I tested Instagram's native promotions, here's what I learned

TL;DR people on Instagram don't give a shit about you. In Q4 of 2019, Instagram rolled out native ad creation functionality that let's you create promotions of posts from right within the app. If you have a business account (i.e. you've converted your personal profile to a business profile) you'll notice a blue "promote" button at the bottom right hand corner of your posts;     Hitting that promote button will take you through the promotion creation wizard, which I will say is incredibly well built and easy to use. This post isn't about how to set up promotions (trust me, it's really simple) but instead I wanted to share some of the insights I gained from running a few tests. So I decided to give it a shot and run a promotion for a video about digital agencies I had recently uploaded.

The First Ad and Audience Test

Note: a somewhat fascinating discovery, the stats you see in the embedded version of the post (likes, views, comments, etc.) only reflect the pre-promotion numbers; if you click through to the actual post you'll see the new numbers, post promotion, which are much higher. The first post I promoted was this post about the 2 types of agencies: For this test I spent $30 over 6 days ($5/day) and let Instagram do the audience targeting for me via the "automatic" audience option. Here were the results:     Promotion cost: $30 Likes: 53 Cost/like: $0.56 Comments: 2 Cost/comment: $15.00 Saves: 2 Cost/save: $15.00 Impressions: 6,527 Cost/impression: $0.004 People reached: 4,674 Cost/person: $0.006 Profile visits: 52 Cost/visit: $0.57 Website visits(from profile): 2 Cost/visit: $15.00 New followers: 0 Cost/follower: N/A Instagram also provides some demographic insights about the audience that was reached by the promotion including gender, age, and geography. Here's what those looked like for this promotion:   Automatic audience gender split   Automatic audience age breakdown   Automatic audience top states  

What The Promotion Insights Actually Mean

The numbers are pretty confusing on the surface, but the promotion platform does go into some deeper explanation if you want it. So here's what each insight data point actually means: Promotion clicks: The number of clicks on links shared in your promotion. Follow: The number of accounts that started following you. Impressions: The total number of times your post was seen. People reached: The total number of people who saw your post.

The Results of the Automatic Audience

The way the automatic audience works is it weighs heavily on your existing follower-base and their key demographics, interests, and behaviors. So apparently most of my current followers on Instagram are men between 25 and 34. The centralization of the States in the U.S. is not surprising actually since these are the states with the biggest populations. Overall I was OK with the impression and even profile visit rate, but I had hoped to see more followers.

Testing a Custom Audience

So I ran a second test on the same ad, this time building a custom audience myself, and increasing the budget to $45 ($5/day over 9 days) Here's what the audience looked like:     and here were the results of this promotion:     Promotion cost: $45.00 Likes: 57 Cost/like: $0.78 Comments: 3 Cost/comment: $15.00 Saves: 2 Cost/save: $22.50 Impressions: 7,848 Cost/impression: $0.005 People reached: 5,960 Cost/person: $0.007 Profile visits: 91 Cost/visit: $0.49 Website visits (from profile): 3 Cost/visit: $15.00 New followers: 2 Cost/follower: $22.50 Overall the results were nothing too exciting, but I had also only spent $75.. so it's not that big of a deal.

The Second Set of Ad Tests

I realize that the common demographic on Instagram is probably younger, and not all that interested in "business style" content, so I decided to test a more consumable, common content style that I see on the platform (and something I personally love); cars. My goal again here was to acquire new followers, so I created a new custom audience just targeting people interested in high-end car brands, here it is:     I again focused on the United States, and left Age and Gender totally open to see what the results looked like. For this first test, I chose a post that I thought was more eye catching: For this promotion test I spent $25 over 5 days (at $5/day) and here were the results:     Promotion cost: $25.00 Likes: 921 Cost/like: $0.027 Comments: 2 Cost/comment: $12.50 Saves: 38 Cost/save: $0.65 Impressions: 10,212 Cost/impression: $0.002 People reached: 7,246 Cost/person: $0.003 Profile visits: 134 Cost/visit: $0.18 Website visits (from profile): 0 Cost/visit: N/A New followers: 4 Cost/follower: $6.25 Here's how the demographics for this audience and promotion ended up shaking out:         As suspected, the performance was much better for less budget, with the cost of likes, follows, and impressions all going down by more than half (an in some cases, an order of magnitude). This promotion also affirmed that the car audience on instagram is significantly scaled toward males, and that the most prevalent age group is actually 13-17 year olds. Coming out of this test, I had a hunch that the image I had selected did better because it could be considered "controversial," in that it pictured a Philadelphia police officer.

My 3rd Ad Promotion Test

I wanted to test if the presence of the police office did in fact have an impact on the reach and performance of the campaign, so I selected another car post, with ONLY cars in the picture, to promote to the exact same audience:

For this promotion I also decided to dial down the budget, to see what happened. I kept the daily spend the same (at $5/day) but only ran this test for 3 days, spending $15. Here were the results:     Promotion cost: $15.00 Likes: 1,072 Cost/like: $0.013 Comments: 1 Cost/comment: $15.00 Saves: 58 Cost/save: $0.25 Impressions: 13,005 Cost/impression: $0.001 People reached: 10,265 Cost/person: $0.001 Profile visits: 115 Cost/visit: $0.13 Website visits (from profile): 1 Cost/visit: $15.00 New followers: 3 Cost/follower: $5.00 Here's how the demographics for this audience and promotion ended up shaking out:         The performance from this promotion was near identical in terms of the breakdown between men and women and the large skew within the lowest age range, I was interested to see that California and Texas flipped in terms of performance.. apparently kids in California are more attracted to Police / controversial imagery than the kids in Texas :)

My 4th Ad Promotion Test

Sticking with the hypothesis that "controversial posts" perform better - which is how I'm describing my posts that feature police officers in them, I decided to select another post including an officer. This time I selected one where the officers patrol car actually has it's lights on; to see if this had any impact on performance. Here's the post I used for this promotion:

For this promotion I again spent $5/day, but for 5 days, for a total promotion cost of $25. I again used the exact same audience as the previous 2 tests. Here were the results:     Promotion cost: $25.00 Likes: 1,216 Cost/like: $0.02 Comments: 8 Cost/comment: $3.12 Saves: 69 Cost/save: $0.36 Impressions: 14,683 Cost/impression: $0.001 People reached: 11,465 Cost/person: $0.002 Profile visits: 219 Cost/visit: $0.11 Website visits (from profile): 3 Cost/visit: $8.33 New followers: 2 Cost/follower: $12.50 Here's how the demographics for this audience and promotion ended up working out:         Overall this the best performance of any promotion test so far, with all costs coming down and the post seeing considerably more engagement. Even the age range showed more reach in older age brackets, though still heavily skewed toward kids 13-18 years old.

My 5th Ad Promotion Test

Based on seeing a directional affirmation in the performance of the last promotion for this audience, I decided to run a second "non-controversial post" test to the audience to see if it performed similar to the first "all car" car post. In an attempt to limit the variables, I selected another "all car" post to see how it faired:

For this promotion, I again dialed down the test budget (like I had before) to $15, but keeping it again at $5/day. Here is how this promotion performed:     Promotion cost: $15.00 Likes: 860 Cost/like: $0.017 Comments: 2 Cost/comment: $7.50 Saves: 50 Cost/save: $0.30 Impressions: 9,842 Cost/impression: $0.001 People reached: 9,518 Cost/person: $0.001 Profile visits: 60 Cost/visit: $0.25 Website visits (from profile): 0 Cost/visit: N/A New followers: 0 Cost/follower: N/A Here's how the demographics ended up for this final promotion test:         Again, we see Texas back on top, and the huge skew in the age group back to the lowest (13-17 year olds). This final test also generated no new followers, but kept in line with the relative cost per like for this audience.

What I Learned

The biggest confirmation is that people on Instagram don't give a s#!t about you. It's a consumption platform, and people are there to be entertained and consume content; handing out likes like high fives. Comments and especially follows are a guarded commodity. Content that is eye-catching, and even potentially a bit controversial is going to outperform more bland stuff. So if you're designing a marketing strategy for this channel, make sure you are only posting highlights to maximize performance. Display performance (people reached and impressions) seem to correlate very closely with the population, at least in the United States, with geographies with significantly higher population density accounting for the majority of the performance. Build your own audiences versus using the platform's "automatic" targeting options. This may get significantly better in the future, but based on my tests so far the cost per result from custom audiences is about 1/5th. Also, you can expect that about 1% of the people you reach will actually engage with your content. Lastly, the major age group that is on the platform to consume your content is represented by people under 34 years of age, with teenagers being the vast majority -- at least this seems to represent who the platform is choosing to display posts amplified through the apps native promotion functionality. This is great news for businesses selling products to this demographic, where it's the parents paying for them, but if you're selling to post-college age folks (22+ years old) your targeting needs to be really dialed in not to waste budget on useless vanity metrics, i.e. likes. What's been your experience with Instagram's Ads so far? Have you tested out the native app promotions?