Instagram is looking to expand its advertising platform, by making the app available to businesses of all sizes.
The company is also improving its targeted advertising, to help marketers better tailor their content to users of the photo-sharing app.
The app is going to adopt similar ad targeting methods as Facebook, whilst implementing more self service tools for its advertising platform.
This is part of an effort to make Instagram ads “available to businesses of all types and sizes”.
Along with opening up its ad platform to more businesses, Instagram will also be offering action-orientated formats and better targeting capabilities.
The company said: “Advertisers want to drive business results across a variety of objectives – from awareness and message association to website visits and offline sales – and our ad formats will evolve to serve all those goals.
“This will not only help advertisers, but the community as well, as people will be able to learn about a product or service and then take action directly from an ad to sign up on a website, buy a product, or download an app. In the coming days we’ll begin testing some of these direct-response formats.”
The company launched ads a year and a half ago, offering both photo, video and carousel ads.
Instagram said that across 400 campaigns on the app, ad recall from sponsored posts was 2.8x higher than Neilsen’s norms for online advertising.
The social network recently announced it has hit 14m monthly UK users, confirming its position as one of the most popular social networks around.
The company revealed that 300m people around the world log into Instagram once a month, with 70% of these users coming from outside the US.
At a recent event, Instagram’s head of brand development for EMEA, Amy Cole, spoke of their plans to improve ad relevance on the network, saying: “We’ll also be enabling more targeting options which allow for more relevance in ads that are being run.
“A lot of the examples we’ve shown have been focused on the bigger, global brands. Some of the products and features that are coming out will start to allow brands of all sizes to be able to take advantage of Instagram.
“One will be enabling them to do more; think of all the different actions that they can start taking on Instagram ads directly. Things like install apps, signing up for products and services and learning more as well as shopping on Instagram.”
Today, Barclays bank became the first user of Instagram’s new target advertising format, launching its first ever Instagram ad campaign.
Find out more here.