Instagram Australia has announced a new range of ad surfaces and creative tools to give brands an easier way to create, tell their story, and grow their business ranging from music in Reels to ads on the Explore page.
The photo- and video-sharing app says that the new changes will offer “even more” opportunities for in-platform brand discoverability whilst not appearing incongruous with the rest of a user’s feed.
The new changes start with Music optimisation for Reels ads. Instagram is rolling out free, high-quality songs from the Meta Sound Collection library that can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels. Businesses can manually select a song from the library or allow the app to automatically select the best music for an ad based on its content.
Ads are also coming to Explore home and profile feed. Explore home, the grid that people see when they first arrive on the Explore tab, will now feature ads to reach people in the earliest stages of discovering new content they care about.
Adverts in the profile feed are currently in testing for non-teen public profiles, the feed experience people can scroll through after visiting another account’s profile and tapping on a post.
Ads in profile feed give advertisers the opportunity to expand their reach easily using existing feed assets, while giving people the same personalised ad experience they enjoy in their main Instagram feed. The company is also testing a monetisation opportunity that allows creators to earn extra income from ads displayed in the profile feeds.
New AI-powered multi-advertiser ads allow businesses to be discovered by shoppers who are ready to buy and have recently engaged with relevant content in their feed.
When a person expresses commercial intent by engaging with an ad, Instagram will deliver more ads from other businesses that may be of interest, powered by machine learning. Through a large-scale back-end study, Instagram observed that adding multi-advertiser ads to ad campaigns drove improved efficiency in incremental conversions per dollar spent.
Instagram recently launched an open beta of Augmented Reality (AR) ads, which are available in both feed and Stories. Through the AR experience, powered by Spark AR, brands can encourage people to interact with the effect through their surroundings.
“We are really excited to announce these new features and ad formats,” said Will Easton, managing director, Meta Australia and New Zealand.
“We’re continuously looking at new innovative, unique, and powerful ways to help advertisers and brands get discovered and reach new audiences across the app. These new ad formats and tools aim to
help brands tell their own story, reach new and existing customers, whilst driving meaningful growth across their businesses.”
