Instagram Ads Not Working? Check if you are making these 3 mistakes.

November 27, 2020
Blog, Social Media Marketing

Instagram Ads Formula. 3 things impacting your performance?

Instagram Ads are managed through Facebook Ads Manager

Instagram is placed within the Facebook Ads Manager for all the ad targeting objectives. Advertising on Instagram is not allowed as a stand-alone in all ad objectives.

When you create Instagram sponsored ads within the ad sets, the Facebook ad systems derive the Total Value for each of your installed sponsored ads. It predicts if people are likely to engage with your ad content and its relevancy. If it is more relevant, higher chance your ads will perform better. So what’s the formula?

Formula:

[Advertiser Bid] x [Estimated Action Rates] + [User Value] = Total Value

Estimated action rates

Each ad has an optimization event, often an action you want a person to take like clicking on a website or installing an app. Estimated action rates represent how likely a given person is going to take action on your ads. This is based on the user’s past ad engagement behavior and advertisers’ past ad performance. Based on this Facebook ranks your ads X by your bid.

Ad quality

We represent how interested we think a person will be in seeing your ad with measures of its overall quality and specific relevance. For example, if your ad has gotten lots of negative feedback, that can decrease its total value. Or, if the person has a history of being interested in what you’re advertising, that can increase its total value.

User value captures things like ad quality, expected positive and expected negative engagement from the people in your target audience and post-click experience.

Relevance score

Your ad is assigned a relevance score; this estimates how well your ad is resonating with the people you want to reach. The higher your ad’s relevance score, the better it’s considered to be performing. The score ranges from 1 to 10, where a 1 indicates low relevance and 10 indicates high relevance. A relevance score for an ad is shown after your ad receives more than 500 impressions.

Ad relevance scores are based on:

How well your ad is performing
Positive feedback (for example app installs, clicks, video views) we expect from people who see your ad
Negative feedback (for example Someone clicks “I don’t want to see this” on your ad)

If ads link to web pages with poor user experience will likely carry low user value. But what makes a poor user experience?

2. Slow load time

Understand that more than 90% of Instagram advertising and Facebook ads traffic is coming through mobile devices. Speed is super important with good ease of use if you are sending traffic to a page. Use cloud-flare CDN to boost speed and have a minimalistic design.

Image courtesy – Cartoon Stock

3. Poor content experiences

Landing Page Traffic –

Don’t:

Direct sponsored ads to landing pages with minimal original content, low-quality content, or content that is difficult to access.
Distract from your landing page’s original content with excessive embedded or pop-up ads.
Bait people into clicking on ads by using overly cropped ad images or shocking or sexual ad copy.
Attempt to monetize Facebook ad views. For example, Facebook ads shouldn’t link to a destination page that requires people to click through other ads to access the site’s content.
Use low-quality advertisements or shocking or sexually graphic ad imagery.

Do:

Present content in a clear way that’s easy to navigate.
Ensure the content on your landing page is relevant to your ad. Directing people to irrelevant content or an unexpected landing page can create a confusing and negative experience.
Clearly connect the branding in your ad with that of your landing page.

Prohibited Content

Your ad likely won’t be approved if the landing page contains products or services that are prohibited by our Advertising Policies, or shows ads that don’t apply to those same policies. This also includes misleading ad positionings, such as overly sensationalized headlines, and leading people to landing pages that contain minimal original content and a majority of unrelated or low-quality ad content. The landing page should also include a minimal number of ads, pop-ups, and content blockers.

Web of Trust

The landing page linked to your ad must not have been negatively flagged by Web of Trust, a website review service that has no affiliation with Facebook. You can learn more about your site’s rating here.

Also, your landing page must not initiate a download or require an additional program or application to access the content or require people to click through multiple ads to access the page’s content.

Error Pages

Your landing page must function in all browsers and can’t lead people to a site that is under construction or an “error page.” You can check this by confirming that any tracking URL properly redirects to your desired landing page.

Geographic IP Address Restriction

All app ads are reviewed from a variety of international locations, so if you’re directing people to a website that’s restricted to people in certain regions, your ad may not be approved.

Facebook Destinations

You can use a Facebook page as your ad’s landing page, such as your business Page or a Group. But you can’t direct people to the Facebook homepage (www.facebook.com).

If you direct people to your Page, we’ll review the Page’s content to make sure it follows our content guidelines. If you direct people to a Group, it has to be an open and public group —it can’t be a Closed or Secret Group.

Learn about Instagram advertising and its features