An Early Look at Instagram Advertising Performance
By Zachary Reiss-Davis
Salesforce is a launch partner for Instagram across our suite of Marketing Cloud products; Social.com for managing advertising campaigns at scale, Active Audiences to unlock and sync CRM data in Salesforce to optimize advertising and Social Studio for publishing, engagement, customer service, and analytics. As we’ve been helping customers quickly get started with successful Instagram advertising campaigns over the last month, we wanted to share some early performance and cost numbers we’ve have seen so far across over a dozen clients in a range of industries.
So far, the overall click-through rate (CTR) is 1.50%, compared to a CTR of 0.84% in Q1 2015 on Facebook. This aligns to Instagram’s position as a premium, large-format ad type. These ads occupy the entire app screen, and are designed to be highly engaging to consumers.
Instagram has launched advertising in 6 markets including US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Australia. Our early advertising index shows a global CPM of $6.29 (USD). While this is a very early indicator (and about 90% higher than Facebook’s overall global CPM in Q1), it does point to a brand’s value of Instagram as a premium channel to engage with customers. The CPC for these ads is is $0.42 which is only two cents higher than all Facebook ads.
Overall available ad impressions on Instagram is a lot lower than Facebook and carefully managed and tested by Instagram to continue an optimal user experience. However with 40% of all Instagram engagement being one way (i.e. consumers following brands), there is clearly an appetite from the Instagram audience to engage with high quality content.
We are very excited to be working with great brands and agencies around the world to kickstart advertising to the over 300 million Instagram users. According to a recent report from eMarketer, Instagram is expected to represent over 10% of Facebook’s global revenues by 2017, including 28% of all US mobile revenues.
For a deeper dive into Facebook advertising trends, check out our full benchmark report which covers Q1 and Q4 performance across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
