How to Lower the Price of Your Instagram Ad Campaign
So, you’re interested in advertising on Instagram, but the cost is what’s holding you back. Now, although we aren’t able to give you a concrete answer, we can give you a reference point. On average, the CPC, or cost-per-click, is anywhere between $0.50 to $1.00. However, even this reference point can jump up and down given how competitive the industry is that you’re in. If for instance, you’re in apparel, which is very competitive, you can expect to pay anywhere up to $3.00 for every click. If you’ve ever advertised on Facebook, then these prices probably seem much higher than that of Facebook. Although this is true, the reason for it is because Instagram has the highest engagement rate out of all the other social media platforms. As a result, you’ll see the highest ROI with it. That being said, there are so many other factors that impact that cost such as the age or gender that you’re targeting. This means that if you’re targeting 18 to 24-year-olds, for instance, you can expect to pay more as they’re one of the most valuable age groups with regards to Instagram marketing. Therefore, instead of focusing on Instagram advertising pricing, on the contrary, you just need to be sure that you take the steps necessary for lowering that cost.
How to Keep Your Instagram Advertising Pricing Low
If you weren’t aware, Instagram’s parent company is actually Facebook, so anything ad related actually goes through Facebook’s Ads Manager. That’s why, before you even begin, you need to link your Instagram profile to your Facebook business account. When you first start out advertising on Instagram, you should start with automatic bidding versus trying out all of the various manual bidding options. The thing is, you won’t even have any prior data that will let you know the average cost-per-result. As a result, you have a high chance of either over or under-bidding, thus resulting in poor campaign results. Therefore, only go with the manual option after having had a lot of experience that has given you plenty of data that you could analyze.
Another thing that you should do is optimize your ad campaigns for conversions. That’s the best thing that you can do in order to make sure that you that Facebook will auto-optimize your campaigns which results in you getting the outcome that you were looking for at a much lower price. In fact, their algorithms have improved immensely, therefore, Facebook is able to put the ads in front of the eyes of those who have the highest chance of converting. If, though, you end up optimizing your ad delivery for reach or brand Awareness, be sure that you set a frequency cap. This allows you to set a time interval at which the members of your target audience can see your Instagram ads. Therefore, if, for instance, you set the ad’s frequency cap to 3-5 days, you can ensure that they won’t get tired of seeing your ad too often.
However, apart from all of this, you should really make sure that you are creating quality ad content that is relevant to your target audience. The thing is, you will receive a relevancy score in order to rank the relevance of your ad on Instagram. The more relevant your ad is, the lower your cost is going to be. As a result, if you have a low relevance score then your ad will be more expensive. This score changes positively the more social media users start to react to your ad via interactions such as clicks and likes. If, however, users, for instance, hide your ad content, then your relevancy score will decrease. Therefore, ensure that your headlines, copy, graphics, and CTAs, or calls-to-action, are relevant to your target audience. The best way to figure out the elements that are the most relevant to your audience is via A/B testing on your Instagram ads. This means that you need to make two fairly similar ads that are only really different in one aspect. Afterward, monitor the outcome to figure out which type of ad does better.
Yet another way to decrease your cost is by enhancing your targeting. The broader your audience is, you target more people that don’t have a high chance of converting. Therefore, you want to make sure that you are targeting only those who would find your ad relevant to them in some shape or form. However, you can accomplish this easily thanks to Facebook’s sophisticated targeting features. In fact, apart from being able to choose from pretty wide options such as age, gender, and location, you can layer your selections with more narrow options such as interests, connections, and behaviors.
That being said, one of the best ways not to waste your money is to make sure that you don’t neglect to track how your ad is doing after it’s gone live. Although the Ads Manager has an analytics feature, it’s only sufficient for a few things. Therefore, many companies use solutions such as our own in order to track everything that happens above and beyond Instagram.
TEA
Our solution, threat and engagement analytics, works to identify and eliminate any threats such as bots as well as analyze user engagement in order to uncover any obstacles or trends. This is made possible with the help of a number of tools.
Engagement trends analysis technology assists with identifying any of those user behavior trends and finding the actual conversion rate for your site. Remarketing segmentation tools let users target actual potential customers with relevant ads. Our campaign management tools let users track their marketing campaigns. This gives you insight into actual visitor activity in areas like visitor bounce rate and the time spent on your site. In addition, both our automated click fraud protection and engagement fraud protection make sure that all of the gathered engagement data is related to actual visitors instead of human-like bots.
If you’d like to learn more, watch our free webinar on our site.