Did you know that 87% of Instagram users made a purchase, followed a brand or visited a brand’s website after seeing an ad? So, if it’s not obvious to you yet, Instagram ads are your best bet if you want a profitable Instagram business.

Using video ads, a brand like Tommy Hilfiger was able to reach a wider range of its target audience. The ad boosted sales of the advertised line by a whopping 28%. 

Image source: Instagram | @tommyhilfiger

However, because of the low cost of advertising on Instagram, it’s tempting to construct ads with little thought. In fact, many businesses don’t plan effectively before launching their ad campaign. 

The problem with this is that it can be difficult to reach your target audience as effectively as you want to.  

Granted. Instagram ads are well suited to give you returns. However, you need to take certain actionable steps to make them more effective.

How To Become Profitable On Instagram Ads

If you are looking for ways to make your Instagram ads more profitable, you are right on time for some invaluable Instagram tips and tricks. 

Creating an Instagram ad

First things first, you need to create your Instagram ad. You can do so via the Facebook ads manager, Power editor, Instagram partners or third-party tools like Adespresso and Facebook’s marketing API.

To create your campaign you’ll go through 3 main levels:

• Campaign level
• Ad set level
• Ad placement level

Campaign Level

At the campaign level, you’re required to choose an objective for your ad. Your objective is simply the aim or results your campaign is supposed to achieve. 

Choosing the right objective is very important to making a profitable ad because it directs the algorithm, telling what to do to get the kind of results you want. 

For example, if the reason you are running an ad is to make more sales, then you should choose catalogue sales as your objective. By doing this, Instagram will showcase your products for your customers to see and make purchases.

The different objectives you can choose from are:

Awareness:

• Brand awareness: this aims at showing your ad to the right users. It helps you make more users aware of your brand.
• Reach: it aims to show your ad to more Instagram users.

Consideration:

• Traffic: it focuses on increasing your website traffic.
• Engagement: this is to increase your engagement such as likes, comments, shares, event responses etc.
• App Installs: it seeks to encourage users to download your app

Image source: Instagram | @jumiafoodng

• Video Views: it seeks to increase your video views
• Lead Generation: This is designed to help with attracting potential buyers. Here, your ad will encourage your potential clients to give out their contact information like email addresses and phone numbers. 
• Messages: it seeks to foster brand-customer communication. It increases DMs from users. 

Conversions:

• Conversions: here, the goal is to increase conversions such as sales, registrations, email newsletter sign-ups etc. 
• Catalogue Sales: this aims at boosting sales by showing products from your product catalogue to interested customers via ads.
• Store traffic: it focuses on increasing visits to your business in a physical location. 

Ad Set Level

Image source: Instagram | @kenneth_adeshina

This is the stage where you enhance your ad to reach your target audience. With Instagram ads, you get access to highly targeted options. 

Think of this stage as a sort of SEO stage. Just like SEO will help your site rank high, the ad level targeting options ensure that your ads arrive at the right doorstep. The ad set helps you target users based on factors such as:

• Age: you can choose the age range of your target audience. The widest range is from 13 – 65+.
• Location: choose the location so that Instagram will show your ads to people in those places.
• Gender: If your product is gender-specific, then you can choose which gender your product is for. You can also choose to show your ads to both genders.
• Language: If you need to reach a group of people that use a particular language, then select the language. 
• Demographics: You can target or exclude people based on their education, employment, household and lifestyle details.
• Interests: this targeting option helps you reach people based on their interests or the content they engage with. E.g fitness, travel, food, art etc.
• Behaviours: you can target users through their online purchasing behaviour and other online activities.
• Connections: this targets users following their connection with your Instagram page i.e people who have subscribed to your email list or visited your website. You can also target users that look like your audience (i.e Lookalike audiences).

Note that if you buy authentic Instagram likes or followers, you can choose the engagement targeting options to help them interact with your page easily.

The Ad Placement Level

This is where you choose exactly where you want to make your ads appear on Instagram. By default, the Facebook ads manager selects both Facebook and Instagram placements. So, if you’d like to change that, you need to edit the placements to your taste.

Using the Instagram ad placement feature, you can set your ad to appear on  Instagram Feeds, Stories, Reels, Explore tab or Shop.

In addition, you can choose which mobile devices or operating systems your ads should appear on. For instance, if your ad is for an iOS app you can choose ‘iOS device only’.

Instagram ads: Budget and Scheduling

Image source: Pexels

The next important phase is to set the budget and schedule of your Instagram ad. The budget or the amount you’ll spend for your ad could be either a daily or lifetime budget. 

A daily budget is simply the amount of your ad spend every day. A lifetime budget is the ad spend over the lifetime of your ad.

For the schedule, you can choose to run your ads continuously till your budget elapses or you can set a start and an end date.  

Instagram ads: Costs and Bidding

The cost of your ads depends on factors such as your bid, estimated action rates and the relevance score. On average, an Instagram ad cost per click is between $0.50 – $1.00.

Instagram ad bidding involves competing for high placement for the target audience. It’s like getting the attention of Instagrammers to your ads. The more you pay or bid for ads the higher the chance of your ads reaching the right people.

Select Your Ad Format

There are 6 Instagram ad formats to choose from. It’s ideal to make your choice based on what you are advertising. 

For example, if you are running a campaign for household items, you can use video ads to showcase your products in action. The 6 Instagram ad formats are:

• Image ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads
• Stories ads

Image source: Instagram | @alxt_programme

• Reel ads
• Shop ads

Your ads will appear among regular feed posts, reels or Instagram stories. However, they’ll carry the ‘sponsored post’ tag.

Tip: Make sure that your ad photos and videos are in high resolution to capture the eyes of your audience.

To Conclude

If you have a business on Instagram and running Instagram ads is not in your strategy, then you are losing out on a lot. Facebook ads manager is designed to give you great results and help you achieve your business goals. 

Embedded in this post are cues to guide you in creating a profitable Instagram campaign. Having clear objectives for your ad, and choosing your target audience and ad format are necessary steps to running a campaign that will yield returns. Feel free to read the article again and start implementing!