Top 5 Powerful Tips For Instagram Ads (#3 Always Work)

Instagram app has been running on rails of success since 2010. According to Instagram, 1 billion people use Instagram every month and over 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day. If you are running your Facebook page successfully and now, it’s time to grow your target audience over Instagram with good Instagram Ads Tips before it loses all its organic reach like Facebook. 90% of marketers use these social media platforms to reach their audience. 

Continue reading this blog post to clear all your doubts about how it’s different from Facebook, choosing the right aim for the Ad Campaign, best placement strategies, marketing strategies to grow your target audience and know all the tidbits of optimizing your Instagram ads.

Let’s get started with Instagram Ads Tips.

5 Tips For Getting Started With Instagram Ads

1. Be clear with your Ad Objective

When creating Instagram Ads, you must know what objectives are available on the platform that helps you strategize your ads. But not all objectives of Facebook Ads can be used for Instagram Ads too. There are several other ad objectives you can opt for. Instagram first focused on Reach aim, but now it has broadened its number of objectives. Below I’ll cover all the objectives fruitful for the ad campaign.

Ad Campaign Objectives in Instagram Ads

Ad Campaign Objectives is one of the important Instagram Ads Tips which social media experts and specialist keep in mind while making Instagram ads campaign.

Awareness

It is at the top of the conversion process which generates interest in your business to your target audience.

• Brand Awareness

This objective helps you to reach an audience who seem interested in your Instagram ads and helps to increase awareness of your business. You can choose a high-quality image, video, carousel, or slideshow format for this objective. You shouldn’t expect the engagement with your content here like click-through, opt-in or purchase. People are more likely to pay attention to what you are offering in your ad campaign creatives. This aim is more helpful with the businesses with a high budget who just want to reach people’s minds but not looking for direct sales.

• Reach

This aim helps you widen your Instagram marketing ad campaign reach to your target location depending on the budget and settings. The more budget you allocate, the more reach you see. This aim gives benefit when you want your Instagram ad to reach as many people as possible.

Consideration

It is in the middle position of the conversion process where you want your target audience to take action on your ads.

• Traffic

This aim helps you to send your audience from your ad to your website, URL, blogs, apps, etc. The main aim is to drive the audience outside of Facebook. This could showcase your product description/features, read your blog. Instagram targets those audiences who reside under your ad campaign settings based on their past behaviors.

• Engagement

This aim helps you to reach an audience is more likely to engage in your posts. Reactions include likes, shares, comments on Instagram, or offer claims on the Facebook shop page.

• App Installs

This aim helps you drive the target audience to your business app where they can download and install the app.

• Video Views

This aim helps you to get more likes and reach on your business videos over Instagram. This helps you to showcase your brand products and services in the form of videos to the outside world.

• Lead Generation

The aim of this is to collect leads for your business. Create ads that collect audience information like name, email, company name, phone number, etc automatically whosoever is logged in on Instagram.

• Messages

This aim helps you to connect directly with your target audience on Instagram messenger where you can tell them more about your business.

Conversion

It is the final part of the conversion funnel where your audience is more interested to buy products or using your service. 

• Conversions

This aim helps you to find audiences are more likely to take action on your website or app like purchase, add to item, checkout, add to wish-list or even register on your website. 

• Catalog Sales

This objective helps you to promote your physical products to shoppers who visited your website or an app. This generates more sales through the catalog.

• Store Traffic

This aim helps you to drive nearby traffic to your business locations. 

2. Improve Ads with better targeting

Targeting is one key to achieve success in an Instagram marketing strategy. You can target your ad with multiple ad formats. Instagram Ads audience works exactly like Facebook Ads audience. The Instagram account allows you to target with 4 types of audiences:

Saved Audience

This audience helps you to create when you are building a target audience from scratch or duplicating the existing one. Creating new audiences according to specific location customers or demographics like people living in India; age between 18 to 65+ years is used in a specific Instagram ad. This shows you the potential reach of your audience which is eligible to see your ad. Based on target settings, your ad will be shown on Facebook apps and services in the past 30 days. 

Custom Audience

The custom audience helps you to create an audience from different sources that matter to you the most like websites, customer emails, Instagram business profiles, FB page, events, lead forms, etc. You can target ads for the audience you have created on Facebook, Instagram or other Social networks. 

Facebook pixel plays a key role here. As you know, pixel allows you to track people who visited your website after viewing your Instagram ad or Facebook ad. With pixel, you can easily track down viewers independent of devices. You can even create custom audiences targeting people who add products in their cart, download any resource, sign-up the form, purchase any product, etc. 

Lookalike Audience

Lookalike audiences can be a great opportunity to grow your business because it targets people who are likely to be interested in your business as they are like your best existing customers. Smaller the audience, the more targeted your audience will get created, somewhere like 1%. This helps you to target people who have visited your Instagram page or profile and engaged with your posts or content.  

Special Ad Audience

This type of audience helps you reach new people who have similar behavior as your other valuable customers. Special Ad Audience uses existing most valuable customer information to reach new people. This audience depends on customers’ credit, employment, or housing status, those who don’t comply with these will not be used. 

Rest to set-up this audience it is similar to creating a lookalike audience.

3. Ads shouldn’t be like ads

Audiences show more responses to the ad that looks like organic content, not like a promotional product/service. Eye-catching high-quality creatives are the ones that get attention while scrolling and swiping on social media. Instagram is visual content platform so it would definitely prefer attractive photographs or animation over some cliche promotional post on your ads. 

You should go with A/B testing with your creatives of ads. Try storytelling with your ad campaigns and I promise you it’s the only Instagram Ads tip that will differentiate your ad from other competitor Instagram ads. Your audience should not feel like you are forcing them to buy your products or services. 

Stories stickers enhance video performance 83% of the time. (Source: Facebook)

Here’s a great Instagram Ad example from Swiggy India and they ran this ad campaign in 2018 to increase their reach, app installation and extend customer base.

4. Go with best ad format

Choosing the right dimension for your ad before uploading it to media files of the Facebook dashboard is a good decision. As it gives you a preview of how your ad looks to your audience. With cropped ads, you are making a mistake and it will reflect a poor Instagram marketing campaign to your audience and competitors.

Best Instagram ad size varies and has its own requirements- 

Stories Ads

You can improve your Instagram news feed with your stories ads. It gives you an opportunity to show your ads to full-screen. Recommend using a 9:16 aspect ratio to fit the full-screen format. 

File type

• .mp4 or .mov (Video)
• .jpg or .png (Photo)

Maximum File Size

• 4GB (Video)
• 30MB (Photo)

Video Length

• Maximum: 120 seconds
• Note that images will show for 5 seconds by default

Dimensions

• Recommended Resolution: 1080 x 1920
• Minimum: 600 x 1067

Photo Ads

Photo ads are beautiful canvas through which you can tell your story to your audience. They can be created in a square or landscape format. 

Landscape image ads specs are: Recommended aspect ratio: 1.9:1

Dimensions

• Recommended Resolution: 1200 x 628
• Minimum resolution: 600 x 315 pixels

File type

• .jpg or .png

Maximum File Size

• Maximum 30MB

Square image ads specs are: The proper aspect ratio is 1:1

Dimensions

• Recommended Resolution: 1080 x 1080
• Minimum Resolution:600 x 600

Video Ads

Video ads allow you to showcase your business products or services in video formats. This approach is mostly used in mobiles to gain the attention of your Instagram followers.

Landscape video ads specs are: Recommended aspect ratio: 1.91:1

Dimensions

• Recommended Resolution: 600×315
• Minimum resolution: 600 x 315 pixels

File type

• .jpg or .png

Maximum File Size

• Maximum 30MB

Carousel Ads

Carousel ads one of the top-performing ad formats on Instagram as it comprises multiple images or videos. You can add up to 10 images or videos in the carousel. The audience can easily view each image one by one and land on the respective pages. 

Instagram Carousel Ad specs The proper image and video aspect ratio is 1:1

Media type

• image or video

Dimensions

• Recommended image/video resolution: min. 600 x 600, max. 1080 x 1080

File Type

• .jpg or .png
• Minimum number of cards: 2
• Maximum number of cards: 10

File Size

• Minimum video length: 3 seconds
• Maximum video length: 60 seconds

Collection Ads

Collection ads make it easy for your audience to discover, browse and purchase your products. It gives you a good engagement with cheap costs. It is the canvas ads that populate itself over the screen which gives your audience more view to choose and perform their actions. Choose one product and see its variations there only below the primary product. You are giving an instant experience to your audience where they land on your page without leaving the Facebook dashboard. You can use this if you have multiple products as a catalog. The recommended aspect ratio is 1:1 for square and 16:9 for landscape images.

Instagram Collection ad image specs: 

Dimensions

• Minimum width and height of 600 pixels.

Media type

• image or video

File Size

• Max image size of 30MB.

File Type

• .jpg and .png

5. Be Smart with Budgeting

Millions of users are visiting daily on Instagram, so an increase in advertising is also parallel seen. According to eMarketer, Instagram will earn $12.32 billion in ad revenue in 2020. You are competing against multiple advertisers for one product or service. The first thought that crosses the marketer’s brain is “What budget needs to be allocated”? To know this, you must be clear about your business goals. 

Goals like:

1. Followers over Instagram
2. Engagements on posts
3. Traffic on the Instagram shop page
4. Sale from the Instagram shop page
5. More app installs
6. More website traffic

First, you need to do the research for your target audience. Here are some Instagram Ads Tips through which you can find out targeted customers for your business. 

Second, forecast your budget estimation with the Google Keyword Planner tool. This tool helps you to see the forecast for your products or services which you market. Put your metrics – keywords and locations to see forecasts or historical metrics. The date range, network helps you to know and understand the budget you should have to run the marketing ad campaign and the results you will get afterward. 

Last, the budget varies from location to location as we see that the United States is more costly than the United kingdom. If you see the cost-per-link click of these two countries as below, you will see a clear difference:

So, these are some Instagram Ads Tips & Best Practices that can help you to make your strategies to improve your Instagram ads performance. If you are already running Instagram ads and facing any issues, do comment and I’ll make sure, your queries will get resolved, you get what you desire for your business.