19 Actionable Steps For Wildly Profitable Instagram Ads Campaign

Use Facebook Ad Library to carry out competitor research to see what your competitors are doing and learn from them. If they've been spending money perfecting their campaigns, you can use their learnings to give yourself a headstart.

Make sure you have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website and also have Event Tracking on the relevant pages you want to be tracked. You can use this data later to run highly targeted campaigns.

Create a strategy with clear goals so you know the expected results from your campaign and be realistic with what you're trying to achieve and set a realistic timeframe to do this. It's not common to get sales from a single Ad campaign so consider all the stages in the buying cycle; awareness, consideration, conversion and retention.

Choose the right objective for each campaign, remembering that you need to take your buyers on a journey of awareness and consideration first, before trying to convert them.

Make sure you set your budget correctly and manage it effectively. It's better to invest properly to allow Instagram to do the hard work and get your ads working effectively. We recommend a budget of £30-£50 per day to start with - run that for 2-3 months and you'll soon be generating the ROI you've been looking for!

Make sure you utilise the demographic filtering when creating your audience Ad Sets. This is a great way to target your audience. Use all the information you have available on your Buyer Persona and test different filtering variations until you have a solid audience of at least 1,000,000. Anything lower than 1,000,000 will be more challenging to get results as you want to allow a bigger audience so the data can go to work.

If you have an Instagram Profile, Facebook Page or website with Pixel data or a customer list (with permission to use for marketing purposes), then this will give your campaign a great head start. You can use this data for campaign targeting or even create Lookalike audiences.

If you have enough data (minimum of 100 people/conversions) to create a Lookalike audience, then this is the key to success! Lookalike audiences are part of the real power of Instagram Ads marketing as Instagram will identify other people similar to your existing clients/those who have already converted.

If you're running a Traffic campaign with the view of driving people to your website, it's always a good idea to optimise the Landing Page Views instead of Link Clicks. Link Clicks includes any clicks on your Ad or to your Instagram Profile, whereas Landing Page Views tracks the number of visits to your actual landing page.

Instagram recommends keeping all placements on, but we don't! If you have a limited budget for your campaigns, think about your audience and where you want your ad to be placed to engage with them; which platforms, what kind of format and what the impact is of having it appear in the different placements. If you're objective is brand awareness, then keep all placements on, but if you're going for conversions then take a more considered approach and even think about the device and whether or not the user is on Wifi when they see your ad.

Using your brand profile is most common practice but if your message is better served from a person, consider creating an Instagram Profile for a person so it looks as though the person is posting instead of a brand. This can be very effective for a long storytelling post.

We find a single image tends to be very effective and a great place to start, but it's worth testing carousels and videos to see which performs best for you and your target audience.

Make this descriptive and benefit-focused to encourage the user to take action.

This is one of the most important elements of your ad. We have great success with both long ads that tell a story and engage the user, as well as short ads that leave an air of mystery but suck the user into taking action, so we recommend trying both and seeing which performs better over a 2-4 week period.

Test different CTAs and remember to align it with your campaign objective. Learn more is an effective CTA if your objective is traffic to a website, but also for Conversion campaigns with a strong landing page.

If your campaign has a URL, consider using the URL shortener so that a long URL is not displaying in the description as short URLs tend to get higher Click-Through Rates (CTRs)

Make sure you run multiple ads at the same time so you can test different elements to see what's working best and then do more of that. You should be A/B testing constantly throughout your campaigns and let the data drive your decisions.

Make sure you agree your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) before you start your campaign and ensure you report on them on a weekly basis, then review them in detail monthly to see how you are performing against your expectations.

Make sure you give your campaigns long enough to run before making big changes as it can often take 6-8 weeks to really see the performance of a campaign.