What you need to know about Instagram Ads

Instagram shared its first ever figures on how many monthly active users it has in the UK.

Out of 300m global active users, 14m UK Instagram account holders are accessing the social image sharing platform on a monthly basis. Overall 70% of Instagram users are based outside of the USA.

The fast adoption of Instagram has been driven by many trends in consumer behavior: the shift from text based communications to visual based communications, the shift from ‘search with intent’ to ‘discovery’ and of course most prevalently, the shift away from desktop to camera enabled, always-connected mobile phones.

70m photos are uploaded via mobile every day, generating 2.5bn likes. This is a phenomenal amount of engagement and proves that Instagram users are an ever-connected bunch hungry for new images, found through a small number of discovery tools.

It’s a powerful engagement tool and users know that when they follow or interact with a brand, there won’t be a hard sell because the functionality just doesn’t exist.

Until now.

So far there have been 500 campaigns in total globally and Instagram states that 97% of those campaigns have generated a significant uplift in brand recall, 2.7 times higher than the Nielsen control group.

Interestingly though, each of the brands using Instagram ads have had direct involvement with the Instagram team in terms of the ad’s development.

This isn’t a ‘submit your sponsored post to Facebook for fast automatic approval’ type deal, if you want to advertise with Instagram you have to have a one-to-one relationship with the ad team.
How sustainable this is in the long-run is entirely up for debate, and how long before users become frustrated that they don’t have access to a ‘Learn More’ button that can link to their own off-site interests is also something that time will only tell.

 

If you feel you need a helping hand with your digital marketing make sure you get in touch. Sharp Monkeys is a digital marketing agency based in Worcester.