Instagram ads are a great way to reach new users who might be interested in your content. They can appear in Stories, your Explore page, and in your Feed. But have you wondered how you can reach a specific portion of Instagram users using your ads? What kind of targeting options are available on Instagram, anyway?
In this post, we’ll go over the Instagram ad targeting options, how you can choose them, and which ones we recommend you look into.
Instagram Ad Targeting Options: Long Story Short
You remember how Facebook acquired Instagram, right? Well, since around that time, Facebook and Instagram have started to use the same ad targeting options. This basically means that you can expect to use the same options across platforms and that it’s even possible to have the same type of ad on both Facebook and Instagram.
So which targeting options are available?
Firstly, you have demographics. This includes users’ age, gender, location, and language. These are relatively stable and easy enough to find out with either Instagram Insights or a tool like Sotrender.
Follower demographics in Sotrender
So which groups would you target in your ads based on insights like this? Based on this graph alone, you might conclude that your ad would do well with women and men between 25 and 34 years old. This would allow you to reach new users that are already similar to your followers.
As for interests, these categories can really make a difference. Some of the categories you’ll find in the interests section include photography, science, travel, and entertainment. There are other categories that are even more narrow than that, but which one you go for really depends on the type of audience you want to attract. Besides demographics, we highly recommend targeting users based on interests. Remember, not everyone who fits your followers’ demographics is a guaranteed new customer. However, those who actually are interested in your product categories might be!
Behaviors as a category can be a bit tricky, though. This category includes things like a person’s job title, whether they have made a purchase recently, what kind of buyer profile do they fit, and so on. This matters when you want to reach users who might work in a specific field or if you want to reach people who you can be sure fit a specific buyer profile. Instead of hoping that they’ve previously made a purchase over Instagram simply because they are interested in “shopping” or “e-commerce”, you’ll reach the users who actually performed this type of activity.
You can also target your Instagram ads to a custom audience or Lookalike Audience. It’s really up to you to decide what could fit your needs best. In case you’re unsure of it all, you might want to hire a freelancer or agency to manage your Instagram ads for you for some time. You can learn from them and eventually, learn how to use the targeting options to set your own ads. Check out our reading below for more details!
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