Less than 6 months ago, Instagram stories were launched. Quickly met with much criticism, not least for their resemblance to Instagram’s direct competitor Snapchat, they have nonetheless enjoyed considerable success. In fact, they now count over 150 million daily users, a number now equivalent to Snapchat’s users. It therefore seemed obvious that advertising should take hold of this new medium, and now it has. It’s worth noting that 70% of Instagram users follow a brand, but also that more than a third of the most viewed Stories are posted by brands. Instagram wants to keep up with this trend by offering Ads integrated into the News Feed.
After a test phase on some thirty brands (Nike, Netflix, Airbnb…) in the USA, ads for Instagram stories are now starting to target the app’s French users. Our Instagram ads agency has therefore taken an interest in this new form of advertising integrated into the user’s news feed, who simply has to browse his or her Instagram stories to discover the different ads between his or her contacts’ posts.
Formats available in Instagram stories
Two ad formats are possible, either a 5-second photo or a 15-second video. What’s more, the ads integrated into the stories can be swiped by the user like the posts of their contacts. For the time being, it is not possible to click on the photos or videos to open the advertiser’s site or redirect the user to a product sheet. However, this possibility should appear in the coming months, after the launch of Story Ads.
Story Ads also include a statistics section that shows ad view rates, as well as how long the ads have been swiped.
Last but not least, and even if the Story Ads proposed by Instagram are very similar to the ads already used on Snapchat, it’s important to know that advertisers will benefit here from all the data of Instagram and Facebook users. This would enable Story Ads to work with an elaborate and very powerful calculation tool. It’s on this point that Instagram seems to be effectively differentiating itself from Snapchat and bringing added value to its Story Ads.
If you want to go further on Instagram, find out how to grow your Instagram community.
