Hey guys it's Rod, and in this week's video, I'm going to take you
through everything you need to know about advertising on Instagram.
It's a little different to just doing straight ads on Facebook, if
that's what you've been doing so far.
I'm going to take you through the different placement options that there
are, things you need to watch out for when you're selecting creative and
some best practices that will help you get the best possible results.
Now as usual, if you find the content on my channel useful, please go ahead and
caress that Like button, hit subscribe.
Don't worry about the notifications because that's annoying.
And without any further ado, let's get into it.
So here we are in the Facebook ads manager.
Now all of the ads that you create and run on Instagram are actually
handled by the Facebook ads manager.
So I'm not going to take you through anything that you need
to know as regards to setting up a business manager or setting up
the pixel or anything like that.
We're just going to focus solely on what you need to do once you get to
the point of actually creating the ads.
There'll be other videos that handle those other setup items.
So I've got an example campaign here already created, and an example ad set.
Let's take a look at the video ad for starters.
Just play that ad so you can see what it is.
It's very simple and it's also completely fictional, this is not a real company.
So let's have a look at the creative section first.
So in the ad creative, we've got feeds, we've got stories and reels, and we're
going to focus on those two sections because it's mainly the two places
where you'll have your ads displayed.
So if we look at the ad set level, and if you've got automatic placements, then
that means that you are telling Facebook to work out where's the best placement to
actually show the ads, and it'll quickly work out which one's working well, which
one isn't, and then it will divert all the budget to those particular placements.
So then at the ad level, once we look at the ad creative,
we've got feeds and stories.
So both Facebook and Instagram have feeds.
So for Instagram, the ideal creative size for feeds is square.
Now a lot of people say a 4:5 placement is better, but that's
really only for organic posts.
In all the testing I've done, when I'm looking at it in my own Instagram
feed I've found that the square 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels or a one-to-one
format is best for Instagram feeds.
So this particular ad is a square format.
So it's a 1080 by 1080 video.
Then if we look down at the Stories and Reels section, I haven't
changed any of the creative yet.
The ideal size image for Instagram stories and reels, and also for Facebook
stories, which is the next one along is 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels tall.
As you can see, with Instagram, it takes the color out of the photo and
tries to stretch it out to make it tall which does look a little better.
And then on Facebook, it doesn't quite do that.
So it uses this gray background and plus whatever is your creative in the middle.
So there's a couple of ways that you can customize your creative
to suit the taller format.
Now I'm not saying that you have to do this and that it
will definitely work better.
But it's certainly something that you want to test, because when you
use a square format, you end up displaying some of the text from
the description, which is down here.
And when you're using a tall format ad, which I'm going to
show you in a sec, then it doesn't show that description text there.
So if we wanted to modify these placements for stories and reels,
we can do that one at a time.
We can also just modify that particular section.
So what I'm going to do is modify all the stories and reels in one go.
So we can change what we've got to a different piece of creative,
or we can crop what we have.
So if we go with what Instagram recommends what we're doing is
we're cropping what was a square format video, which is not going to
produce a very good result for you.
Or can just stick with one-to-one.
So what I'm going to show you is how you we're going to
change it to a different format.
I'm gonna choose this ad here, which I've already got loaded, and as you can
see that's in a 1080 by 1920 format.
You can see it stretches all the way from the top to the bottom of the display.
Now there's a couple of things to notice.
Part of the top of the ad will be obscured by the advertiser information.
So if you are putting any sort of text or copy or anything up there
you just want to make sure that it's not obscured, and I'll include the
measurements so that you can put them into Canva or whatever graphics program
you're using to ensure that you don't actually have anything obscured by that.
And it's the same at the bottom of the ad.
So you'll have a call to action here, which might be shop now, or it might
be subscribe or something like that.
And you don't want to have any of your copy that's within the ad below
that so it ends up being obscured.
So once again I'll provide the dimensions that you need.
So that's all you need to do.
We're switching to that piece of creative.
Now you could upload a new piece of creative, if you wanted to.
And we can go save.
So now what we've got is our Instagram stories and Facebook stories have a nice
tall format, and there's nothing that's bleeding out from around that creative.
Now, if you want to have a bit more of a look of a preview, you first of
all have to publish what you've done.
I suggest that you make sure your campaign is off, so you're not
publishing anything unexpectedly.
Once you've published it you'll then have access to some other sharing options.
So you can see the post as a Facebook post with comments, and
you can also share a link or you can send a notification to Instagram.
So when you select this one, to send the notification to Instagram, what it will
do is it'll pop up and say that it's been sent to your Instagram account.
You go onto your phone, open it up, can take a minute or two, and then it'll
start showing up in your stories feed.
The other way you can do it is to go share a link and you can copy that.
And then you can send that to someone else.
And if they load that into their browser, it will show up for them.
So I'll just quickly show that to you.
You won't be able to see me put the URL in, cause the screen
is not capturing up that high.
This is particularly handy because what you can do is you can select the
different placements from up here.
This is how it looks in the mobile newsfeed.
We've got your desktop news feed.
Now, if we go down to Facebook stories, you can see how it's
the different piece of creative.
And then if we look at our Instagram stories, that's how
it will look on Instagram.
So that's another way that you can get a preview of it.
And if I select show ad it then shows it in your actual feed.
So that's how things work with a video ad.
Now let's have a look at the image ad.
Now with this one, I'm just using once again, a square
piece of creative for the feeds.
And if I go down to the creative section, and look at the stories,
you can see I've already modified that placement to use a tall format,
which is equivalent to 1080 by 1920.
In this case it's 764 by 1357, but it's the same ratio.
Now, if I change that back to a square format.
I'll just choose that format there.
Now when we look at the Instagram stories, the primary text
is now displaying down here.
So it's just something to keep in mind.
It works the same with videos and images.
And it's whether you want some of the text from your description to show there.
You can see on Instagram stories, it shows, and also on
Facebook stories, it shows up.
Now let's have a look at a carousel ad example.
Now this time around I'm using a different example, a couple of fictional characters
who are wanting to get you to sign up to their mailing list through a lead magnet.
So if I look at the feeds side of things, we've got 10 frames, I think that's
nine or ten frames in this carousel ad and feeds are pretty standard.
So when somebody looks at this, they're going to be able to flick through
the carousel ad, whether it be on the Facebook or the Instagram feed.
In this instance, I don't have a tall format piece of creative
loaded for stories and reels.
Now, Instagram stories are maximum 15 seconds long.
Now what Instagram will do is it will show a couple of the cards that you've
got in your carousel, and it will put that into the story and you'll have
the link there to expand the story.
And Instagram will then select some additional cards.
So you may end up with things being shown out of order.
So it's just something to be aware of with carousels when you're placing
them on Instagram stories, what you can do is you can de-select this option,
which is for automatically showing the best performing cards first.
And you might want to de-select that one, if you've already got
a call to action at the end, so I'll show you what we've got here.
So if I just go to the last card, I've already got a call to action there.
And if I want to make it bigger, I can expand it out.
I don't really want to have an additional card at the end of that.
But certainly you can use carousels in Instagram stories.
You've just gotta be mindful of how things will get displayed and whether that's
something that you want to have done.
I think it probably is better to use either images or videos or slide
shows, when it comes to your Instagram stories or your Facebook stories.
Did you find this video useful and you've got some more questions?
If you do, drop them in the comments below.
Would you like to get better results from your Instagram or
your Facebook advertising or both?
Well if you do, we can help you with that.
My agency is a specialist Facebook and Instagram advertising agency.
We help people set up new campaigns, optimize existing ones.
We manage everything from beginning to end, creative, copy, the works.
If you'd like to have a chat with somebody about that, there will be a link in the
description below where you can click on that and book a time in my calendar
or the calendar of one of my team.
We can have a chat with you about what you would like to do and
what you do in your business.
Find out if we're a good fit, talk about the pricing, all that good stuff.
If you found this content really useful, go ahead and caress that like button, hit
subscribe and I'll see in the next video.