Advertising on Instagram: Complete Guide for Beginner (1/2)

Instagram has finally reached 1 billion users – a massive community. Hence, advertising on Instagram is a perfect strategy for your business.

If your audience uses this platform, the right ad will capture their attention, drive leads, and, finally, improve your conversion.

However, advertising on Instagram is more than posting a stunning image. You should set up campaigns, define target audiences, a budget and posting schedule, and monitor performance — just to name a few.

To simplify the process, we’ve compiled a complete guide that can assist you to build an Instagram campaign, one step at a time.

If you’ve run Fb ads, you about 75% of the way there. Remember that you need to create a Facebook page and sync it with your Instagram business account before start running Instagram ads.

1. Choose an editor and make your campaign.

You could build Instagram ads utilizing one of these tools:

To choose a suitable tool, you’ll need to think about both your company size and the number of adverts you want to run at once. When you’re handling lots of campaigns, or you’re looking for really precise control over your campaigns, you might consider leaning towards the Power Editor. But the Ad Manager fits most marketers’ needs, so that is what we’ll use for the sake of this post.

After choosing an editor, you’ll see an option to either view all campaigns or make a new one. To get began advertising on Instagram, Creating a new campaign is more suitable.

2. Determine an objective.

You will find that there are lots of objective options to choose as the picture below:

Advertising on InstagramFor this post, we will choose: “Traffic.”

After choosing this, you will be prompted to name your campaign. This will seem like a simple task (and it actually is) however, it’s a great idea to have some kind of naming convention or set process within your business. It will make it simpler for you to maintain campaigns straight as you continue to create them.

3. Choose your audience.

When you’re just starting out with advertising on Instagram, odds are you might now know exactly which audience you want to go after. It will come with time, and you might just have to play around with it at first.

During this step, you will discover that the platform’s built-in targeting could be as easy or as extensive as you want it to be, with options like:

  • Location
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Language
  • Relationship
  • Education
  • Work
  • Financial Status
  • Home
  • Ethnic Affinity
  • Generation
  • Parents
  • Politics (U.S. only)
  • Life Events
  • Interests
  • Behaviors
  • Connections

You could make what’s called a custom audience to get audiences who’ve already engaged with your business, or a lookalike audience to reach new people on Fb who’re just like your most valuable audiences.

Advertising on Instagram

The adverts platform additionally lets you save the audience you create for use again later, which could be good when you’re experimenting and want to save the exact people you used for certain campaigns.

When it comes to the objective we chose — “send people to your website” — we’ll want to target more particular people: the kind of people who are really going to be interested in the content we present.

To do that, you’d jump down to the “Detailed Targeting” part, and search for different demographics, interests, or behaviors that apply to your target audience. For example, a (very small) audience, just to let you know the different ways you could target certain people:

Instagram Ads detailed targeting.

To let you understand a sense of the audience you’ve chosen, Fb gives an “audience definition gauge.” This offers you immediate feedback on how broad or narrow your audience is, as well as the estimated reach number of your advert. Because we didn’t add very many criteria to our targeting, you will see that the audience appears “fairly broad.”

Advertising on Instagram

4. Set your placement.

This step is the biggest differentiator between organizing advertising on Instagram and on Facebook. To move forward with the Instagram advert, you’ll only need to check the boxes for “Instagram.”

5. Make your budget and schedule.

You have the option to pick between a daily budget and a lifetime budget for your ad. Here is the difference:

  • Daily budget sets your advert up to run continuously throughout the day, which means that the algorithm will automatically pace your spending per day. Remember that there’s a minimum daily budget relying on different factors in your ad, normally around $1.00.
  • Lifetime budget sets your advert up to run for a specified length of time, which means the adverts algorithm paces your spending over that whole time period.

Besides setting your budget, you have to set your schedule. You’ll need to decide exactly if you want your Ad to start and finish, down to the minute. There are also options to set parameters so that your advert runs only during certain hours of the day or during particular days of the week. You’ll find these options in the “Ad Scheduling” part.

Then, you could set your advert up for delivery. Here, you have three options that may define who sees your ads.

  • Link Clicks: Your adverts will be shown accordingly to get the most clicks to your site at the lowest price. That is all based on the platform’s algorithm.
  • Impressions: Your adverts will be delivered to users as many times as possible. Have you ever seen the same advert on your feed all day long? That business is most likely using this option.
  • Daily Unique Reach: Your advert will be shown to users up to once a day. People might see your advert multiple times, however, at least not multiple times a day.

Then, after you select your delivery option, you will have to determine your bid amount.

This figures out how effectively your advert is delivered. If you look “behind the scenes,” you’re competing with other advertisers trying to get a similar user in a constant auction.

You could select Manual or Automatic. Automatic leaves it up to Fb’s algorithm to deliver your advert — ideally getting you the most clicks for the lowest cost. Manual lets you set a price for link clicks. If a link click is value a lot to you, attempt setting a higher than suggested bid, and your advert will be displayed over a competitor with a lower bid.

You could select to pay based on impressions or link clicks. That is up to you.

After that, you could schedule your adverts. There are two options you have for delivery:

  • Standard: shows your adverts throughout the day.
  • Accelerated: helps you reach a user quickly for time-sensitive adverts.

(Note: manual bid pricing is required if you choose the accelerated delivery option.)

Lastly, you will have to name your advert set so you could identify it in Ads Manager later.

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