The social media landscape is continually changing, and perfecting your paid advertising strategy for each channel can be challenging. Here are the top trends for Instagram in 2023 and how OnSpot’s suite of solutions can be a great fit to achieve your campaign goals.
OnSpot audiences include data points not offered by the major social networks including past location visit behavior, expanded demographic characteristics, and unique audience extensions that include household members, real-world friends, and lookalikes. These highly targeted audiences are custom tailored to your campaign needs, and can be published to the social platform of your choice for improved performance and response.
OnSpot’s detailed audience analytics inform your team on new opportunities and allow for data-driven decision making for your business. Audience behavior including location visitor trends and patterns, demographic personas, and how they are responding to your marketing efforts are difficult to measure in most social network advertising platforms, but OnSpot can provide those insights.
OnSpot’s attribution reporting provides tools that measure response to both brick-and-mortar locations and online to deliver multi-channel measurement of ROI on a social campaign. Social platform measurement tools are limited, leaving you without the insights stakeholders need to understand in-person and web visitor behavior outside of click-thrus in the social platform. Additionally, we can match sales back to the original audience exposed to the campaign for improved CPA analysis.
Instagram has now become the most popular social media platform for sharing photos and videos. Nearly 90% of users follow at least one business account, which leads to significant opportunities for brands on this channel to reach their ideal customer if they can find them.
Sponsored content has been seamlessly integrated into the main feed, stories, reels, and most recently into search results, providing marketers with multiple ways to serve visually appealing and engaging ads that convert. Below are some key trends to keep an eye on – and how OnSpot can support your Instagram strategy.
Trend: The Popularity of Instagram, Challenges with Ad Targeting, and Relevance
Instagram is one of the most widely downloaded apps, and with that comes billions of users – with new users joining all of the time. In fact, 13.15% of the world’s 3.8 billion active social media users log into Instagram on a daily basis. With the growing popularity of Instagram as an advertising platform, competition among businesses has intensified. This makes it more challenging to stand out and reach your target audience effectively.
While Instagram provides various targeting options, including a general geography and demographic characteristics such as gender, age, and interests, reaching the right audience with relevant content can be a challenge. Ensuring that your ads are seen by people who are genuinely interested in your product or service requires careful audience selection and effective use of targeting parameters.
Benefits of OnSpot
OnSpot’s audience creation tools allow you to create highly responsive audiences in order to serve the right content on Instagram, to the right set of potential customers, at the right time. Cut through the millions of users that are logged into the app daily to message your product or service to those most likely to convert. Utilize data points not offered by the Instagram audience building tools – for example, visitors to your competitors’ store locations in a specified time frame. Precision targeting will maximize your Instagram budget while boosting performance and conversions.
Below we break down further the unique audience building features of the OnSpot platform, which can address targeting challenges faced by marketers on Instagram in the following ways:
- Geoframing – the ability to define specific geographic areas relevant to your campaign objectives, at scale. By targeting users within these custom-defined areas, marketers can reach a more relevant audience on Instagram.
- Audience Uploads – use address lists, store locations, device lists, and IP address lists. By utilizing existing data, advertisers can create custom audiences for their Instagram campaigns. This feature addresses the challenge of audience relevance by allowing marketers to target specific addresses, locations, or devices that align with their campaign objectives.
- Demographics – create audiences based on hundreds of household-level data elements. Users can select attributes from an easy-to-navigate menu, enabling the creation of local, regional, and national audiences. This capability helps address the restrictions Meta has placed on targeting a specific demographic on Instagram, allowing advertisers to refine their audience based on various demographic factors.
Trend: Challenges with Attribution & Results Reporting
Tracking and measuring the effectiveness of Instagram ads can be challenging. While Instagram provides its own analytics tools, tying ad performance to specific conversions or actions taken by users outside of Instagram requires advanced tracking and attribution methods.
The Meta Ads Manager reporting tool uses an attribution window for measuring actions taken on an ad, such as a purchase, tied back to views and/or clicks. Conversions from a specific ad can only be attributed if the desired action was taken within a 1-day or 7-day window, depending on your Ads Manager account settings. Purchases that were made outside of that window will not be attributed to your ad campaign.
Additionally, Meta’s offline conversion event setup requires you to upload data on a daily basis in order to accurately tie real-world conversions back to your campaign. This process can be cumbersome and difficult to implement. If you are using the Meta Offline Conversions API for campaign attribution, note that it will be discontinued in 2024.
Benefits of OnSpot
OnSpot attribution reporting can tie the original target audience of the ad campaign back to website or in-person visits, as well as match purchase data back to the original audience. Our tools do not require a specific time frame for attribution reporting. We know that consumers shop and review various products and services differently and may visit both a website and real-world location ahead of making their purchase.
Users of the OnSpot platform can create custom lookback windows in order to attribute sales to their Instagram ad campaigns that are in-line with their typical sales cycle. Instagram reporting does not have the ability to associate these actions back to the original advertising campaign, but OnSpot attribution reporting does!
Real-world foot traffic attribution is at the root of the OnSpot Platform. With a few simple set up steps, your team can measure both foot & web traffic lift from your Instagram campaign automatically. In addition, you can retarget ad responders and provide custom offers by using our responder audience tool as part of our attribution functionality.
Lastly, our matchback reporting capabilities do not require you to upload transaction data into the system on a daily basis. Rather, we will take the customer data post campaign, within the time frame you specify, to tie purchases made back to the campaign target audience.
It’s important to note that the advertising landscape is continuously evolving, and Instagram’s advertising features and challenges are continually changing. We recommend referring to the latest documentation and resources provided by Instagram.
Adding the capabilities of the OnSpot Data platform to your social media strategy will improve audience targeting, analysis, and reporting for your Instagram objectives. Contact our team today to schedule a demo.
