Instagram is testing out four new
advertising options to help brands reach more customers this holiday season, including music optimization for Reels ads, new ads in Explore, multi-advertiser ads, and augmented reality (AR) ads.
With the rise of TikTok, the popular photo-sharing app has been moving in the direction of short-form video, with Reels
delivering over $1 billion in revenue over the past year. “Reels ads present a new opportunity for reaching new customers,” the company stated in a recent blog post.
The rollout of free songs from the Meta Sound Collection library can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels. Now, businesses will be able to manually select a song from the
library, or allow the app to select a song for an ad based on the ad’s content.
Instagram will also
include ads in Explore -- the grid users see when they first arrive on the Explore tab -- “to reach people in the earliest stages of discovering new content they care about.”
Users will also begin to see ads being tested in profile feeds for non-teen, public profiles. Instagram said these ads will “give advertisers the opportunity to
expand their reach easily using existing feed assets.”
As part of this test, the company will
experiment with a new creator-monetization opportunity, giving eligible U.S. creators the option to earn extra income from ads displayed in their profile feeds.
Instagram is
also testing what it calls “multi-advertiser ads” -- ads that suggest additional ads for relevant businesses in users’ feeds.
For example, after users hit the “Shop
Now” link below an ad for Ray-Ban and return to their feed, they will be shown a carousel of other related products they can easily decide to “Shop Now.”
“Through a large-scale back end study, we observed that adding multi-advertiser ads to ad campaigns drove improved efficiency in
incremental conversions per dollar spent,” Instagram said.
Finally, Instagram recently launched an open beta
of AR ads available both in users’ feeds and Stories. Powered by Spark AR, brands can now encourage people to interact with the effect through their surroundings