Instagram announced that it is taking steps to make its ads available to businesses of all sizes.
The visual social media company is focusing on three key areas, including expanding ad offering to include action-oriented formats, enabling more targeting capabilities and making it easier for businesses of all sizes to buy ads on its social network. For starters, Instagram is beginning to test some direct-response ad formats that will help consumers learn more about a product or service by allowing them to take action directly from an ad, such as purchasing a product or downloading an app.
“Advertisers want to drive business results across a variety of objectives — from awareness and message association to website visits and offline sales — and our ad formats will evolve to serve all those goal,” said Instagram in its official announcement.
In addition to direct-response ad formats, Instagram is also working to help advertisers target their messages more effectively later this year. In fact, Instagram is working with Facebook to enable advertisers to reach people on its social network based on demographics, interests and other information. Moreover, Instagram is improving the feedback mechanisms within its social network to give users better control so they can improve the relevance of ads they see.
Lastly, Instagram is working to make its advertising available to businesses of all sizes through an Instagram Ads API and Facebook ad buying interfaces over the coming months.
“There are more than two million advertisers who actively use Facebook to market their business and we want to leverage the best of Facebook’s infrastructure for buying, managing and measuring the success of ads on Instagram. We will start by opening the Instagram Ads API to a select group of Facebook Marketing Partners and agencies, and we plan to expand globally throughout the year.”