With nearly 1 billion Instagram users as of 2019, this app has taken the social media world by storm in the past few years. The photo-sharing app is a great way to interact with people, but businesses of all sizes also use it to reach out to their target audience, increase engagement, raise brand awareness, and alternative sales funnel.
If you use Instagram properly, you can earn significant revenue through the social media platform without spending a lot. It is a great place to market your brand and products and generate website traffic.
Read ahead to see how much Instagram ads cost, the factors that influence these costs, and why it is necessary to use this platform to reach people.
Instagram is a massively successful platform that businesses take advantage of to grow their awareness. They use visual content such as pictures and short videos to advertise their brand through different campaigns.
An Instagram ad campaign launch instagram ads works well with a Facebook ad account. You can use your already existing one for Facebook promotional purposes or create a new Instagram business. However, it is better to use an Instagram account to understand your target audiences’ wants to increase your organic marketing efforts.
Facebook Power Editor and Instagram Ads Manager manage all Instagram ads considering your budget, time frame, optimization goals, and audience.
Your brand’s campaign objective determines the number of call-to-action (CTA) button options you can have on your Instagram ads. However, this number cannot be more than eighteen. Furthermore, the ads can have a website link, application download options, and online shopping options.
Social media marketing is at the top of its game in this day and age because of the billions of social media platforms’ users. Since Instagram is a popular app, there are several reasons why investing in its ads will be advantageous for your business.
Instagram has become a massively popular app, faring close to YouTube and Facebook. For your businesses’ purposes, you have to determine your audience’s percentage to respond to it. With so many Instagram influencers, you can reach out to them to influence their followers to consider your brand.
However, you can target the small-scale influencers instead of the big names to drive more engagement with the followers. This is because these influencers share a trusted bond with their intimate community of followers. When they recommend your brand to others, it sounds more trustworthy than selling it like an ad.
At present, your organic posts cannot have clickable links on Instagram. The app allows you to add a link in your message or caption, but you can either access it through their bios or copy-pasting the link in your browser.
You can add external links in Instagram advertising, allowing you to create designated destination URLs that lead to your website. Using your domain with an implemented Pixel enables you to monitor the website traffic your Instagram advertisements generate, which is not usually present on external website URLs.
Once you’ve created your brand’s presence, interested customers will want to know details about your brand and the products or services you sell. This allows you to tell them your story in instagram stories or by any another way and impress them to drive more conversions.
As a result, Instagram Advertising drive more traffic towards your website because of its billions of users discovering new products every day, making it possible for you to engage with more of your target audience.
As an Instagram user, you might have noticed that thousands of small and big brands use the platform for their business purposes. Some use it as an additional channel and their websites, while others rely solely on selling their products and services.
One of the most significant investments comes from brick-and-mortar businesses such as Nike. It focuses on Instagram to boost its sales, with the campaign focusing on customer relationships to build engagement and create trust in them towards the brand for better sales.
Instagram is an essential marketing tool today, even if you don’t want to use it for direct sales. It is relevant to many of the world’s population, and most businesses use this fact to advance their business. You have to reach out to your audience, and using Instagram in the right way can help you gain a competitive edge.
Instagram can act as a sales funnel and improve your revenue by working as an alternative market area to represent your brand and attract buyers.
Instagram is a great way to stay updated on what your competition is doing. You can follow your competitors, customer base, and approach to draw people in through the platform.
Keeping track of what others are doing and meeting the customers’ expectations is essential. You can learn from your rivals and their successful and unsuccessful campaigns to keep people interested.
Instagram Ads with destination URLs have a link click CPC (cost-per-click) range of about $0.5 to $0.95. For all metrics, the range is between $0.4 to $0.7, which involves all the clicks that an ad gets, including link clicks, comments, likes, average instagram cpm and shares.
Your instagram ad prices/ instagram ads cost depends on several variables. Your campaign objectives automatically increase or decrease, Your instagram ads cost depends on what you select (ad quality) and its link to the target instagram users engage/audience’s position in the funnel.
For instance, if your paid advertising/online advertising campaign objective is brand awareness, its cost will be less than something further down the funnel with a better value objective, like conversions. With a broad and cold audience, your chances of increasing your brand awareness may be less than those familiar with your business and what it offers. They are more likely to purchase from you or carry out some higher value action related to your campaign.
Your audience’s size also impacts your ad pricing. With a more significant audience target, the ad prices are lower due to lesser competition. However, as the audience becomes narrower with geotarget, the costs increase as their competition also rises.
Furthermore, your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) also impacts your ad pricing. With a lower CTR, the system might believe there is a disconnect between the target audience and the messages in your ad, resulting in higher costs. Your ads should be relevant to your target audience, and the CTR indicates the relevancy.
Four factors influence the Instagram advertising campaign costs:
The relevancy score is the relevancy Instagram attaches to your ad, considering your audience, determining its cost. Since Instagram wants to display relevant ads to people on their instagram feed, your score is decided by how people react to your ad.
The relevancy score will be higher with private responses to your ad such as commenting, clicking, liking, etc. But for ad hiding, you get a negative response, resulting in a lower score and decreasing your ad performance.
Naturally, ads that get a higher relevancy score get positioned over the lower ones. A more relevant ad results in you paying almost the minimum amount required to get higher clicks and more leads.
The amount you decide to pay for your leads determines how much you spend on your campaigns. Similarly, your bid amount also decides the money you spend on your ads.
You’ll have to pay more for clicks and impressions because Instagram has greater bid amounts. As a result, if your budget is only $1,000 and the bid amount is $5 per click, your ad will only receive 200 clicks. But, with a $2,000 budget and $5 CPC, you’ll get 400 clicks. If your bid amount is $0.8, you’ll get even more clicks for both scenarios.
Your bid amount impacts your budget and vice versa. These decide how much it will cost for advertising on Instagram.
Your Instagram advertising costs are dependent on your competition. For any product you sell, you have to reach your target audience, which your competitors are also targeting. As a result, your competitors influence the amount you spend on your campaigns.
With more people bidding for the same audience, a bidding war can arise where companies bid to get leverage over one another, possibly resulting in your CPC increasing as you bid against your competitors.
These rates impact your Instagram ads campaign prices based on the probability that people will act on your ad. Instagram wants to know the likeliness of your audience engaging with your ad.
Engagement actions include clicks and conversions, so Instagram promotes ads that are more likely to engage people and make them interact with the content you provide. The estimated action rates impact the Instagram ad cost.
Advertising can be expensive, yet it is essential to build brand awareness. As a result, you have to learn to manage the Instagram ads properly to get the most out of your social media marketing campaigns on a smaller budget.
To make your Instagram ads cost-effective, you have to be clear of your business goals and use careful targeting to avoid overspending. Use automatic bidding, so you don’t make costly mistakes throughout the learning process of using the platform.
If you create a preset daily budget, you won’t cross this limit, and the automatic bidding helps you stick with the fixed costs you’ve set for the Instagram ads for every month.
Furthermore, you can create particular landing pages with content related to your ad to maintain high-quality scores. Create a home page that has different types of information which is not particularly relevant to your ads.
You should test your ad copy and nail its relevance to decrease costs. The higher the relevance of your ad copy, the higher your ad’s position to reduce the CPC.
Instagram is a widely popular social media platform worldwide and is still rising as a casual interaction medium and an advertising and business channel. While thousands create ads, promote ads & use it to conduct business, it is still an unsaturated market.
Whether you are a business that is starting or has been in the market for a long time, you should stay relevant to your audience and use Instagram as an effective medium to grow your brand. It might become a better source of revenue, engagement, and awareness than Facebook.
If pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is new to you, the many metrics and terms might confuse you at first. The most common words you’ll see the most are PPC and cost-per-click (CPC). It’s good to offer quick summaries of both, but understanding what they’re about and how they’re related takes explanation, as we do below.
When you begin to focus your website efforts on gaining more visitors, you can choose managed search engine optimization or PPC advertising, among other things. Most websites do both.
PPC is a form of digital advertising where you pay every time someone clicks your ad.
You may have the campaign set up for a certain sum per click. Usually, site owners establish a daily budget they want to spend. The value of every click will vary based on search volume and competition.
Your other option when you choose PPC advertising is to pay for your ad’s impressions. This is also known as ‘views.’ The term means how many times your ad is put on a page from the advertising source, no matter if it was seen or not. Impressions are counted by cost per 1000 impressions or CPM. If you use Google Display Network ads, you’re probably paying per 1000 impressions.
Impressions don’t require the prospect to click anything. They may not take any action. With clicks, you know the person who clicked your link and visited your site. They haven’t viewed your site yet or bought anything but getting them there is step 1.
CPC measures how much a click costs you in a given industry for specific keywords. Cost depends on how popular those keywords are and how often they’re searched. If you run advertisements for ‘Adele bloopers,’ and Adele falls down the steps the next day, you’ll pay a much higher CPC because there will be so many more searches for that phrase. If you set a fixed budget, you won’t lose your shirt, but your funds will be gone faster.
CPC is one aspect of PPC marketing, but CPC may refer to the entirety of PPC advertising. CPC helps you determine how pricey a keyword phrase is against the advantage and strategies for gaining the clicks. It’s helpful to decide on the best terms to select and when you figure your return-on-investment when the campaign is running.
These factors decide what your CPC is, either on Bing or Google:
Keep in mind that having a high bid doesn’t mean you’ll win the auction. If you keep the highest quality score and ad rank possible, you can obtain an excellent return with your PPC ads.
Are you looking to get ideal results from your digital ad campaigns? Then you need to lower your CPC. Here are some sure-fire ways for great results:
The audience you target is a significant factor that will affect your cost-per-click for social media and PPC ads. You want to get your ads in front of people who desire your services or products and get a click. To lower CPC, determine who the audience is as accurate as possible.
How to do this? Think about the people most likely to line up and buy your products or services today. Who’s your ideal customer?
Consider age, marital status, purchasing habits, hobbies, gender, and occupation. All of these demographics affect the audience’s buying decision. For instance, single women who are 20 years old and like running will have different characteristics than married men who are 55 and love to sail.
When you refine the audience, you’re getting more specific on who you want to reach. Of course, your business could have several ideal customer types. You should have different ad groups for each one.
It seems obvious, but creating ads your audience will respond to is essential. The relevancy of each ad affects social media and PPC advertising.
With PPC, the relevancy of the ad applies to the quality score. It’s a significant factor that affects the quality score of each ad. Google or other search engines will check the keyword selection and the ad to check that it dovetails with those keywords.
When you own a high-quality score, your ads will be placed higher. You’ll get better leads. Also, you can get a lower cost-per-click because of the ad’s high relevancy. In this way, you can drop your CPC with effective pay-per-click advertising.
When you do your social media ad buys, the relevancy of the ad affects your cost-per-click. Social media websites strive to put relevant ads in front of the appropriate audience. When you make your ad highly relevant to your chosen audience, your cost decreases.
If your ads aren’t quality, they may not only receive a poor score, but they could also be suspended from Google altogether.
Some write it as an afterthought, but the CTA is possibly the most essential part of your digital ad. It gives the prospect instructions on how to interact with you.
An effective CTA matters because it nudges the person in the appropriate direction. Many prospects will be intrigued by the ad and want to move forward.
If you’re doing PPC ads, you’ll want a compelling CTA on the landing page. This will grab more leads for your site.
Don’t make the CTA generic; if you say, ‘click here,’ yawn! They aren’t learning anything about the next stop.
Try something specific, such as ‘download your free report now.’ They know what’s going to happen, and they’re getting something valuable to them.
Now that you’ve learned more about CPC, PPC, and how to lower your cost-per-click, you should be ready to craft some compelling ads that will make your business more profitable.
Have you been thinking about running some Google Ads, but you are not sure what you need to know or what the extensions are for? Google Ads Extensions provide additional data we can add to any ad. Being a free tool, Google Ads Extensions gives us more details for all the Google ads we place, such as locations, additional links, prices, and more. Let’s go over why using Google Ad Extension is a must in any ad campaign and what all of these extensions are used for.
We get asked this question all the time. However, hopefully, you can understand why we would take full advantage of Google Ad Extensions with our answer. If you cannot see the benefits of such a powerful free tool, then allow our team of experts at PPC.co to break it down for you. Rest assured, there is no reason not to be using Google ad extensions unless you like to burn your own money.
Google Ads Extensions increase your Google ads rank. Those Google ads that have a higher ad rank will appear above simple ads during a user’s typical searches. Appearing above simple Google ads benefits your company. Ads at the top of the page are typically clicked more and can also extend how recognizable your brand is. Being free, Google Ads Extensions can increase your ad rank but will not increase your cost per click.
There are no additional costs to add extensions to your ad campaign. The cost per click on the ad, including extensions, will be charged, but no charge for clicks on seller ratings. Examples of this are if someone clicks the location extension to access directions or clicks the call extensions to call the business. For a detailed breakdown of the cost-per-click, Google has some great information.
Long story short, the actual cost per click for ads with extensions is calculated the same as for ads without any ad extension.
These tips will help with which extensions to use.
Extensions can be approved or disapproved, like keywords and ads. If an extension is disapproved, it will need to be re-evaluated and edited to be reviewed before it will automatically begin showing.
Depending on the type of business, the advertisement will be different. Google extensions are mostly automated extensions and will use the best fitting extension depending on what is currently being searched. Information from the homesite and ad-campaign is all calculated when choosing which extension takes priority.
Knowing what each extension can do and what their role is best suited for will be key in making the most of each of them. Keeping the goal of the business in mind while making the most of all ad space is critical when using google ad extension.
Lead form extension’s will help capture potential customers’ interest when they are searching, watching, or discovering relevant content. This extension is only available in video campaigns but can obtain a lot more leads.
There are two types of lead form extension’s:
Lead form extensions have many requirements before they are enabled. Here is more helpful information on lead form extensions.
After setting up Location extensions, people can easily find retail locations that sell your products or services. This is an excellent option for customers who are deciding what and where to buy. This is best used by manufacturers who make use of retail stores to distribute their products. Here is more helpful information on affiliate location extensions.
The locations extension will show people your location, a call button, and the link to your business details page. This can include important information such as your hours, photos of your business, and the most crucial part, directions on how to get there.
Businesses that want a lot of foot traffic will benefit the most from this extension. When our night out with friends gets canceled at the last minute, and we search for “best cheesecake near me,” this is the extension that brings us the ads for nearby cheesecake. Here is more helpful information on location extensions.
Adding additional text to your ad with some flavor such as: “free deliveries” or “24/7 live customer support.” This extension is fully customizable. Allowing up to 10 different callouts to show in a single ad. Making the most of callout extensions would be to show unique or specialized services or products you offer. This can convert more people offline. Here is more helpful information on callout extensions/callout extension.
This will work best when the ad has a good deal. Not for something like 2 for $5 and now 4 for $10.00. Bringing pictures and icons with direct clickable links to products or services. This allows can show up to 8 different options at a time. Allowing an easy and convenient way for everyone viewing the ad to see exactly what is offered.
Showing your hot deals or limited offers right on your ad is a great way to encourage the compulsive shopper in all of us. Here is more helpful information on price extensions/price extension.
Besides your great-grandmother, everyone is using a smartphone. Why not make it easy for them? Those with an Android or IOS device can get access to everything your ad offers in a single click. App extensions can also automatically begin the app download if desired. Among other options, a click can lead to google ads account, campaigns, and ad group. Here is more helpful information on app extensions.
Seller ratings are a detailed but easily and quickly absorbed review of the seller. Seller ratings will show a rating out of 5 stars, the number of ratings received, and the qualifier, which will highlight why a particular rating was given (if there is sufficient data). An example would be a delivery service that may have a 5-star rating for always delivering on time.
Seller ratings only show when:
Besides the structured snippet extensions having the longest name, it is also one of the most beneficial. This extension will do a lot of the work. What it does is when people search on Google, the ads will show more information from the content it is advertising if it is relevant to their search. This is done by automatic analysis from Google. This relevant information added to your ads can translate into more clicks from interested visitors.
Now that we can see the basics of most google ad extensions, we want to make sure we are using them to their full potential. Luckily most of them are automated.
Each ad can use multiple extensions at a time because not every search will trigger each extension. So, the best practice is to make use of every available extension and enable all of them.
Extensions can also be scheduled individually. Sales and promotions that only run for a limited amount of time are common in business so being able to schedule these things in advance and have the process automated is quite nice.
Ad extensions that are customizable such as the callout extensions, will do well to be monitored. If using some simple phrases or maybe quirky ones, it will be good to know if it is drawing in more business. Ad extensions have an entire page dedicated to viewing how well they are performing. Not only can the clicks be viewed, but impressions, related costs, and even more statistics are available.
Pay-per-click campaigns are our specialty. We audit your current PPC campaign to evaluate what to fix. We also optimize client landing pages, for improved PPC results. Squeezing the most out of every resource is a lot like licking your fingers after a good meal. Here at PPC.co, we have the knowledge and experience to help you get the most out of your ad investment.
If you run a Google Ads campaign, you want all of the people who view your ads to be legitimate prospects.
But sometimes an ad campaign can receive clicks that are malicious competitors who want to waste your ad budget? And what if some traffic is coming from bots?
This is what is known as ineligible clicks or invalid click’s. This article describes everything you should know about ineligible clicks.
If you watch your site statistics carefully, you probably know it receives its share of spam traffic, especially if you have a comments page. Bot comments are irritating and can fill your inbox and waste time. But what are invalid click’s about?
The term means an action that a bot or person takes where the link you paid for is clicked on by accident or a system did it. Invalid click’s are usually due to:
Spambots can be really annoying by clicking constantly on the paid link, costing you hundreds or thousands of dollars. When you remember that some popular keywords cost more than a steak dinner for two, it can have a really big effect on your ad budget.
Some malicious competitors may try to damage you by draining your budget. Others may work for click farms who click paid ads as well as social media site posts. Believe it or not, click farms are out there and they are profitable for the site owners.
Or a malicious link could be done by someone with an ax to grind.
When you first set up your account, you have an option to customize data views. The default is ‘people in or who are interested in your target locations.’ This is recommended, but if you don’t alter it, you could have some PPC fraud or abuse going on.
You can change the campaign settings and reduce some of the ineligible clicks by changing your recommended settings. Choose ‘People in your targeted locations.’
Next, if you click Campaigns, you will notice 3 columns. Select ‘modify’ and you can add another column to see ‘invalid click’s’ and ‘invalid click rates.’ After you add them, you can review in seconds the campaigns that are being hit with invalid click’s
Google attempts to track invalid click’s and you may see a refund in your account for them from time to time. The refund part of your bill will be noted. You also can see invalid click’s that you won’t get charged for in your ad campaign.
Invalid click’s and click fraud may sound the same but they aren’t. The result is mostly the same but the reasons are quite different.
As we have explained, invalid click’s and ineligible traffic are usually caused maliciously or by accident. You’re paying for every click so repeated clicks can drain your account fast.
Click fraud, however, means that the clicks are malicious in nature and want to defraud the site owner or Google. Click farms are definitely click fraud. So would your angry ex-girlfriend who clicks on your website’s ads.
Google keeps track of these behaviors. It has processes set up to shield you from repeat clicks and automated clicks. The search engine watches timings, IP addresses and other questionable activity to protect advertisers.
Google tries to reduce the impact of invalid click’s and click fraud on customers’ ad budgets. But the invalid click’s Google finds and pay you back for are often a fraction of the real cost.
We’ve gone over what ineligible clicks are, how they happen, and other vital information. Now we’ll detail how to prevent ineligible clicks from damaging your PPC campaigns:
Change your ad campaign stat data by adding several columns that relate to your campaign’s invalid click’s. It’s important to remember that you will not be charged for clicks that Google says are ineligible. However, you can still be paying for bogus clicks that Google missed.
Some site owners purchase a click fraud prevention program that tells you exactly the clicks that are invalid. However, if you don’t want that, it’s possible to find them yourself. But you have to watch and really understand your ad campaign stats. Then you can see sudden spikes and other sketchy activities.
You should carefully go over any time there is a change in your account’s KPIs. Be on the lookout for the biggest sudden changes. Are they explainable or a mystery? For example, a major change could be because of changes you made in your campaigns recently. On the other hand, they could be a sign of a bogus click attack that Google didn’t spot.
Display network advertisements are one of the most frequent sources of ineligible clicks and invalid traffic. The Google Display Network has many benefits and a lot of vendors get excellent traffic. However, there are too many low-quality sites and sketchy website owners.
They could click advertisements on their own site to make an extra buck and get no results for you. If you don’t remember to block them with an automated solution, it’s your job to review your ad placements and exclude sites that don’t convert.
After you include the most important columns, review the campaigns that are seeing the most invalid click’s. Attempt optimization by going over your settings for keywords and targeting.
Approve the changes and check if the invalid click ratio decreases. Google also says you should pinpoint and improve areas of your account with low conversions.
Ineligible clicks and invalid click’s can be a real problem for advertisers. With the above ideas and tips in mind, you can regain control of your advertising campaign and delete those ineligible clicks.
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