Running Instagram Ads Through Your Facebook Page

One set of tools for both

Instagram belongs to Facebook, and its advertising is sold through the same tools as Facebook's own ads, chiefly Ads Manager.

That means a business with a Facebook page can place ads on Instagram without ever having posted there. The ad is created in the same place as a Facebook ad, with Instagram chosen as one of the places it appears.

Many small businesses already run Facebook ads and have never looked at that setting. Some are running Instagram ads without knowing it, because the automatic placement option lets Facebook show ads in both.

Either way, it is worth knowing what changes when the ad moves to Instagram.

Who sees them

The targeting is Facebook's, so the same choices apply in both apps.

• Location, down to a radius around a town or an address.
• Age and gender, as on Facebook.
• Interests, drawn from what people do on Facebook.
• Your own customers, matched from a list you upload.
• People similar to your customers, found by Facebook from that list.

The fourth needs the most care. Use only a list of customers who would expect to hear from you, and make sure your privacy policy covers that use.

What is different about Instagram

The same person behaves differently in each app. On Instagram they are scrolling through photographs, quickly, on a phone, and anything that looks like an advertisement is easy to skip.

The audience leans younger than Facebook's, and almost everyone uses Instagram on a phone, so the ad and the page behind it have to work there.

The photograph does almost all the work. Captions shrink to a line or two until someone taps for more, and links typed into captions do nothing, so the button under the image is the only way through to your site.

Photographs that work there

What works on Instagram is a photograph that would look at home among the ones around it: real places, real products, real people, well lit.

Graphics full of text do badly. Facebook rates ad images by how much of them is text, and shows heavily lettered ones to fewer people.

Square images remain the safe choice for the feed. Video plays automatically without sound, so it has to make sense with the sound off.

Connecting the accounts properly

If the business has an Instagram account, connect it to the Facebook page before running anything. It is done from the page's settings, or in Business Manager if you use it.

Connected, the ad carries the Instagram account's name, and people who tap it land on a profile with your posts. Without a connection, the ad uses the Facebook page's name and picture, with no Instagram profile behind it.

Converting the account to an Instagram business profile, which requires a linked Facebook page, also adds a contact button and statistics on who sees your posts.

Make sure the account is registered to a company email address and owned by the business, not by whichever employee happened to set it up.

A worked example

An outfitter in a mountain town sells and rents backcountry gear: tents, packs and stoves in summer, snowshoes in winter, and canoes for a nearby chain of lakes.

It had a busy Facebook page and no Instagram account. When the owner tried Instagram ads to reach people in the city two hours away, they ran under the Facebook page's name.

They used the same images as the Facebook ads: product shots on a white background, with prices written across them.

Every ad pointed at the home page, where a slideshow came first and the rental prices were several taps away.

Instagram exposed the images. Among photographs of lakes and campsites, a tent on a white background with a price on it looked exactly like what it was.

The second attempt used customers' own trip photographs, with their permission, and linked straight to the canoe rental page, with prices and a booking form near the top.

The owner also opened an Instagram account and connected it, so the ads had a profile behind them.

Where the ad should send people

The click from an Instagram ad opens inside Instagram's own browser, on a phone, from someone who was looking at photographs a second earlier.

So the page has to continue what the ad started. An ad for canoe rentals goes to the canoe rental page, not the home page, with the price and the way to book visible without much scrolling.

It has to load quickly on a mobile connection, and every form on it has to work with a thumb.

A visitor who has to hunt is one tap away from going back to the feed.

Measuring it properly

Ads Manager can break results down by placement, so you can see what the Instagram share of a campaign cost and produced, apart from Facebook's.

In Analytics, tag the link in the ad with campaign labels naming Instagram, so those visits are counted under their own name and not mixed in with everything else.

The Facebook pixel, a snippet of code added to your pages, can also report whether visitors from the ads went on to send a form or make a booking.

Spending and timing

Start small, with a separate ad set for Instagram so its results are not blended with Facebook's.

The same image shown for months goes stale with the people who keep seeing it. A few photographs rotated through a campaign usually hold up better.

And run the ads ahead of the season they promote. People plan trips, purchases and projects weeks before they act on them.

The counter-case

Not every business suits Instagram. A plumbing company or an insurance broker may find little in its work that photographs well, and customers who search on Google rather than scroll.

For them the money is often better spent on search advertising, where people are already looking for the service.

And a business that cannot produce good photographs will struggle there whatever it spends.

For a business with work that looks good in pictures, though, the advice stands: run the ads from your Facebook page, connect the account, and point every ad at the page it promises.

Before the first ad

1. Check your placement settings in Ads Manager.
2. Connect your Instagram account to the page.
3. Choose real photographs without text on them.
4. Link each ad to its matching page.
5. Test that page on a phone.
6. Tag the link with campaign labels.
7. Run Instagram as its own ad set.

Step four matters most. A strong photograph earns the tap, and a page that does not match it loses the visitor in the next second.

Counting those visits under the right name, rather than losing them, is covered in direct traffic that is not really direct.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.