Best Practices for Instagram Ads To Get More Sales

Implement the best practices for Instagram ads, and your sales will skyrocket. It’s an important part of the success of growing a brand on Instagram. The platform gives you many tools for creating highly effective ads that can become the backbone of your business. 

This article has some of the top strategies and tools to create Instagram ads. The Instagram ads’ best practices will work for any niche, and you can be a complete beginner. 

You can start on a shoestring budget and increase the spend as you get more results. Continue reading for the best practices for Instagram ads that will help elevate your business. 

How To Advertise on Instagram

Do you want to know how to advertise on Instagram? To take advantage of the Instagram Ads feature, you must sign up for a professional account. This step is free; you don’t have to separate login details. That’s because you can have up to five Instagram accounts under a single username. 

You can then use Instagram account switching to move between accounts. This is a good idea because you can separate your personal and business accounts. It leads to a better Instagram experience because you don’t need to mix business and personal life. 

Now, let’s look at the top ways of how you can run ads on the Instagram platform:

• Directly on Instagram: You can create advertisements on IG once the profile converts to a professional account. This will allow you to boost Instagram posts and Stories. 
• Facebook page advertisements: Do you have a Facebook page that syncs to your IG account? Then, you can create ads from the page, and they will appear on Instagram. 
• Ad campaigns in Ads Manager: You can create ads using the Ads Manager platform. It offers a comprehensive array of tools that will help you increase the conversion rate. 

Note that in some regions of the world, you must connect your Instagram and Facebook accounts to access ads. This might be a requirement even if you only want to run advertisements on Instagram.

Best Practices for Instagram Ads: Top 4 To Consider

Are you struggling to increase the number of Instagram sales or followers from your advertisement campaigns? Then, you can increase your effectiveness by taking advantage of the following best practices. 

1. Utilize the META Conversions API

The META Conversion API is a powerful tool to increase the effectiveness of your advertisement campaigns. The feature will help you track conversions and provide suggestions on how to improve advertising campaigns. You can stretch every dollar and increase the return on investment. 

The tool excels at providing granular detail. Hence, it’s ideal for those among you who love to dig into the data to make small improvements. The tool helps with making continual improvements in the long term. 

Therefore, you can turn a losing campaign into one of the industry leaders. 

2. Use Broad Target With Instagram’s Algorithm

You can trust the Instagram algorithm to target the specific audiences that lead to the highest conversion. You’ll need to set the campaign to board targeting. Initially, this casts a wide net for the Instagram marketing campaign. 

However, it will quickly remove users from consideration with the advanced targeting features. 

This feature is ideal for inexperienced marketers. That’s because the algorithm does the hard work of analyzing data and targeting the right audiences. Do you have trust issues with the algorithm? 

Then, you can set a small budget for the campaign as an experiment. Once you see positive results, you can increase the budget as you gain trust in the algorithm’s capabilities.

3. Choose the Best Images 

The quality and relevance of your photos will play a pivotal role in increasing the Instagram conversion rate. That’s because Instagram is a visual platform, and the quality of images is high in any niche. This means high-quality images taken with top-end equipment are a no-brainer. 

Here are some ideas for choosing the right images for advertising campaigns:

• Lifestyle images: Consider adding lifestyle images to your Instagram ads. These showcase different use cases for your products or services. The idea is to help the customers visualize using the product for themselves. Are you not sure how to implement lifestyle images? Then, look at what your competitors are doing to get a few ideas. 
• Good quality lighting: The lighting of your videos must be second to one. That’s because the image quality drastically reduces when lighting is an issue. You can hire professionals to take photos since they will know exactly how to get the best lighting. 
• Unique images: There are a lot of ads in many niches on Instagram. After all, it’s one of the more popular social media platforms out there. Hence, you need to offer unique images to have a chance of standing out. Give them a reason to pause and inspect your advertisement when they’re scrolling through their feeds. 

4. Use Instagram Insights

You’ll get access to Instagram Insights after registering for a professional account. This is the software you can use to monitor the performance of your ads. It’s important to understand how to interpret the data to identify what optimization you can implement. 

Some of the more important metrics you must monitor include impressions, reach, CPC, CPM, and CTR. We’ll cover what each of these means in further detail later on in the article.

How Much Does It Cost To Advertise on Instagram?

Do you want to know how much does it cost to advertise on Instagram? There is a fee to use the advertising platform or an obligation to spend a minimum amount. You simply need to create a professional account, which is also free. 

However, the cost for ads works on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis. This means you pay for the ads every time someone clicks on them. The CPC cost varies widely between niches since it depends on the number of advertisers. However, expect to pay anywhere from 20 cents to $2 per click and potentially much more. 

You need to research the CPC cost for your niche to evaluate if you can run profitable campaigns. You also need to increase the conversion rate to make the most of the money you have to spend on Instagram ads. 

Furthermore, you can limit the amount of money you spend on ads per day by setting a spending limit. This means the advertisements automatically turn off after reaching ad spend.

Top 5 Instagram Ad Analytics Metrics To Track

You need to track certain Instagram ad analytics metrics to figure out what’s working. Likewise, you can get rid of the losing campaigns that are dragging down the overall performance. You can track all of these metrics with the Instagram Insights console. 

1. CTR (Click-Through Rate)

The CTR is the percentage of people who click your ads after viewing them. A relatively high CTR means you have crafted a compelling ad that interests your Instagram target audience. The CTR average for niches differs since it depends on things such as the competition audience profiles. 

Furthermore, a high CTR doesn’t guarantee a large number of sales. It simply means that the advertisement has hit the mark. 

However, the product sales page must match the advertisement quality to get high sales. A high CTR without many sales can lead to negative ROI, and you need to address the problem. 

2. Reach

Reach refers to the number of users who have seen your advertisements. This gives you an idea of the scope of your advertisement campaign and its proliferation on Instagram. A higher reach means that you have a broader target. This might be good or bad depending on the size of the target market you want to reach. 

Furthermore, many users mistake reach for the number of impressions. The difference here is that reach is simply the number of unique impressions. In comparison, several impressions are possible by the same user.

3. Impressions

Unlike reach, impression is the number of times an advertisement is placed in front of users. Note that an advertisement placed in front of the same user multiple times leads to multiple impressions. Budget and audience size relate to the number of impressions you generate.

4. CPC (Cost Per Click)

The CPC is the amount you pay whenever a user clicks on your advertisements. This is an important metric because it helps you estimate the cost of generating each sale. You do this by considering the conversion rate on your sales page. 

You may want to turn off your advertisements when the CPC is too high. This happens when too many competitors bid on the same category of ads. The trick is to go after niche audiences or wait until the CPC returns to manageable values. 

5. CPM (Cost per Mile)

This metric tells you the cost per 1,000 impressions. It’s another tool in your arsenal for evaluating the cost of your marketing campaign on Instagram. You can pay using CPC or CPM during the advertising creation process. 

Your option may depend on what other marketing software you use. That’s because you may want to standardize your metrics across different platforms. You can also calculate the CPM by dividing the spend by impressions and multiplying it by 1,000. 

What Is Instagram Ad Frequency?

The Instagram ad frequency refers to the number of times you show an ad to the same person. You can also see the ad frequency, which limits the number of items an advertisement shows to the same person. You want to do this to ensure you don’t waste money on showing ads to people who aren‘t going to buy. 

Therefore, you need to figure out the ideal ad frequency on Instagram for your marketing campaign. You can do this via testing by determining the average number of views it takes to get a sale. 

You can try setting different caps on your ads and monitoring how it impacts your bottom line. You can make better decisions with more data, so wait until the sample size is big enough.

Is the Instagram Ads Platform Worth Using?

The Instagram ads platform is worth using to sell products on IG and grow your brand. However, ensuring your campaigns are profitable and Instagram gives enough support is your job. You should play around with the features to understand the toolkit. 

Now that you have read the best practices for Instagram ads, set up a few campaigns for yourself. Keep the budget low while experimenting to decrease the risks while learning. You’ll eventually get the hang of the process and drive many sales. 

Are you struggling to get the account growth you need with Instagram ads? Then, consider the professional growth service here at Plixi. We combine our network of IG influencers and in-house algorithms to propel growth. 

So what are you waiting for? Start growing and gaining Instagram followers today.