Instagram
Advertising
Insights

Overview

BACKGROUND

A lot of professional users today on IG pay to promote a piece of content as an advertisement. After this they often access Ad Insights page to see how that content is performing.

AUdience

Advertisers (Creators & Businesses) who currently advertise on Instagram. They could be advertising any or all the following type of content: Posts, Stories, Reels

Goal

Helping advertisers understand and improve their ad outcomes using data driven decisions.

Background on Ads

Professional users who run ads on Instagram can be both businesses and creators. The main goal for these users is sometimes to sell more product and services or sometimes just to increase the reach of their brand as a creator or their business. This can be done by going into your profile and selecting the "Boost" call to action.

Ad Creation

Users go through a 4 step flow where they select the Ad goal, Audience they want to target and the budget and duration of the ad.

Ad display

An ad can be placed on when a user is looking at organic reels or stories and within the IG feed and explore tab.

How creators see ad performance today

Once the ad stops running, here's how the advertiser can check the performance of the ad. They generally look for how many people it reached and specially how many likes, comments and shares the ad received.

Problems

PROBLEM 1

Advertisers have to visit each Ad Insights page to see the performance of each ad and add up the data to see the total value ads provide. Some of them even take screenshots of each page and compare on an excel file.

PROBLEM 2

Advertisers are not able to understand why an ad is successful and what changes they should make to improve their future performance.

Summary of the problem space

Process

Specturm of Solutions

OPTION 1: Filters based approach

Introduced filters for the cost breakdown section and the user can choose to see the drill down information on the performance of different types of ads.

OPTION 2: Showing everything inline

In this option, I decided to display everything inline about the performance of each ad type. This way the user doesn’t have to do much and can easily go through the insights page by scrolling.

Release Plan

Here are all the different releases we made to solve the problems mentioned above

Click on any of them below and use the carousel to go through all of them

Notable REsults

  • By showing collective performance of ads, customers have a better sense of the value ads provide.

  • There was a sizable increase the monthly active advertisers and improve advertiser retention by a little.

  • This new surface will be scaled to show more recommendations to users to improve the health of their ads. This introduces a whole new surface that can help our ads business scale.

  • This is a feature that most of our competitors don’t have and gives IG an upper hand in the ads business.