[Journey] Making an Instagram page go viral - LIVE case study

[Looped31]

The ad is now live

I want to skim over some of the more important aspects of Instagram story ads that are often overlooked, and while some may feel the need to interject and say that they ‘already know this’, I’m sure it will be useful to the vast majority on here.

First off: deeplinks

What is a deeplink?

A deeplink is essentially a shortened link like a bitly, but it has certain features to it. For example, if the link was to a youtube video, and you turned it into a deeplink, once clicked it’d ask you if you wanted to open the video in youtube, where otherwise it would have taken you to youtube on the web version.

This is important because when we setup the Instagram story ad, and drive traffic to your Instagram profile URL, we need to make sure that the URL is turned into a deeplink, or else when the ad watcher swipes up they’ll be taken to your profile on the web version of IG, where they’re not signed in, and so cannot follow or interact with your profile.

Demographics targeting

In order to ensure the cost per click (essentially cost per profile visit) stays as low as possible, you need to be using worldwide targeting. This means that the ad will be shown to people all across the world, so although you’ll get a whole roster of countries viewing your ad. The goal here is building a community that can be monetized further down the line, which is why I chose worldwide instead of just tier 3 countries. If you are targeting tier 1 countries, the cost per click goes up rapidly which is why I didn’t do that either.

Audience size

The audience targeting needs to be as broad as possible to get the lowest cost per click. In this particular scenario, I’m just targeting football fans, so I know that if I chose the target interest ‘football’, I will get interested ad watchers. If your page was just about football tricks, then you could narrow down your audience size further, but remember, the bigger the audience size the lower the cost per click. More detailed targeting comes at a higher cost.

I’ll give regular updates as to the status of the results and what gains I’m seeing. The cost per follower will not be too hard to work out as the page is fairly stagnant.

A realistic result after 1 week of ad testing for me would be a cost per click of £0.02, so that’s the goal for now!

Thanks,
Laurence

[SBG]

Great updates, giving me a lot of motivation for my own. Looking forward to seeing how the story ads went

[Paradox]

@Looped31

In order to ensure the cost per click (essentially cost per profile visit) stays as low as possible, you need to be using worldwide targeting. This means that the ad will be shown to people all across the world, so although you’ll get a whole roster of countries viewing your ad. The goal here is building a community that can be monetized further down the line, which is why I chose worldwide instead of just tier 3 countries. If you are targeting tier 1 countries, the cost per click goes up rapidly which is why I didn’t do that either.

When targeting worldwide Facebook generally tends to show it to the cheapest countries anyways.

If it was Europe for example, you may experience a high volume of clicks from Bosnia or other countries with cheap traffic. I wouldn’t say worldwide > tier 3… the followers are pretty unmonetizeable imo but they can be great for building engagement, momentum, or just follower count fast!

[Paradox]

Why you spilling all my secretsssss bro???

Btw, not all deeplink softwares work in the ads manager.

[Looped31]

Yeah my FB rep explained this to me a couple of months ago. It’ll assess the cost per click over all the different countries it’s shown the ad to, and try to optimise accordingly, but it’ll try to continue showing the ads to all countries, just putting more budget on the cheaper ones.

[Looped31]

Yeah there’s 1 main one out there (which I’m not sure I’m allowed to share the name of?) which Facebook allows you to use links from to advertise with, but there are a couple of deeplink providers who offer links which are blocked by Facebook and therefore cannot be used with ads, so that’s a good point and worth noting for people trying to find a deeplink provider!

[Alexnvo]

why not link have them tap profile? instead of swipe up

[Looped31]

Good point, think you mentioned this to me on discord meet but I was having difficulty understanding at the time

The only thing I’d say is that the cheapest way to generate profile visits is the ‘traffic’ ad option, which requires a link. If there was a link, and at the same time, a call to action to click a profile, then it may confuse people, but most importantly, if there were only taps on the profile, the ad would not measure this, as it is looking at the swipe up clicks instead, so you cannot A/B test ads for performance which is in my opinion the most crucial aspect.

[IGsocialize]

Guys do not overcomplicate things you can use Firebase’s Dynamic Links, free and reliable, even the tracking is very good. Other services out there are free for the first 1000 clicks, not much, then you will have to pay minimum 0.01 per click, non-sense.

Try Firebase yourself, you are up an running in less than 2 mintues.

Let me know if you need a help with it.

[Young]

Does firebase turn a link into a deep link?

[Looped31]

It’s Google’s own deeplink solution, but you have to set everything up yourself and use your own domain.

[IGsocialize]

You are not correct, you don’t need a domain and the setup is a few clicks only. Actually is not even a setup, just complete a few fields.

[IGsocialize]

Yes @Young, you can use the Dynamic Links and works perfect for iOS and Android.

[IGsocialize]

Here you have it:

[Looped31]

Ok so here are the ad results so far:

£1.10 spent
372 link clicks

The cost per profile visit is currently £0.0029.

Yes, about a third of a penny per profile visit. I’ve never seen it this low so only time will tell, but the creative must be rocking it! Relevance score is high.

The follower gain so far is 66, so according to this I’m currently spending £0.017/follower. This currently converts to about 2.1 cents a follower!

I’ll keep you all posted, but we’re off to a strong start!!

[Looped31]

Sorry typo there aha! 2.1 cents a follower not 21 cents a follower

[Powerlifter]

wow, so $1 a day for a week will convert to around 462 followers. Not taking into account what you gain organically. Might have to look into ads lol

[Looped31]

Definitely worth it! Be careful of what demographics you’re targeting though. As @paradox rightly pointed out, a large chunk of my 370+ clicks are probably from tier 3 countries, but due to the nature of it being worldwide there will be tier 1 countries too here and there.

Also I forgot to mention, I’m targeting the language as ‘English (all)’ which means it’ll only show the ad to people who speak English.

[Sam_Austin]

Hey brotha, so I have been running IG story ads for quite some time for growing a Art/Creative niche account. The lowest I have ever gotten followers is about $0.05 a follower. Sometimes we will get it down to $0.025 but now days we are losing like 45 followers a day.

So with all that being said, I am trying to figure out how do we run story ads in a way that can get that ridiculous follower amount you are. We are following every instruction you have above, except we are not using deeplinks.

[Looped31]

Start using deeplinks man! Keep split testing ad sets with the same creative with different audiences, and also try going really broad. For example, people only interested in ‘art’.

Maybe even try switching up the creative as a whole!