Instagram ads are a powerhouse for businesses and marketers of all sizes, offering multiple high-engaging formats to help you connect with your target audience.
While there’s a lot of new information and processes to learn when you get started with Instagram ads, the good news is that the learning curve isn’t very steep. The Instagram ad creation process is relatively straightforward — the devil is in the details of your audience controls, creative optimization, and campaign strategy.
In this post, we’ll cover everything you need to get started with Instagram ads, including:
- What are Instagram ads?
- The difference between Instagram ads and post boosting
- How much do Instagram ads cost?
- How to run your first Instagram campaign
- 9 best practices for Instagram ad creative and targeting
First, let's cover the basics.
What Are Instagram ads?
Instagram ads are paid campaigns that you can run in various formats and placements on Instagram in order to reach your target audience and encourage your desired action. You create Instagram ads through Meta Ads Manager — the same platform you use to create Facebook ads. In fact, because you use the same ad creation platform, you’ll often create Facebook and Instagram ads at the same time.
Instagram ads use programmatic advertising. From the marketer’s side, you create an ad, tell Meta who you want to target (or not target), set a budget, and let them do the work on your behalf.
Users will see your ad in multiple places across Instagram, including in stories, reels, and in-feed. If they click on the ad, they’ll be taken to the landing page of your choice. You pay for specific user actions that you define for each campaign type, such as ad clicks, video views, or per thousand ad impressions.
What’s the difference between Instagram ads and post boosting?
Instagram ads use the platform’s full-fledged, self-service ad creation process. It gives you full control over your ad set and creative, including the option to pursue specific bidding strategies or A/B testing.
Post boosting on Instagram — also known as creating sponsored posts — is part of the ad system, but it’s a much simpler and faster way to promote content. When you boost a post, you pay to promote an organic Instagram post that has already been published on your account. Marketers typically boost content to get more reach quickly. Think of it like hitting the Staples’ Easy Button to get instant reach.
Both Instagram ads and sponsored posts have a place in small business marketing strategy. Post sponsoring is particularly useful when you want to get more visibility on well performing or important posts. Ad campaigns offer a more methodical approach to advertising, allowing you to target specific business goals.
To make it even easier, you can use Loomly to create Instagram sponsored posts within your Post Builder dashboard. See how to get started here.
How much do Instagram ads cost?
Ad costs vary significantly on Instagram — to the point where they can fluctuate day to day even on the same campaign.
This is because it’s an auction-based marketplace. You aren’t bidding on a set price — you’re competing against other marketers, and their bid and ad relevance will impact who receives the placement. As more competitors enter the market, you can expect costs to go up.
Here are a few Instagram ad pricing benchmarks to give you a basic idea of current averages:
- Cost-per-click (CPC) ranges from around 40 cents-70 cents. The cost increases for ads that take users to a landing page instead of just viewing the ad or video on-platform; destination URLs have average CPC ranges of 50 cents-95 cents.
- Cost per engagement (CPE) ranges from 1 cent-5 cents
- Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) ranges from $2.50-$3.50.
Keep in mind that there are budget and bid controls that can help you control Instagram ad cost. You can set daily or lifetime budgets, and you can set bid caps or target bids that tell Meta how much you’re willing to pay for certain types of actions. While you want to be careful with bid caps — as higher-quality clicks may cost more — these limits can keep you on budget.
There are also steps you can take to lower your ad costs, including:
- A/B testing to find the sweet spot between quality clicks and low-cost clicks
- Improving your ad relevance diagnostics; ads deemed relevant by Meta can have better placements and lower cost per click
- Ensure your audience isn’t too narrow; it can become expensive to show the same ads to the same audience members, and unlikely to yield significant results
Are Instagram ads worth it?
This is a completely fair question, especially for small or medium-sized businesses that have tight budgets and limited resources. Instagram ad costs can be high, and even though you’re paying for guaranteed actions like video views or clicks, it doesn’t mean those views or clicks will actually drive a sale.
However, businesses of all sizes have found success on the platform. Meta’s ad system is pretty exceptional, with easy self-service ad creation and management. The platform also makes use of machine learning: It determines what types of users are most likely to take your chosen conversion action and figure out how to connect your ad with those customers over time.
Testing ads is the only way to determine how well Instagram will work for you, but if you have a large audience share on the platform, they're worth trying.
Types of Instagram ads
When we talk about types of Instagram ads, we're talking about two major factors: the format of the ad, and the placement of the ad.
The available Instagram ad formats are:
- Images
- Videos
- Carousels
- Flexible, which means your ad may appear as an image, video, or carousel ad, depending on what the ad delivery system determines your audience wants to see.
In addition to format, you can also control where the ad shows up in the Instagram app. Figuring out the best placement isn't as straightforward as format, so let's look at each possible placement in more detail.
1. In-Feed ads
These ads show up when users are scrolling through their main feed. They’ll see your ad between posts from other accounts they follow. You can use image or video ads for this purpose.
Instagram ads Feed placement by Flamingo Estate
Captions carry significant weight for these ad placements — put the important, attention-grabbing copy at the front of the ad before the “... more” cut-off point.
2. Explore page ads
When users are browsing their feed after clicking on a post in their Explore Page, they can see your ad. These are extremely similar to in-feed placements, and as a plus, users who see these ads are exceptionally open to discovering new brands or products that they’re not already connected with.
Instagram ads Explore page placement by Smalls Cat Food
3. Stories ads
Stories ads are a big deal for brand awareness and recognition campaigns, but they can also successfully drive clicks and sales. They show up between stories from people that users already follow, and appear in full-screen mobile formats, so they dominate user attention.
Instagram ads Story placement by Joybird
These ads usually feature a small amount of text, with strong, eye-catching creative and a noticeable CTA button of your choice.
4. Reels ads
Reels ads are the newest option in the Meta Ad system. Your full-screen, mobile-friendly video will play as users are scrolling through their Reels feed. 37% of Instagram users now scroll through reels daily, and these audiences are often highly engaged, so this can be a great way to leverage storytelling and a popular format to get results.
Instagram ads Reels placement by Bened Life
You can create a caption on Reels ads, but it should be short. The primary focus should be on the reel itself, and make sure that you capture user attention within the first three seconds. Powerful hooks can go a long way here.
How to run ads on Instagram
You’ve got the basics — now it’s time to get started creating your ads. Let’s take a look at the process, from setting up your account to creating your first campaign.
Instagram ads account setup
There are a few things you’ll need to do before you actually start creating Instagram ads. These setup tasks each take five to ten minutes to complete.
- Create an ad account in Meta Business Manager and add your billing details.
- Set up tracking through the Meta Tracking Pixel and ideally Facebook Conversions API, which will allow you to better track and optimize for conversions and create retargeting campaigns off site-based activity.
- Determine your total monthly budget available for Instagram ads, and consider how you want to allocate it. Don’t forget to save some of that budget for dedicated A/B tests, which we’ll talk more about later.
Once you’ve knocked out the steps above (check out those linked resources if you need any help!), you’re good to start creating your ads.
Understanding campaign structure
The last thing we need to discuss before actually creating an ad is how Meta structures their ad campaigns. You’ve got three levels:
- Your ads or what customers see, and define the creative components you use (like copy, images, and videos)
- Your ad set can contain multiple ads, and determines factors like audience targeting and placements
- The campaign, which can contain multiple ad sets and ads, and determines your ad objective
Creating your first Instagram ad campaign
You can start creating Instagram ads by heading to your Account Manager and creating a new campaign. You can either create an entirely new campaign, or create a new ad or ad set under an existing campaign.
Choose an objective
The first thing you’ll do is choose an objective. This tells Meta what specific goal you want to focus on with this campaign. Examples include:
- Build brand awareness
- Drive traffic to your site
- Boost on-post engagement
- Collect lead information
- Promote your mobile app
- Drive sales
Choose the immediate action that you want to prioritize — while sales or purchases is every business’s goal, it’s not usually the immediate focus if you’re targeting an unaware audience.
Define campaign settings
Next, you’ll name your campaign, choose any special issue statuses (such as housing or politics), and continue on with campaign settings.
You’ll see the option to toggle on features of Advantage Campaign and Split testing features. The former distributes your budget across ad sets depending on performance goals and bid strategy. The latter, which we strongly recommend using, facilitates A/B testing on campaigns to get clarity around what creative, targeting, and placements work for you.
Set your budget and schedule
Next, you’ll set your ad budget and schedule. You can also choose to set an end date, which you should apply if the campaign is time-bound in any way (such as a Black Friday sales event that expires at a certain time).
In general, many experts don’t recommend that beginners worry much about bids or bidding strategies, as it may end up limiting potentially high-value placements. Many agencies let Meta take the reins on this. In you're a beginner, focus on setting your total budget and a desired campaign end date.
You can also choose to select performance goals. For an awareness campaign, for example, maximizing the reach of your ads is the default option. Then, you can choose to set a cost per result goal, which tells Meta approximately how much you want to spend on your desired conversion action. If you're interested in setting target costs per results, learn more here.
Choose your audience targeting controls
Next, you can set up audience targeting.
Options include demographic, location, interest, and custom list or activity-based targeting. For example, this might look like targeting 30-34 year old women who own dogs, have no children, and who have purchased from you in the past.
As you adjust your targeting controls, you’ll see your “audience definition” bar change. This shows how broad or narrow your audience is and your estimated daily potential reach. It’s important to strike a balance between strong reach and strong audience relevance.
Select your placements
Next, you’ll choose placements.
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Automate placements and Meta will find the best placement options for your ad. Instagram ads by Ruggable.
Unless you have a particularly niche campaign in mind, it’s often best to let Meta automate placements and to include all placement options. Doing so will help the platform find high-converting users at the best prices across potential placement options.
Create your ads
Finally, choose your ad set up. You can use single images or videos, carousel ads, and collection ads across different placements — depending on the placement. Make sure that you have images and videos that are optimized for every possible placement, including mobile-focused Reels and Stories content.
We recommend testing each type of creative at different points.
After you do this, you’ll add your creative elements, including selecting images and videos, copy, CTA buttons, and destination URLs. (Don’t worry — we'll discuss best practices for creative below!)
Make sure you preview your ad in different formats to ensure that everything is cropped correctly, check for spelling or grammar errors, and submit it for approval!
You can manage your ads from your Ad Manager dashboard at any time, including editing ads, campaign settings, and pausing or ending campaigns.
Instagram ads best practices
These Instagram ad strategies and tips will help you refine your audience targeting, creative, and campaign optimization practices for best results. To give you some inspiration, we’ll pull examples from the Facebook and Instagram ads library, which is a great place to go if you’re ever feeling stumped (and a great place to peek at what your competitors are doing).
1. Lean into reels and stories
Mobile-friendly reels and stories are highly popular right now and a great way to dominate a user’s attention. Reels are especially useful for advertising because they're based on a recommendation algorithm. Users already expect to see content from users and brands they don't follow, which means they might be more receptive to your ad.
Instagram Story ad by Teddy and Wool
2. Get the media dimensions right
You can upload multiple different versions of an ad to ensure that it will appear correctly in each placement, which we recommend doing since the default option is for Meta to show your ad in as many formats as possible. We cannot recommend doing this enough— it’s essential to make sure that your images and videos are cropped correctly and don't appear pixelated or blurry.
If you look at the example below, the single image looks fine in the “original” option for Search results placements, but it doesn’t look right for in-feed ads and it hardly works at all for Stories, Reels, Apps, and third-party sites. It’s better to upload additional media in the ideal dimensions for each format. 1:1 or 1.9:1 is a safe bet for most ads, but 9:16 is where you want to be for mobile.
3. Include closed captions
It’s vital to include closed captions on video ads that have any kind of voice-over narration or dialogue. This makes your ad accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. It also accounts for placements where video ads autoplay without sound, and for users who watch video with sound off.
Source: Instagram ad library
4. Have a strong hook
You need to start strong with any kind of ad. In my experience, that means you’ve got a caption that captures the user's interest in the first 75-ish characters for in-feed posts. For video ads, you’ve got even less real estate — just three seconds or less to interest your audience.
Start with a strong hook, and for video content, use storytelling to create a lasting impact. Some examples of this include:
- Ask a question addressing a pain point: "Tired of spending another Friday night at home watching movies? Refresh your love life with these great date night ideas!”
- Highlight a key product benefit: “Put some spark back into your marriage with new adventures right from your hometown.”
- Tell a “personal” story. “Our marriage was stuck in a rut, going to the same restaurant for date nights. Then we found Date Ideas, which changed the game!”
Our Post Ideas Guide has tons of hooks for you to choose from, and it’s free to download.
5. Don’t be afraid of exclusionary audience controls
When it comes to audience targeting, it can be difficult to get it right. You want to have niche-enough campaigns that they’re relevant to your audience segments, but you don’t want to get so niched down that you accidentally eliminate target audience members.
That said, a safe bet is to use exclusionary targeting to tell Facebook who you don’t want to reach.
If, for example, you’re creating an interest-based targeting campaign meant for new potential customers and you don’t want to waste ad views or clicks on existing clients, you can choose to exclude a custom audience of existing customers from seeing that ad.
Knowing you don’t want to target can be just as important as knowing you do, so don’t be afraid to use those settings.
6. Test influencer-created content
Work with influencers on organic and paid campaigns. You can actually run ads that feature both the influencer and your brand name, using entirely influencer-created content. Some users may perceive this content to be more authentic, especially if they’re already familiar with the creator.
Source: Instagram ad library
7. Focus on features and benefits
This is a classic sales tip, and it works well. List a feature, and (if there’s room) explain how it benefits the customers. Some captions may only have enough room for just the feature or just the benefit, in which case try to connect the two through video context.
You can see a great example below of a feature-focused campaign.
Source: Instagram ad library
8. Create ads relevant to audience segments
Relevance is everything. The more you can connect an ad to the target audience, the better. This means using creative that connects with their pain points, needs, and motivations.
The ad below from Ruggable, for example, mentions pet-friendly, kid-friendly, and life-friendly washable rugs. They make sure to address two sometimes distinct segments of their target audience: pet owners and parents. While those double-income-no-kids-with-a-dog families (hello, fellow DINKWADS) might have ignored “kid-friendly” messaging, the pet-friendly can loop them back in.
Source: Instagram ad library
9. A/B test all aspects of your campaign
This is a simple tip, but it may be the most important. A/B test your campaigns thoroughly, changing one variable at a time to determine what works and what doesn't.
You should test:
- Audience controls.
- Bid strategy (if you’re using anything other than the default).
- Copy, including length and style of copy.
- Pain points, features, or benefits mentioned.
- Images and videos.
- Ad formats.
- CTA buttons.
Source: Instagram ad library
Final thoughts
Instagram ads can be an outstanding platform for brands of all sizes looking to connect with their target audience. It’s a good idea to start small if you’re unsure or feeling intimidated, and you can always work your way up to larger campaigns.
Don’t forget to give Instagram time to really learn and optimize your campaign through their machine learning capabilities, which they use to determine who to show your ads to in order to drive your target actions. This can take two weeks for larger-budgeted campaigns, and up to a month for totally new accounts with tighter budgets.
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