Instagrowth: The History of Advertising on Instagram

If you are into internet advertising, you know two of the biggest platforms that you must advertise on are Facebook and Instagram. With constant and consistent growth from the two platforms competition is fierce and users quickly disregard ads. In order to keep advertisers spending money and users noticing ads, Facebook/Instagram must innovate and bring a fresh perspective to the table.

To date, Facebook has 1.449 billion daily active users and Instagram just hit 1 billion daily active users

(Image courtesy of TechCrunch)

(Image courtesy of TechCrunch)

Advertising on Instagram seems to be the favored project when it comes to offering advertisers new ways to pitch their product to potential customers. With the addition of product tagging, you are able to tag products from your Facebook catalog on the images of your Instagram posts.

(Image courtesy of TechCrunch)

Next, it was the addition of ads in Instagram Stories, which were not great when they launched. After testing Instagram Stories and not seeing any decent results, a lot of advertisers were about to write them off completely. Then, Facebook quietly reworked Instagram Stories and turned that placement around. They gave advertisers the ability to turn single image ads into IG Stories with an authentic look and feel to the ad.

And with that rework, the results started speaking for themselves by matching the cost and quality of the Facebook News Feed placement.

With all of this being said, that brings me to today, where I noticed an interesting notification that I have not seen previously. I tried to replicate the notification on another ad account and it would not show. This fits Facebooks typical process of releasing new features, which is, certain people and certain ad accounts get the feature as it slowly rolls out. What was the feature?

The ability to crop videos to a different aspect ratio for different placements. If you have a 16:9 aspect ratio video that works with the Facebook news feed placement you can now crop the video to “vertical video” or square for mobile and Instagram placements. After a few moments of searching, I was able to find the option and it looked like this:

With the special attention to make videos easily available to be run on Facebook mobile and Instagram, I think an IGTV placement could be released sooner than most expect. Still, it’s always exciting to see new techniques for advertising on Instagram.