Introduction
In this article, I’m gonna show you how to set up ads on Instagram. Now, Instagram is actually owned by Facebook, so when we’re doing this, we’re actually gonna be doing this through Facebook’s platform. Just keep that in mind. Now, obviously, Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, so it is one that could be highly effective for driving traffic to your business.
Types of Instagram Ads
The first thing we have to understand here is the different types of ads that are available to run on Instagram. The first one is photo ads. This is pretty self-explanatory; you’re allowed to have a description there, and you can take them directly to your website. But then we have video ads that are in the feed. This is different from story ads—we’re gonna talk about story ads in just a second here.
Video Ads in the Feed
Video ads in the feed have been around for quite a while now, and you’re allowed to have videos up to 60 seconds long—a minute-long video as well as a description below this video, which can be pretty effective in order to drive more sales and convert more people. We’re going to talk about that later on in the video, but video ads can be very effective. You can have different formats for this video, so it can be a long vertical video or a typical type of YouTube style where it’s a 1920 by 1080 video. So, you have a lot of different options there for video ads.
Carousel Ads
Then we get into something called carousel ads. This is great for people who are running e-commerce businesses and trying to sell a physical product. They want to be able to display different viewpoints of that particular product. People find that to be very influential and helpful for those running these types of ads for e-commerce businesses.
Story Ads
And then we finally have story ads. These are relatively new and haven’t been around for too long, so a lot of people aren’t using story ads yet, but they can be incredibly effective.
Considerations for Story Ads
One thing to consider with story ads is that they can only be up to 15 seconds long, and you aren’t allowed to have a lot of text in there. You can have text within the video, but you can’t write long paragraphs. It’s just not going to work for most people; they aren’t going to read a full paragraph in a 15-second span unless they hold down on it, but most people don’t do that.
Creating Ads in Facebook Ads Manager
So, what we’re gonna do here is click “Create Our Own.” This will take us to Facebook Ads Manager. We’re going to have to log into Facebook first, but I should already be logged in, so we’re getting onto Ads Manager right now.
Creating a New Campaign
Now, we’re going to create a new campaign. It might look a little bit confusing at first with Facebook ads—that’s maybe why you came to this article. It can look kind of intimidating with all these different options, but trust me, once you get the hang of it, it’s not too difficult. It’s pretty user-friendly through Facebook Ads Manager, at least compared to something like Google AdWords or Bing Ads, which can be a jungle. We want to decide what our marketing objective here is—whether we’re trying to build brand awareness or drive more traffic to our business, generate more leads. For most people, they will want to just get more traffic to their business.
Naming the Campaign
We’re gonna name our campaign, so just to make sure that we don’t confuse this with other campaigns, let’s call it “Run Number One Campaign” and click “Continue.”
Creating a New Ad Set
Now, we end up on the page where we are able to create a new ad set and choose who we are actually marketing our products to or our business to. This is the part where I really want you to pay attention because there are a couple of different ideas within here that, if you follow through with them, could really help your business grow. We’re gonna want to decide where we go with our traffic, whether we send them to our website, or even to WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger where you can then have a conversation with them.
Setting Up Bots
You can set up bots to answer their questions as well, but that’s an entirely different video. So let’s just have it go to our website for today, and then we’re going to actually choose who we are targeting. Hold on, give me a second.
Targeting Your Audience
Okay, so when we choose who we target our specific ad for this campaign, I want you to be careful with this because a lot of people think they understand their target market perfectly well. Maybe if you’ve been running your business for a long time, you do know who your target market is and who will be converting the best on your products.
Being Cautious with Targeting
But if you’re just getting into this, if this is really one of the first ads that you’re running and you haven’t sold a lot of products in the past and you don’t fully know your look-alikes, then I want you to be cautious of this. Some people will jump into this thinking, “I have a hunch that the average person who’s buying my products—if you’re selling an online course for helping people with passive income—it’s going to be most likely people between 18 and 35, maybe male, in the United States.” Making these assumptions can really hurt your overall sales growth in the long term.
Real-Life Examples
I know two separate people on two different occasions; I’ve asked them this question, and they’ve both answered it to my surprise. They were surprised themselves at first. Contrary to what they believed, they were both selling pretty similar courses about generating income online—making money online through various sources. They both found that contrary to popular belief, where they thought that their target market and highest converting person would be somewhere like a thirty-year-old male or a millennial eager to make more money, they actually found that a good amount of people converting at very high rates were forty-five years and up.
Unexpected Conversions
Even senior citizens were buying their online digital products, getting into the sales funnels, and purchasing these items. At first, you wonder, “Wow, how can a 65-year-old be interested in these kinds of passive income sources and converting so well on this?” But it turns out they have a lot more discretionary income. A thousand dollars is much easier to come up with when you’re 65 and retired than it is for someone who is 18 years old and struggling to pay the rent. It is interesting to see this, so don’t make those assumptions.
Importance of Broad Targeting
The whole point of this is to not make too many assumptions on who your specific target market is. You can have some good ideas, but I think it’s important at first, when you’re running your very first ad and testing the waters, to keep it pretty broad. I would suggest keeping this pretty broad and then creating different ads to do different ad tests to see who’s converting the best. You can do different age groups, make multiple different ad sets, so you can set this up. We’re gonna keep this very broad, in the US, and our potential reach right here is 230 million people.
Adding Countries
You can add different countries on here as well. I like to have the United Kingdom and other countries that have a pretty high amount of discretionary income, like Canada and Australia. Obviously, there are other countries you can add, but you do want to think about where you are going to be selling the most of these products. You can narrow this down to a very specific location—Philadelphia, California, New York, etc. You can get very specific with this. You’ll also want to select your language, which will possibly be English for myself, at least for my customers.
Detailed Targeting Keywords
Now, we can choose some detailed targeting keywords here. Choose your business and decide on some pretty broad, general words that could fit into this. If you’re too specific, the ad rates are going to go up a lot more; you can be paying more per view and per click. So for this, we’re gonna do “marketing.” The more that we add on here, the more broad it will become and the cheaper the ads will technically be. Let’s add some other ones here. So now our reach is only sixty-four million people. We can add different ideas like, let’s say, “business.”
Adding Connections
This is very general, and it’s going to open up to a lot of people. Okay, business is not even—yeah, alright. And what I love about this here is that we’re actually able to add different connections, so how people are finding your platform, or people who have already seen your website, seen your Facebook page, liked your Facebook page. You can do this through connections, and that’s what’s really incredible. This is something you can’t do with radio ads or traditional cable TV ads—you can’t just choose the people who have already liked your Facebook page or who are already warm traffic.
Benefits of Facebook Marketing
This is what’s pretty incredible about Facebook marketing. We’re not going to do this for this because we don’t have anything set up for that right now, but if you do have that set up, it could be very high converting. Now, we’re gonna want to change placements to edit placements. This is where I’m going to choose the specific ads that are going to be running. We’re not going to be doing Facebook ads for this—you can, obviously, but I would suggest running separate campaigns for separate ads.
Campaign Management
For example, if you have the same exact video for Instagram feed video and story video, it can get a little bit weird because story ads can only be 15 seconds long, and the feed video can be sixty seconds long. So, I would create two separate campaigns for that. Let’s just go with the feed for now for the video that I could put on here at the moment. I don’t have anything set up for stories. Story ads should be much longer, a vertical 9:16 ratio, but for feed, you can do really any different ratio for that video—square, 1920 by 1080, or 1080 by 1920.
Mobile Device Targeting
Now, we can add which type of mobile device we want to put on here as well. Hold on, there we go. We can do iOS, Android, which is pretty interesting, but there’s something that I would consider getting into—only when connected to Wi-Fi, for people who are concerned about data. We’re not going to do that. If you’re trying to drive more traffic to mobile apps, you’ll want to select this as well.
Budgeting and Scheduling
Now, we need to go down here, and we need to decide on our budget. So, for the purpose of this, let’s say a daily budget of $10. We don’t want to go too high with this—maybe a lifetime budget of $70. But make sure you are using all the money that you want to spend. This is important for the lifetime budget; it allows you to know exactly how much you are going to spend. For this, you can set a schedule, and this is what I love as well. There are certain times of day when people are just going to convert better. People might be clicking your ad and costing you money when you’re not actually making sales from this because it’s a weird hour of the night and people are just bored and watching your videos.
Optimal Ad Timing
You can set this up so it runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. or 11 p.m., the hours when people are buying things the most often. If you’re getting paid daily, this is really good for Facebook ads. I don’t want to make this video too long, but now we can continue to the next step, where we can create our ad.
Creating the Ad
Make sure you don’t forget this part—review this page, and then, here, we can create the ad. We can upload a photo or video. Let me show you how to do that.
Uploading the Ad Content
We can go to “add a video” and choose a video that we already have, or you can create a slideshow, but I would not recommend that for video ads on Instagram. It looks like we’re missing a video, so we need to upload a video file. I can upload something real quick just to show you what this looks like.
Setting Up Ad Descriptions and Links
Now, if you already have something like this set up in your folder, you can upload your ad video, and this is what’s going to show up. But I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds with this. Once you do that, you have to make sure you add a description for the video and add a link to your website. These are crucial because if you don’t add these, people won’t know what the video is about. You’ll want to add a thumbnail as well because the first frame of the video might not always be the best one.
Final Steps
And then, once you’re done, you just click “Confirm.” You can preview the ad and make sure everything looks good. Click “Confirm,” and it’s going to go through the review process. Once it’s reviewed and approved, it will start running on Instagram. So that’s it! You just set up your Instagram ad through Facebook’s Ads Manager.
