Running paid Instagram ads is a great way to drive additional traffic to your site. Today we will look at two common ways to run ads on Instagram, Boosted posts or the Facebook Ads Manager.
I recommend using the Facebook ads manager because of the targeting options available but will dive into boosted posts to compare its targeting options versus using the Facebook ad manager for your next Instagram ad campaigns
Since both Facebook and Instagram are owned by the same company. We can run our Instagram ads from the same ads manager that we use for Facebook ads.
If you have never run Instagram ads through the Facebook ad manager don't worry you can set that up here with our beginners guide to setting up your ad account.
The Facebook Ads Manager: A Better Way To Boost Your Instagram Posts
If you already have an Instagram account then you are probably familiar with the blue boost post on your Instagram account.
How Do You Choose Your Target Audience On Instagram?
With your boosted post you can create a target audience based on your Instagram followers or create a custom audience and boost an existing Instagram post to your target audience.
You only have 3 targeting options with Instagram-boosted posts.
Age & Gender, interests, and locations.
The Facebook Ads Manager Provides More Options For Targeting Instagram Ads
The Facebook ads manager provides more options to find your ideal Instagram target audience.
Customer Audiences And Lookalike Audiences
One of the ways that the Facebook Ads Manager differs from boosting your post is the ability to create both custom audiences and your lookalike audiences.
You can create custom audiences from sources you own, like existing customers acquired in the last 30 days, or from your Facebook pixel, which can create custom audiences of people who have added to cart or website traffic.
If learning about custom audiences interests you, I've created a guide to learn more.
You can create a lookalike audience of people who have already engaged with your content. For instance, I can take my purchasers in the last 30 days or people who have added to cart and create a lookalike audience based on those. Facebook then uses its algorithm to create an audience of people to target on Instagram based on the custom audience chosen.
If using boosted posts I can target people who look like my current followers
If learning about lookalikes interests you.... you guessed it I've created a guide for you.
What Ad Objectives Are Available For My Instagram Ads
With boosted posts, you have 3 options for your goal.
Is your objective more traffic, more traffic, or more traffic. I'm overstating this, but profile, website visits, and more messages all focus on traffic to the site.
If your ad objective is to drive awareness and visitors to the site. Boosted posts through Instagram are probably the way to go. It's super easy to do as well as understand and you can start advertising in minutes.
What happens if our ad objective is something other than traffic? What if it's purchases or more add-to-carts?
The problem with traffic objectives is that Facebook tends to send low-quality traffic to your site. This is because you are paying Facebook for visitors, Facebook doesn't care what happens after they visit your site, success is determined by getting you the best bang for your buck possible. This shows up in Instagram analytics tools you use as CPC (cost per click)
The algorithm is optimized to show your boosted post to Instagram users who are most likely to click to: visit your profile, website, or message you based on the call to action button you use.
Ad Objectives In The Ads Manager: How To Create An Instagram Ad
Creating Instagram ads with the Facebook business manager allows for better advertising on Instagram.
This is because of the width of targeting options available to us.
Now let's get started with creating your Instagram advertising campaign so that you can get your message out.
Creating Your Ad Campaigns
To get started creating your first Instagram ad, click the green "Create" button.
Now you can choose your ad objective. You'll notice that you have 6 options to choose from for your objective.
Similar to a boosted post, you can run Instagram ads for website traffic by choosing either awareness or traffic campaign objectives.
Awareness Objective
What it does - Use this to have Facebook show your Instagram ads to the people most likely to remember them on Instagram. This objective is good for reach, video ads, and brand awareness
Recommendation - If you are getting started with Instagram ads I would not recommend using this campaign to get started as the audience will be too broad for you. If you are a local business I might consider this objective as long as you are targeting your city. This should increase the frequency and relevancy of the ad. According to Facebook the number of times Instagram users should see your ads should be between 3-4 times.
Example - Carousel ads that show a collection of products. When creating these Instagram ads think of the desired audience we are showing this to. These potential customers are getting their first impression of the brand. Because of this, we want to offer a wide range of products within our collection and not limit it to 1-3 products. 7-10 product images is a good number here.
Traffic Objective
What it does - We briefly discussed this with boosted posts. But you can use this objective to drive traffic to your site.
Recommendation - If you are using the traffic objective be sure that you have a sales funnel in place to take advantage of the traffic that comes to your site.
Example - You drive 1,000 people to your site for $750 or $1.33 cost per click. The goal is to get people to sign up for your new product launch. How do you define success? Some questions to ask here are what is the conversion rate of your landing page? Is this landing page and funnel converting at a rate that makes choosing the traffic objective an option?
Engagement Objective
What it does - Optimizes your Instagram ad to get more engagement on video ads, event responses, Instagram pages, or direct messages.
Recommendation - Use the engagement objective if you are trying to grow your social media presence.
Example - Instagram offers a Shop function. This can move your Shopify store for instance into Instagram so that people can shop directly on Instagram. To drive engagement and followers for your Instagram store you launch an engagement ad campaign to increase your Instagram followers.
Leads Objective
What it does - Collect leads for your business: email, SMS, booked meetings, and more.
Recommendation - Love this objective. I could write a whole blog post on the importance of growing your email and SMS lists. You should be growing these and the lead objective is the objective to use.
Example - Use this objective to collect leads for your newsletter, new product launch, or to get exclusive access via SMS.
App Installs objective
What it does - Get people to download your app.
Recommendation - If you have an app I would use this objective to drive app installs.
Example - You can use this objective to increase downloads of your app by targeting people who have visited your website in the past 30 days but did not download the app.
Sales Objective
What it does - Use this objective to increase sales on your website or in your app.
Recommendation - If you have an eCommerce store I would use this objective to drive sales and find highly qualified traffic. Even if these Instagram users do not convert you can create a custom audience as discussed above to retarget these people and bring them back to the site.
Example - You can use the sales objective to create Instagram Stories ads that feature products from your Shopify store. Then use the custom audience of purchasers from that Instagram ad to create additional Instagram ads targeting lookalike audiences of these people.
Instagram Marketing Strategy
These six ad objectives are one reason I prefer running ads from the Facebook Ads manager compared to boosting my post.
If my goal is to drive sales through Instagram ads. I need a marketing strategy that allows my Instagram ads to optimize for more purchases and not visitors. The same goes if I'm tasked with driving email growth. I want an ad objective that optimizes for leads, not visitors.
Setting Up Your Ad Set Within Your Ad Campaign
Once you choose your ad objective selected, I choose the sales objective for our example, you should see a page like this one. Click on the New Sales ad set.
Setting Up Your Conversion Event
Once there we are going to have our ad set focus on conversion on our website. For the conversion objective, you will see a wide range of options. Including add to cart, view content, etc, we want the purchase event. You will see a yellow warning symbol. This is normal as you are just starting your account. As you get more conversion events for the event you've chosen the yellow warning will disappear.
Note: if we don't hit our sales number and we feel confident that the creative, messaging, and product are on point we can change our conversion event to something like add to cart. This is higher up the funnel and can produce better results. The higher up the funnel you go the closer to website visitors you get, which is our least qualified traffic in the case.
Budget and Schedule
Choose your daily budget or lifetime budget.
If you choose a lifetime budget make sure to choose a start and end date... it's a lifetime budget so Facebook needs to know how long that lifetime is. Maybe you have a Black Friday sale that lasts a week. You can give this a lifetime budget of 1k then set the end date for a week from the start date.
I'd just choose a daily budget which gives me more control, but it's up to you.
Audience Selection
Under the audience section, you can create a new audience or use a saved audience. Saved audiences are audiences based on certain parameters you choose. These are typically created in the audience tab of Facebook and include custom audiences, lookalike audiences, age, gender, etc. Saved audiences can be used as a shortcut to access your most commonly used audiences.
If you don't have a saved audience no worries we can create a target audience here by choosing what to "INCLUDE' by searching our existing audiences. These include your existing custom and lookalike audiences.
An important note here is that if you have a custom audience that you would like to EXCLUDE you can do that here. For example, you wish to create a target audience of Instagram users who have not visited your site before. To do this you can exclude a custom audience of all people who have engaged with your Instagram page in the last 90 days, 180 days, etc.
Also, note here you can also choose the location, age, gender, and detailed targeting.... as you can see this is only a small portion of the ad manager, while with boosted posts this made up 25-50% of the work we were doing.
Choose Your Ad Placement
Placements refer to where you want your Instagram ad to be shown.
For example, you could run your Instagram ad on Stories and Reels or Newsfeed.
Maybe you choose Facebook to run messenger ads. If you do this then your only option is to run ads on a placement for Stories and Reels.
Typically, when starting your first campaign you will choose automatic placements. This will show your ads on all platforms, not just Instagram, but on Facebook, audience network, and messenger.
Then after a week, you would look at the breakdown tab within the ad manager to see which placement had the best conversion rate for you.
Since we just want to run ads on our Instagram account we are going to choose manual placements we can uncheck all boxes but the Instagram one.
Knowing the placement is important. Running Instagram ads on the Instagram feed will have different sizing requirements than running on Instagram Stories.
To see the sizing requirements for each ad placement hover over the placement and the sizing requirements will show up on the right.
You can also use Facebook's ads guide for more details.
Create Instagram Ads With The Facebook Ad Manager
Now that you have chosen your objective and the target audience for your Instagram ad. The final step before publishing your Instagram ads is to create the actual Instagram ad for your campaign.
To do this click the blue next button at the bottom of your screen or select the unpublished ad on the left. For me called, "New Sales ad".
When creating your Instagram ad choose either "Create Ad" or use an existing post.
Creating a new post gives me more flexibility on the copy being used.
In addition, to copy control when you create your ad you can add in your own CTA and website URL.
By using an existing post you are promoting a post from your Instagram account. This is similar to using a boosted post for existing Instagram posts.
Ad Creative
You can add your copy, creative, and CTA in the ad creative section.
When you upload your image or video ad for your Instagram ads you will have the option to choose different ad formats for the different placements we talked about earlier.
At the Ad Set level, I choose to use Instagram ads targeting specific placements for Stories and Reels as well as feeds.
As you can see below when I uploaded an image for my feed placement I have an option to crop or use a different image for my Stories and Reel target placement.
Destination
In the destination section, you can add your CTA. If you have a CTA that is not Learn More, the default you will see when you create your ad, be sure to scroll through the options offered.
Don't forget to add your link to your site.
Tracking
If you are tracking events via your Facebook pixel or the conversion API on your website. Check the website events box.
If you have set up your offline events you will see an offline events box there. Offline events are helpful if you are running Instagram ads for your Retail store.
If you're interested in adding UTMs for tracking purposes you can do that as well.
If you are new to UTM's you can UTMs Google Analytics UTM Builder to help you build out your tracking.
Copy the highlighted portion and paste it into the URL parameters field under Tracking.
Publish Your Instagram Ad
You are ready to publish your first Instagram ad. Hit that publish button and get your message out there. Don't forget to track your performance with the Facebook ads manager.
If you are looking to set up a boosted post you can read our blog post on setting up your Instagram or Facebook boosted posts.
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