It’s that time of the year again folks! That’s right, in barely a blink the year has whizzed right past us and we’re nearly at Christmas.

The fast-approaching shopping bonanza is manna from heaven for most retailers, who can now take advantage of some new Instagram ad options.

Expanding ads in Explore home and profile feed?

Brands can now display ads in the Explore feed and Instagram is testing the placement of ads in profile feeds.

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“The Explore tab will now feature ads to reach people in the earliest stages of discovering new content they care about. We are also beginning to test ads in profile feed for non-teen, public profiles, which is the feed experience that people can scroll through after visiting another account’s profile and tapping on a post.”

It’s unclear how prominently the ads will feature – although an example of an Explore ad has it taking up at least three times as much space as the other content.

More exposure, irate customers?

These changes may not be entirely popular with users, who don’t want to see a stream of ads on every surface they interact with.

Placing ads in Explore should increase the amount of organic exposure each one is subjected to, which will hopefully lead to more eyes on your adverts and more leads for you to convert. But then again, nothing can be taken for granted.

For businesses, profile ads should be an easy way to repurpose some existing assets to reach your audience in new places all while “giving people the same personalised ad experience they enjoy in their main Instagram feed,” says Instagram.

Insta will also be running a monetisation test to see if creators can earn extra income from displaying ads in their feeds. A program like this may be exciting for brands, who could utalise existing partnerships to place adverts in high-traffic areas of Instagram.

AI-powered multi-advertiser ads?

Multi-advertiser ads are also being tested at the moment.

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“Multi-advertiser ads allow businesses to be discovered by people who are in a shopping mindset and have recently engaged with relevant business content in feed.”

When a person engages with an ad, a multi-advertiser ads kicks into gear and shows them more ads from other businesses that may be of interest. Marketers don’t have to do anything here as the recommendations are all powered by AI.

That means your brand could be shown to interested users who have previously scrolled through a competitor’s offering or may be interested in purchasing your product to complement one they already own.

According to Insta, this format is more efficient in terms of conversions per dollar spent. Insta conducted a large, back-end study measuring incremental effects with nearly 500,000 advertisers in Q3 2022. 

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“Results showed that adding multi-advertiser contextual ads to existing Instagram feed ads campaigns outperformed running campaigns for the purchase outcome in the overall Meta aAds ecosystem without multi-advertiser ads. These results are statistically significant at 90% and included campaigns for all eligible optimisations (including offsite conversions and link clicks) for Android and iOS opt-in users.”

Easy to toggle on or off

You can turn on multi-advertiser ads with the following four steps:

• Create an Instagram ad in Ads Manager.
• At the placements section, select Instagram feed in either manual placements or Advantage+ placements.
• In the formats section, click the checkbox for multi-advertiser ads.
• Once setup is finished, hit publish.

Now, if you want to go the other way and turn them off, this is how you do it:

• After you’ve created your ad, go to the formats section.
• Unselect the checkbox for multi-advertiser ads.

New Reels update

Instagram has also announced a music optimisation feature for Reels ads.

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“We are rolling out free, high-quality songs from our Meta Sound Collection library that can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels.”

Brands can use this to manually select a royalty-free song from the library, or you can let Insta automatically pick the best one for your ad based on the content.

AR ads near you soon

AR Ads will be available in Feed and Stories and offer marketers the chance to play with an immersive augmented reality ad experience.

The feature will let people interact with their surroundings, which could open up a whole new world for clever advertisers.