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What have led me to write a complete guide to Instagram Ads?

With more than two million monthly advertisers worldwide using Instagram (and rising), it is the channel that undoubtedly generates the highest ROI today compared to other types of social networks.

The number of active monthly users on this social network has grown dramatically in recent years, and continues to do so.

Currently, it has more than 25 million business profiles worldwide.

Betting on advertising in it is the best option for your publications to reach a large number of people at a lower cost.

Facebook and Instagram use the same advertising platform as Facebook Ads and this means that you can share audiences between the different campaigns with locations both in the two already mentioned and on Messenger.

In this guide I will explain how you can use Instagram Ads effectively to create advertising campaigns from scratch, designing ads that work.

Last but not least, I’ll show you some examples of best practices so you can get ideas and get inspired.

But first of all, let’s start at the beginning.

1. What is Instagram ads?
2. Main reasons to make Instagram Ads
   • Effectiveness.
   • Evolution
   • Segmentation
3. Is Instagram advertising adequate to reach your target audience?
   • With photo.
   • With video.
   • By sequence.
   • Collection.
   • With video / presentation.
4. Instagram Stories Ads.
5. Creating ads from the app vs. from the ad manager
   • Publishing types and location.
   • Advertising objectives.
   • Limiting audience segmentation.
     • Automatic.
     • Manual
   • Budget Allocation
6. How to advertise on Instagram Ads?
   • Link your Instagram account to Facebook
   • Create an advertising campaign from the ad manager
     • Brand recognition
     • Scope
     • Traffic
     • Interaction
     • Application downloads
     • Video reproductions
     • Generation of potential customers
     • Conversions
   • Create your ad set
     • Segmentation of the ads
       • The saved audience is the one that you can manually segment according to the interests of the audience.
       • The personalized audience is people who already know your business and have interacted with it on some occasion.
       • The similar audience is created by people who may be interested in your business because they look like a personalized audience.
         • Saved Audience
         • Personalized audience
         • Similar audience
       • Location of the ads
       • Creating your ads
       • Analyze and optimize your campaigns
7. Best practices in Instagram Ads.
   • Show the personality of your brand
   • Know your audience as if they were your best friend
   • Use the hashtags
   • Test the images and copy of your ads.
   • Don’t lose sight of your competition
   • Use eye-catching text
   • Optimize your landing page
8. Conclusion.

1. What is Instagram ads?

Instagram ads is the advertising that is carried out in Instagram to reach millions of active users likely to be potential customers.

In this way, you get greater exposure of your brand and greater control over who can see your content.

Since 2015 any brand and business can advertise here with all types of ads and advertising formats.

The technical way of creating ad campaigns in this social network is practically identical to what we would do in the case of Facebook ads.

There are many reasons to make ads on it, from a low cost of advertising, to the millions of users you can reach with your ads.

2. Main reasons to make Instagram Ads

In my experience, the main motives behind Instagram’s ads are 3:

• Effectiveness.
• Evolution.
• Segmentation.

I analysed them a little more in detail.

Effectiveness

Advertising through the Facebook Ads platform is highly effective.

It is evident that the efficiency of this tool is one of the reasons why brands advertise on it.

Evolution

Instagram evolves continuously and at a very fast pace.

Almost every month it releases new updates to improve the user experience, adding new features that allow both brands and marketers to interact better with the audience.

This makes the platform continually attract new users and advertising even more effective.

Segmentation

Audience segmentation, as in Facebook campaigns, is the most effective and allows marketing campaigns with perfectly categorized audiences.

3. Is Instagram advertising adequate to reach your target audience?

Some people still believe that in this social network there are only teenage girls but, fortunately, for advertisers who target other demographics, Instagram tends to incline towards other types of audiences as well.

However, the highest percentage of users (55%) is in the 18 to 20 age range, followed by (28%) by users aged 30 to 49 and finally by users aged 50 to 64 (11%).

If your target audience is people over the age of 60, it may not be the ideal social network for advertising, although if you decided to do so, you could target this particular group directly and you probably wouldn’t encounter much competition.

Another fact is that since its inception there have always been more women than men, but the gender gap is no longer as big as it used to be.

And just as there are more and more adults over the age of 35, more men are likely to join as the platform continues to grow.

Types of advertisements

You can create five types of ad formats with images or videos that we can place either in the network feed or in Instagram Stories.

• With photo.
• With video.
• By sequence.
• Collection.
• With video / presentation.

Do you want me to show you more in depth?

Ads with photo

This is the most common and simple type of ad, as photo sharing is the main feature of the platform.

The photos can be in square or horizontal format.

Photo ads require content to be as relevant as Facebook ads.

The image is the first thing that the user sees, so it has to be of quality and if it contains text, it has to attract and invite to observe the rest of the ad so that finally the user ends up clicking on the call to action of the ad.

Ads with video

Video ads, when creative, can become extremely appealing to users, receivers of the power of moving images and sounds.

Ads by sequence

With this format you can display two or more videos or images (up to a maximum of 10), plus titles, links or calls to action in a single ad.

These ads give very good results because you can tell a story, while highlighting the products or services of your brand.

Collection ads

In order to be able to carry out the advertisements of collection you have to have an online shop, since you need to have uploaded a catalogue of products within the advertising platform.

The ad is shown in the news section and is accompanied by three or four products that are placed under the main image or video.

You can continue reading at: Instagram Ads: Complete Guide (Part II)