Instagram has 2 Billion monthly active users across globe and 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 25 and 34 years. (Statista)
Instagram has two million advertisers actively advertising on their platform according to Instagram.
To get started creating your first Instagram ad, log into your Facebook account, go over to your Facebook ads manager and start a new campaign.
What are Instagram ads?
Instagram ads are posts or Stories that a brand pays to promote to its users on their Instagram feeds. They look similar to regular Instagram posts, but it is promoted by a “Sponsored” label. These posts can also include a call-to-action button to drive traffic or conversions to their website.
How to create Instagram ads?
Instagram ads can be created by using Facebook ads manager after it got acquired by Facebook in 2013.
If you haven’t created a Facebook business page, please create one now to run your Instagram ads.
Instagram how to advertise in 2025?
Follow the below steps to advertise on Instagram.
1. Choose your ad objective
Once you create a new campaign, the first step in creating Instagram ads is to choosing the objective behind your ad.
The objectives of the Instagram ads are segregated into three different categories – Awareness, Engagement, Lead generation and Conversion.
The ad types which are available to choose from are:
- Brand awareness: This goal is Ideal for newly launched brands who would like to create awareness about their brand. It can also be performed for old brands as well.
- Reach: This goal is to boost your ads to reach wider audience.
- Traffic: This goal is to direct users to visit a website, landing page or app.
- Engagement: This goal is to encourage users to like, comment or share your ad, it’s best fit for creating engagement on your posts.
- App downloads: This goal is to increase the download of your apps from the play store.
- Video views: This goal is to boost the views of your videos.
- Lead generation: This goal is to generate leads to your business by showing them relevant ads.
- Messages: This goal is to encourage your target audience to interact with your brand to answer product questions, provide support or complete purchases.
- Conversions: This goal is to get direct sales actions on your ads, such as adding payment info or making a purchase. Ideal for increasing sales.
- Catalogue sales: This goal is for brands to show products from their product catalogue (you need to set up your catalogue first to use this format),
- Store traffic: This goal is for brands promoting multiple business locations to drive more in-store visits.
2. Name your Instagram ad campaign
After choosing your ad objective, you need to name your campaign for future reference. This is the best way to keep track of your ads within the Instagram ads manager, so we highly recommend you to name your campaign with intention.
3. Select your ad placements
You can select where would you like to place your ads, whether you want to place it only on Instagram Platform or on Facebook, or on Audience network or on Messenger. Since you are advertising on Instagram please choose Instagram.
4. Define your Target audience
Define your target audience from the following audience categories in the ads manager:
- Location: Select your audience location based on your criteria like using postal codes and addresses for narrow targeting or by broad areas such as global regions or countries.
- Age: You can choose your specific age group to target (starting from age 13 to all the way to 65+).
- Gender: Specify which gender would you like to target, men or women for your ads.
- Detailed Targeting: Broken into three subcategories:
- Demographics let you include or exclude people based on life styles, employment and education.
- Interests select users based on their Interests (Pages liked, activities attended and related topics)
- Behaviours target user based on their behaviour like purchasing behaviours, activities involved and travel intentions.
- Languages: Select your users language to target.
- Connections: Choose users who already connected to your app, event or Page.
5. Determine your ad budget and schedule
You have two options to select between a daily budget and a lifetime budget. Daily budgets allow you to run your ads according to your daily budget, like how much money you would like spend each day (you can still select start and end date), while lifetime budgets will run for a specific duration of time.
If you choose a lifetime budget, you can also choose a specific duration for your ads to run. For instance, you want to run your ads only on weekdays or weekends.
6. Pick your Instagram ad format
The basic Instagram ad formats are:
- Photo ads: These include a single image, so you want to ensure it’s a perfect one.
- Carousel ads: Carousel ads allow users to horizontally scroll through multiple images or videos on their mobile device.
- Collection ads: These allow users the ability to purchase products directly from the ad.
- Video ads: These ads are video clips which can be from 3 seconds to 60 seconds long.
- Stories ads: The life time of stories ads is 24 hours. These ads can be photos or videos that show in between user Stories as people scroll through the Stories they follow.
Excellent, now you know how to advertise on Instagram.
Sangeet Shiv is a B2B Marketing and Sales Operations professional with hands-on experience across strategy, execution, and marketing automation. He’s passionate about using AI and emerging tech to drive smarter marketing and scalable growth.