The Next Steps for Ads on Instagram: New Formats, Increased Relevance, Broader Availability

Originally published on Instagram Business.

# INSTAGRAM, INSTAGRAM FOR BUSINESS, INSTAGRAM ADS
Since we launched ads a year and a half ago, Instagram has become a powerful mobile platform for advertisers. We’ve expanded the business to eight countries and have seen many of the best marketers and agencies in the world embrace Instagram to achieve their branding objectives. We’ve worked hard to focus on building a quality experience for businesses and people alike, listening and learning from both our community and our partners. Today we’re announcing the steps we’ll take to make Instagram ads available to businesses of all types and sizes.
A year of progress
We have worked across brands, agencies and our community to design an advertising experience that feels native to the platform. And we’ve made our ad formats more impactful, from photo and video ads to carousel ads that allow brands to tell a deeper story and provide a link for people to learn more.
This has led to noteworthy results. Across more than 400 campaigns measured globally with Nielsen Brand Effect, ad recall from sponsored posts on Instagram was 2.8x higher than Nielsen’s norms for online advertising.
Now, as we look to build on this momentum, we’re focused on three key areas: Expanding ad offerings to include action-oriented formats, enabling more targeting capabilities, and making it easier for businesses large and small to buy ads on Instagram.
Empowering people and advertisers to do more
Advertisers want to drive business results across a variety of objectives — from awareness and message association to website visits and offline sales — and our ad formats will evolve to serve all those goals. This will not only help advertisers, but the community as well, as people will be able to learn about a product or service and then take action directly from an ad to sign up on a website, buy a product, or download an app. In the coming days we’ll begin testing some of these direct-response formats.
More relevance through enhanced targeting
People come to Instagram to follow their passions, from travel and fashion to cars and entertainment. They want to see ads that reflect the things they care about. Advertisers also want to target their messages in more effective ways and reach people not just because of their age, location and gender, but because of the people, places and things they love.
Later this year, we will continue to connect businesses to the right people through expanded targeting options. Working with Facebook, we will enable advertisers to reach people on Instagram based on demographics and interests, as well as information businesses have about their own customers. We will also improve the feedback mechanisms within Instagram to give people greater control and improve the relevance of the ads they see.
Powering businesses large and small
People want to connect with businesses of all sizes on Instagram, from their favorite local clothing stores and restaurants to the largest brands in the world. To give all businesses the opportunity to reach the right people, we are working to make Instagram advertising available through an Instagram Ads API and Facebook ad buying interfaces over the coming months
There are more than two million advertisers who actively use Facebook to market their business and we want to leverage the best of Facebook’s infrastructure for buying, managing and measuring the success of ads on Instagram. We will start by opening the Instagram Ads API to a select group of Facebook Marketing Partners and agencies, and we plan to expand globally throughout the year.
We’re excited to bring Instagram ads to more advertisers and to help support more objectives, which are capabilities that people and businesses have been asking for. Businesses are important members of our community and we look forward to learning what works together.