INSTAGRAM STORIES

Today, more than 800 million Instagram accounts worldwide are active every single month and over 500 million accounts are active every day. Instagrammers are also loving the stories format. Today, more than 300 million accounts use Instagram Stories every day.

Instagram Stories

People can give personality to photos and videos with filters, text overlay, drawing tools, and other Instagram apps.

• Add colorful text, emojis, GIFs, and stickers to photos and videos in your story.
• Choose from different brush styles and colors to draw on your photos or videos.
• Apply creative filters to your story.
• Use live video, Boomerang, superzoom, rewind, or stop-motion to create your story.

An Instagram Story will disappear 24 hours after it has been posted. Stories you’ve posted can be accessed by clicking on your profile photo in your profile, at the top of your Feed, or within your Feed next to posts you’ve shared. To close out the stories viewer, swipe down on your screen to exit. Unlike regular posts, you cannot receive likes or public comments on stories, but you can comment on someone’s story by sending them a private message on Instagram Direct. Businesses can create ads in Instagram Stories. Advertisers can post photos or videos that are up to 15 seconds and will have a sponsored label below the handle. The photo or video will appear as a full-screen story between people’s stories as they’re viewing on the Instagram app. Ads in stories have the same functionalities as organic stories, so you can interact with it just as you would any other story. Unlike organic stories, ads in Instagram Stories do not disappear after 24 hours and run the same way as feed ads. Ads in Instagram Stories are great for showcasing limited-time opportunities (e.g. seasonal, sales), product inspiration, product launches, exclusive experiences, promotions, how-tos, behind the scenes, and more. With deep-linking in Instagram Stories, advertisers can engage users on the immersive stories interface, and seamlessly send users to the products and content that are most relevant to them. App advertisers can use deep links to achieve their traffic, conversion, and install objectives. Ads in stories also use the same targeting and measurement tools as Facebook and Instagram. For example, you can retarget audiences who have seen your ad between stories with another ad on Facebook or Instagram. You can also do the reverse — create ads in stories that are targeted to people who have seen your Facebook or Instagram feed ads.

Here are some additional ideas for how advertisers can use stories:

• Behind-the-scenes footage
• Lookbook
• Product promotions
• Limited-time sales
• Interactive tours
• Teasers
• How-tos (demonstrations or recipes)
• Interviews
• Real-time news
• Available objectives: Reach, Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, Video Views, Traffic, Conversions, and App Installs objective
• Call-to-Action options: Apply Now, Book Now, Call Now, Contact Us, Download, Get Directions, Learn More, Send Message, Request Time, Save, See Menu, Shop Now, Sign Up, Watch More

If you want to extend your Facebook or Instagram feed campaign to stories, you can run automatic placements. Once you click the Instagram Stories box, you can either upload full screen creative or allow our tools to automatically create a fullscreen stories ad from your already-existing feed ad.

Multiple scenes work better

We’ve found that top-performing stories ads had shorter scenes—on average, 2.8 seconds per scene compared to 4.1 seconds for lower performing ads.  If you’re building a complex story, breaking it out into quick, multiple scenes can lead to a more effective campaign. 60% of video Stories are viewed with sound on.  Enhance and add richness to your story by including sound. The end card is an opportunity to reinforce the brand, product, or messaging before the viewer moves on. While we recommend a strong brand and product presence early and often, stories ads that also include end cards perform better among audiences who see the ad in its entirety. Our Instagram Partners (IGP) combines expertise and technology to make getting great results on Instagram simple. From buying ads for Instagram to sourcing and delivering creative at scale, Instagram Partners have proven expertise that can help you. There are more than 40 partners that you can work with to buy Instagram ads and to support you with your specific needs. To learn more about Instagram Partners, please visit instagrampartners.com.

An individual organic story using the Instagram Insights tool:

• Impressions – Total number of times your story was seen
• Reach – Number of unique accounts who saw your story
• Replies – Number of times people send messages through the Send Message option on your story
• Exits – The number of times someone swiped from one of your stories to someone else’s story or returned to their Feed

Note: Insights on stories are only available for media created during the past 14 days.

1. Set your objective
2. Lead Generation: To collect lead information, like email addresses, from people interested in your business
3. Traffic: To increase the number of visits to your website or get more people to use your app
4. Store Visits: To promote multiple business locations to people who are nearby
5. App Installs: To send people to an app store where they can download your app
6. Messages: For businesses that want to open conversations with customers at scale.
7. Define the audience, placement, budget, schedule, and delivery optimizations for your campaign
8. Brand Awareness: To show your video ad to people within your target audience who are most likely to remember it.
9. Reach: To show your video ad to as many people as possible.
10. Video Views: To show your video ad to the people within your target audience who are most likely to watch it.
11. Send people to a website, app, or Messenger conversation, choose the Traffic objective. If you want to show your ad to the maximum number of people, choose Reach.
12. Build and preview your ad

Optimization for ad delivery happens at the ad-set level within the “Budget & Schedule” section of campaign creation. When you make your “Optimization for Ad Delivery” choice for an ad set, you’re telling us to get you as many/much of that result as efficiently as possible. You can use these settings to further fine tune your objective. Your options here will vary depending on the objective you set at the campaign level. If you choose the Brand Awareness objective, you can run your video ad in the following placements: In Facebook, you can use Feeds, Instant Articles, In-Stream Videos, and Suggested Videos to help with your videos. Instagram videos appear in the feed and stories.