Instagram ads now available worldwide

Starting this month, advertisers big and small will be able to run campaigns on Instagram. Ads are now available in over 30 new countries, including Spain, Mexico, India, Italy and South Korea, and will be launching in markets globally on 30^th September.

An official Instagram blog post confirmed: “With technology that leverages the best of Facebook’s ads infrastructure, it’s now easy for advertisers on Instagram to target their message more effectively and reach people based on what they care about – whether it’s fashion, sports, cars or food.”

It added that advertisers now also have access to new ad formats to help them reach their different goals. This will enable people to learn more about what interests them, “or evens shop for a product right from Instagram”.

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Strong results

According to the post, Instagram adverts have already shown that they can bring about excellent branding results, with 97 per cent of measured campaigns generating “significant lifts in ad recall”.

With the new formats, the online service is beginning to notice marketers achieving a range of objectives. It sites Gilt Groupe as one example, which – after turning to Instagram in a bid to attract new customers – ran a campaign that saw an 85 per cent lift in app installs.

 

“Additional capabilities”

In the same blog post, Instagram also announced the following new capabilities:

• “Landscape photo and video to unlock new creative opportunities and give ads a more cinematic feel”

• “Video ads of up to 30 seconds in length, so brands can engage in richer storytelling”
• “Marquee, a new premium product that helps drive mass awareness and expanded reach in a short time-frame – perfect for events like movie premiers and new product launches”
• “Delivery and optimization tools to manage and drive the best performance of campaigns across Facebook and Instagram”

 

Case studies

Software company Kenshoo has spoken about Instagram advertising, based on 25 active campaigns managed through its technology.

David Zelniker, Product Manager at Kenshoo, said:

“It’s obviously early days in the life of Instagram advertising but the initial performance indicators show there is good potential – for example with CTRs around two and half times that of the industry average for social ads.

“We’ve picked up a number of best practice tips for running successful Instagram advertising by analyzing more than 25 active campaigns from a sampling of global advertisers. We found for example that ad copy and creative needs to be unique and compelling for an Instagram audience.  This makes sense because of the audience’s focus on the visual, meaning ads need to be visually appealing and use high-level creative. Ads created for other social platforms may not translate well to Instagram. So auto-importing ads from Facebook campaigns doesn’t cut it, especially as they’re different sizes anyway.

“On the other hand, Facebook targeting parameters (such as Lookalike Audiences – which creates a new list of Facebook users that share similar interests and demographics to your existing targets) are effective in driving ad engagements.

“CPM is still low compared with other social platforms, so there is an opportunity for early Instagram advertisers. But this could change as the program expands and competition increases.

“Overall it’s going to be important for Instagram advertisers to be prepared to invest time and resources to testing and optimizing their ads and ad targeting based on performance data to help them learn what works and what doesn’t work on the platform.”