Instagram continues its flurry of adding new features, with instant ads and new analytics set to roll out next.
Promote For Stories
Running an ad on Instagram is about to get much quicker and easier, as advertisers soon won’t need to access the Facebook Business Manager to activate their Instagram ad campaigns. A recent TechCrunch report revealed that the sister company is about to roll out a “Promote for Stories” feature worldwide, which would enable people to immediately turn any post into an advertisement.
Image Source: TechCrunch
This new method will function much the same way as Facebook’s Boost option currently works, which allows brands and advertisers to simply press one button and choose between a few simple preferences under the desired post to turn it into a sponsored ad.
Account administrators will be able to configure the targeting preferences so that Instagram’s full suite of targeting options can be deployed, like users who are similar to page followers, geolocations, and demographics.
The Analytics Beta Launch
The “Promote for Stories” addition isn’t the only new tool Instagram is offering to marketers. The company also announced that its new analytics dashboard, “Instagram Analytics” has now launched in beta.
Insights offered in this new program are expected to provide deeper, more meaningful metrics than what is currently available in the existing Insights tool, which only tracks engagement details like clicks, new followers, and impressions.
New data such as lifetime value, retention rates, and people who aren’t interacting with content are expected to be included, allowing brands to make more intelligent decisions on how they should cater to their social following.
Image Source: TechCrunch
There are a couple other interesting new additions to this dashboard as well, like the ability to create audience segments (which can be organized to create different types of cohorts based on how often different types of people are engaging), and the option to compare how social follower activity compares to those that are taken on the brand website.
Instagram’s Ascension
The Facebook-owned social platform has seen its popularity soar in recent years – both from a consumer perspective and an advertising one. With over a billion worldwide users and two million paying advertisers, there seems to be nowhere to go but up for Instagram.
Image Source: Statista
With nearly half of the total userbase accessing the platform on a daily basis, 70% of them admitting to looking up their favorite companies, and more than 200 million of them visiting those pages on a daily basis, it’s not surprising to know that more brands have been turning to the image-sharing platform to get their ads in front of its highly-engaged userbase.
A Helpful Boost
Despite the fact that its co-founders resigned earlier this year, Instagram has shown no signs of fatigue. Combining this with the fact that Facebook has been struggling to maintain revenue growth on its native platform, it’s clear that Instagram has become a critical component for Zuckerberg and his team to continue to capitalize on the social market.
These two new features will be helpful for running and tracking ad campaigns more efficiently and effectively for advertisers, especially those working for smaller and medium sized businesses that simply don’t have the time or resources to allocate to spend countless hours in Facebook’s Ad Manager and Power Editor.
As for timelines, there has been no exact date on when the Promote for Stories or the Analytics beta will go live, but it will likely happen soon based on how swift some of their other utility upgrades have been rolled out earlier this year.
In the meantime, if you have any questions about some of these new features targeting or social marketing practices as a whole, we encourage you to reach out to our affiliate management team. They’ll be happy to help provide you with tips on how to get the most out of your campaigns and point you to some of our most high-converting social offers!