How to Set Up Instagram Targeted Ads Yourself

Written by: Melissa Mauro

Targeted ads are a very effective marketing tool that enables you to advertise your products to people who are most likely to be interested in them. Thanks to targeted ads, you can promote your account and specific posts, grow engagement, and increase brand awareness. You can also use retargeting to promote your products to audiences that are similar to your target audience.

Perhaps, you’ve heard many stories about entrepreneurs who achieved significant success thanks to running targeted campaigns on Instagram. However, if you want to achieve good results with ads on Instagram, you should know how to properly set up targeted campaigns. In this article, we will consider targeted ads in detail so that you will know how to set up your campaign and run targeted ads on Instagram.

The Benefits of Targeted Ads on Instagram

First of all, there are more than a billion Instagram Users. This is a huge audience, and no matter the niche of your business, you can always find people interested in your products or services on Instagram. Besides, Instagram is a great platform for marketers because its users like marketing content and expect to see it. According to statistics, as much as 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business. If you are looking for engaged followers who will be interested in your fresh offers, Instagram is a perfect solution.

If you’ve tried targeted ads but couldn’t achieve the desired results, you shouldn’t feel frustrated and focus your marketing efforts on another social media platform. Instagram offers relatively cheap traffic, and if you’ve chosen not the best strategy, you can always tweak your settings so that you’ll see completely different results next time. Given that targeted advertising on Instagram can be done from a Facebook account, you can benefit from the variety of ad settings that Facebook offers.

How to Set Up Targeted Ads

First of all, you can choose to set up your campaign on Instagram or Facebook. To set up ads from your Instagram account directly, you need to have a business account. You can promote your existing posts right from the app. When using the Instagram app, you should simply pick a post that demonstrates the best engagement and click Promote. After this, you’ll be able to choose who will see your ad, as well as its duration, and your budget. In this case, however, you won’t be able to use as many customization options as to when setting up your ads from Facebook.

Determine your objectives

Visit the Campaigns tab in Facebook Ads Manager and click Create. Here, you can choose Quick Creation or Guided Creation. The latter option means that you will follow step-by-step instructions. After this, you’ll be able to select your objectives from a list divided into three categories: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. For example, you can choose such goals as increasing brand awareness, growing engagement, or driving conversions.

You should have a clear idea of what you’re going to achieve with your ads because Facebook will consider your objectives when choosing ad placements and bidding types. If you have an eCommerce store, you will most likely need to increase sales. In this case, you can choose Conversions as your objective. You will also need to install a Facebook pixel — a small piece of code that you should add to your website to track sales and conversions. If you have a Shopify store, you should copy the pixel code from your Ads Manager to the Pixel ID field in Shopify preferences.

Choose the title of your campaign

You can choose any name for your ad campaign. However, we recommend that you don’t choose a generic name like “My Campaign” and make sure that the title includes some specific information, such as the target location so that you can easily identify different campaigns and measure their performance. You can also choose to do A/B testing so that Instagram will test different campaigns and allocate the biggest budget for a campaign that demonstrates the best performance.

Set your schedule and budget

Facebook Ads Manager enables you to set up the budget for your campaign manually or choose Campaign Budget Optimization. The latter option will redirect your budget to the campaigns that show the best performance while taking into account your spend limits. If you’re new to Instagram ads, we suggest that you choose the Campaign Budget Optimization feature because it will enable you to benefit from the lowest conversion cost.

You can choose a daily or lifetime budget. The daily budget option means that your ads will run throughout the day according to the chosen budget. The lifetime budget option means that your ads will run for a certain period of time and your budget will be stretched over that timeframe. For instance, you can choose to only display your ads on certain days when your target audience is most active.

Choose your audience

Choosing your target audience is a crucial step that directly impacts the effectiveness of your ads. You can choose audiences based on demographics, behavioral patterns, and interests. For instance, you can choose people who have products similar to yours in their interests and who live in a certain country. You can also create custom audiences. To do it, go to Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience. This way, you’ll be able to target people who’ve visited your website or anyone whose information you have in your contact list.

For instance, Facebook allows you to display your ads on the Facebook feed, marketplace, Instagram feed, groups feed, Messenger stories, etc. To run campaigns on Instagram, choose the manual placements option and select properties related to Instagram.

Create your ad

Once you’ve decided where you want to display your ads, you should choose the ad format and upload your materials. You can upload a single photo or video, a collection of items that turn into a fullscreen experience on mobile, or a carousel. You should also write a textual description for your ad. Make sure that the size of your visuals corresponds to the Instagram requirements because the Ads Manager doesn’t accept images and videos that have an inappropriate size.

Wrapping Up

Instagram is a great platform for advertisers because it has a big audience of users who are interested in marketing content. We hope that our guide will help you run successful targeted campaigns. Keep in mind that, if you want your campaigns to bring the desired results, you should monitor their performance. Some ads may demonstrate much better results than others so you should use analytics to understand what needs to be improved. There are many built-in analytics tools in Facebook Ads Manager that enable you to easily measure the performance of your campaigns.