As a visual work sharing company we’ve been excited to try out Instagram ads for some time. We’ve read the tea-leaves and configured our Facebook Business Manager and then, just like that on Friday, a new menu item appeared which allowed us to start creating Instagram ads. No fanfare, no notifications, just a very soft launch.
It felt like we spent all day setting up our Facebook/Instagram ad until everything lined up and our ad was waiting for approval with a daily limit of £10.
This morning I woke up to find my phone dead. Not a surprise since it’s a loyal iPhone 3Gs and the concept of battery is almost entirely theoretical at this stage. Still, I plugged it in and it buzzed constantly with Instagram notifications, so it’s clear that our ad went live sometime on Saturday night.
Here it is, in all its let’s-give-this-go-with-some-basic-copy glory:
At the time of writing we’ve had ~2,300 likes, about 10 very negative comments (why is this in my feed? GTFO, etc), and some decent traffic, which is why we advertised, after all.
Using the Facebook tools, I can see that we’ve reached ~80k people at the cost of £0.01/click and our ad has a Relevancy of 10, which seems unusually high.
But, I’m not sure if we’ll continue to advertise on Instagram but this has been an interesting experiment. Likes don’t count for much, while the negative comments make it clear people don’t want ads in their streams, and that’s very understandable.
As softly as Instagram have launched their ad network, it now feels like all that time and effort was spent on integrating with Facebook and warming up potential advertisers, without telling their community that this was coming, and giving them tools to make their voice heard.
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