They’re similar to Facebook, and yet they are confusing many marketers – Instagram ads.

Marketing on Instagram enables you to diversify across all platforms and avoid the over-saturated land that is Facebook. But how is it different? What’s the potential and What objectives are available? Read on my friends, read on…

Instagram campaign objectives

For Instagram Feed Ads, the supported campaign objectives are: Brand Awareness, Reach, Traffic, Video Views, App Installs, Lead Generation, Engagement, Messages, Conversions, Catalog Sales, and Store Traffic.

For Instagram Stories, the campaign objectives available are: Brand Awareness, Reach, Traffic, Video Views, App Installs, Lead Generation, and Conversions.

A great way to start attracting followers is with an Awareness ad, then you can move on to Lead Generation and Conversion.

Instagram has a great explainer of what all the ads do here.

Instagram ad placements

Although limited, they are powerful, the Instagram ad placement allows you to have your ads appear on people’s Instagram feed or in their stories – and these are run from Facebook.

You can find more on that here.

Feed ads

The Instagram Feed enables marketers to show content to their target audiences in between organic posts of users they follow, and can seemingly appear as native content.

This is why they can be highly effective in driving new users into your funnel and encouraging them to engage, click through, or convert through a re-marketing campaign later on.

What are the feed ad specs?

According to Facebook, the technical specs for the Feed Ads are as follows:

• File Type: jpg or png
• File Size Max: 30MB
• Video Layout: Square or Vertical
• Video Max Size: 4 GB
• Video Duration Max: 60 seconds
• Hashtag Max: 30
• Carousel Cards Max: 10

Instagram Stories Ads

These are less intrusive appearing at the top of your feed, and are therefore highly effective in driving clicks to your designated landing page. 

What are the Stories ad specs?

According to Facebook, the design and technical specs of Instagram Stories Ads are as follows:

• Layout: Vertical
• Photo Stories Visible: 5 seconds
• Image ratios: 9:16 and 16:9 to 4:5
• Image Size: 1080×1920 however, key elements will appear within a 1080×1420 space.
• Carousel Cards Max: 10
• Carousel Video Duration: 15 seconds
• Prompted Carousel Video Duration: 60 seconds 
• Video Duration Max: 120 seconds

Using Your Existing Organic Instagram Posts as Ads

Seen success with your organic Instagram posts? Then boost them!

The post will appear in the newsfeed of your target audience without seeming too out of place or disruptive and it’s the simplest way to spread awareness on Instagram.