Christmas came early this year... (23)
nice
wow! so cool. would like to hear what you think of this tool after using it.
Initial results compared to facebook are: cheaper clicks, terrible conversion rate. I'm paying ~$0.10 per website click and converting around 7%. Had a couple others perform worse and killed them quick. On facebook a similar campaign would cost ~$0.25 per website click but convert at 40-55%.
Got another dozen campaigns awaiting approval. I'll keep you guys posted.
Edit: Gonna be waiting awhile. They're manually approving every single ad at the moment.
It's cool!
OK, prices have steadily dropped over the course of the day as fb optimizes. We're now at 4 cents per website click. Conversion rate is up a bit at 7.7%. Optimizing for website conversions isn't available yet. All in all it's now out performing facebook from a cost perspective, despite the dismal CVR. Performance for us on the back end is similar to what we see from facebook newsfeed ads so the people who do convert are good quality leads. We're firmly in the green on the first couple hundred bucks of spend (~45% ROI).
Still just the one campaign going, rest are still under review (seeing 2-6 clicks from facebook on each ad). Guess we'll have to see what happens with the rest tomorrow. I'm pretty confident The click prices will get even lower.
Nice, thanks!
How did you get so early access to Instagram ads? Just a luck or networking?
Originally Posted by datauser
Can you give us an insight on how it's working? The targeting features are the same as facebook? Are you getting nice results?
Originally Posted by dpmarketing
So far it's just the one campaign I talked about above. I'm launching a bunch of new campaigns right now. The review process is extremely slow. About 1/3rd of my ads got disapproved without any reason given. My rep reached out to policy and all they said was "low quality". It's funny because I got identical ads in the same adset approved in a lot of cases. I'm waiting on a more detailed response from them.
That one adset above has been fairly volatile. I don't think the algorithm is as sophisticated as the fb one yet. The average cpc started out at 6 cents, went up to 10, down to 4, and back up to 6 yesterday on a $500 dollar spend. It averaged out to 5 cents. So far today it's at 14 cents on $135 in spend.
I should have much more detailed info later today and after running through the weekend. It'll be interesting to see what happens when we've got our lander optimized and open the spend up to something like 10k a day next week.
Edit - Over all so far we've broken even on $635 of spend, which is great for one campaign that was basically copy/pasted from facebook. On facebook in the U.S., breaking even on the ty page is an incredible result for us.
Hey guys, sorry I didn't update here or reply to PMs all weekend. I've been super busy lately.
In short, the conversion rates we are seeing from instagram are terrible. We're losing our shirts overall. About -60%. I have our team looking in to whether our LPs are functioning properly in the instagram in-app browser. I have a feeling our form isn't displaying properly or a button is tough to tap or something.
On the plus side, the traffic is pretty cheap, I'm sure it will make a lot of people a lot of money here once they open it up. I think it'll just take more testing and optimization then most of us had hoped.
I appreciate your thorough update @cptncrnch! Out of curiosity, may I ask what niche you are promoting? Maybe I missed it?
Originally Posted by affiliaxehannah
What I can say is that we are driving people to our own signup page and backing them out with a thank you page offer, then monetizing the leads over the long term. What we do also has a super broad appeal so we're used to seeing really high conversion rates. We typically aim to break even on the ty page at as high a volume as we can. This usually means leads in the $0.50-$1.50 range and between 30% and 60% CVR depending on the demo.
Sorry I can't reveal more.
Also, I'm seeing a drastic difference in Android and IOS conversion rates after digging through the data a bit. On facebook we see literally no difference in performance between the two so we keep them grouped together for simplicity's sake. We're running up to 3 dozen accounts at a time after all.......
On instagram I'm seeing Android convert at 3x the rate of IOS. Guess it's time to break em up.
Originally Posted by cptncrnch
Been getting a ton of ads in the last few days on IG - bet that's you 
Big white hat brands so far.
I doubt many people here have seen my ads yet. I'm competing with those big white hat brands. In the eyes of the reviewers my ads are "low quality" and a good 90-95% of them have been disapproved. I keep toning them down and resubmitting and they keep disapproving. The ads I do have running are on pretty low budgets because of the lack of ROI.
Just resubmitted another 15 campaigns. Now for the 12 hour + wait....... I wish policy would just respond to my rep and give a straight answer.
Edit - Fun Fact, until very recently Kevin Systrom (founder and CEO of instagram) was personally reviewing every ad campaign before setting them live. These were minimum $200k IOs on a flat $20 cpm and no out clause but that shoud show you just how serious they are about having "high quality" ads on instagram.
Update: Bahhhhh, Humbug!
I've submitted well over 2000 ads now and maybe 2 dozen got approved, which was on the first day. They never give a reason for disapproval in ads manager; the area where the reason would be is just a blank red rectangle. All they told my rep at first was "low quality". He pressed them for more info and a week later they came back and said some of my images were letterboxed and that's why they were disapproved. Those were the ads from day one (about a dozen ads). The other 2000 ads have been progressively getting more and more tame. I systematically stripped away every trick I have learned from facebook until nothing was left that could even remotely be considered against policy in any way shape or form. My ads are now basically getting auto-disapproved and I've given up trying until policy gets back to me with detailed reasons for disapproval.
My last batch of ads had 0% text in the images, no letterboxing, no borders and no arrows. The text had every trick I know taken out and the two sentences I wrote had 100% proper spelling structure and grammar - no symbols, no improper capitalization, no exclamation points even. The text explained exactly what they were going to see on the landing page.
/rant
The biggest thing I've learned is that instagram's in app browser doesn't work. On android pages open in your default browser (chrome, android browser, dolphin, etc.) without issue. On IOS a dialog pops up that says, "Open Safari?" with yes and no buttons. Clearly a huge percentage of people on IOS are choosing not to follow through to my landing page, which would explain the drastic drop in CVR vs android. Unfortunately I never got a single android only ad approved so I never got to cash in on this info. It's unfortunate because the traffic volume is split about 70/30 in IOS's favor.
Hopefully I hear back from policy sometime in the next couple days with more detail.
Edit - just did a little back of the napkin math and figured out IOS was -75% and Android was +25%. That on a few ads that I likely would have killed if I got anything else approved. It's too bad most of my money went to IOS traffic 
Awesome article! Can you share some more detailed stats? Why do you think it is instagram is converting four times worse than FB? How's the CTR compared to FB?
My best ad had a CTR of 4.5%. This is only counting website clicks. Using facbook's definition of a click in the newsfeed my CTR would have been 9.8%. On facebook a similar ad in the same demo would get about 2/3rds these CTRs for me, but the CPM would be 4-10X as high. I'm averaging out to around a $2 CPM on instagram and see anywhere between $7.50-$20 CPM on the facebook mobile newsfeed.
As far as CVR is concerned, here are my thoughts:
1 - IOS is messed up right now. It converts at about 5% while android gets around 17.5% for me. This averages out to 7-8% given the split in traffic volume. The android CVR isn't actually TOO far off the bottom end of my fb CVR (30%)
2 - I think I'm getting a ton of accidental clicks. People on Instagram are definitely not used to clicking links and sure as hell aren't used to clicking images and being taken anywhere, let alone off site.
3 - The feedback from people about Instagram ads has been overwhelmingly negative. I'm used to seeing comments on facebook along the lines of "don't bother", "it's a scam", "I never got anything", etc. On instagram I'm seeing comments like this: "Get this shit out of my feed!", "Keep Instagram ad free!", "Go to hell Instagram, now everything is ruined here", "R.I.P Insta". And then there was this gem....... This person commented on the same ad about 20 times in a row...... "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS", "FUCK OFF ADS"...... we deleted those ones.
So, adding all this up I think instagram will perform a lot better once people get used to seeing ads in their feeds and instagram makes a few tweaks to what the ad units look like and how they behave. Of course the cost will rise too but I feel optimistic it will outperform facebook for me in a dollars in/dollars out sense, which is all that matters at the end of the day.
+1 for bad CR in IG. Seems like people want to like the picture with double click - but they are sent to our offers Thats why the CR is bad, they re not interested in offer, they are interested in "liking" our banners, lol. As for traffic - it's cheap, on low budgets - super cheap, but when you up your budget - clicks become more expensive, similar to FB behavior.
These in app browsers stuff is getting the better of me. Especially iOS can be a nightmare. It feels like dealing with IE6 all over again
Is this in BETA mode? I'm not sure i'm seeing it yet.
Yes, it's in Beta. You're not missing much lol. It's like they bred the two strictest facebook reviewers and inbred their offspring for ten generations.
Finally got some feedback on why my ads keep getting disapproved besides "low quality". Apparently my ads " do not convey a story or inspire emotion". SMH
Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Facebook & Instagram