Instagram Gives Marketers More Advertising Options

Instagram Gives Marketers More Advertising Options

Instagram just gave marketers more advertising options. It has announced that it will be expanding options for advertisers with new carousel ad units. Users can swipe left to learn more about a product or brand because of Instagram’s new carousel ad units. The new carousel ad units will assemble multiple photos together in sequenced stories. This is where the user swipe left to get more information about the product.

A “Learn More” button is in the last photo in the series which links to a website of the brand’s choice that opens in an internal browser within Instagram.

Marketers informed Instagram last year, through a series of inquires made by the social media giant, that they wanted more advertising options. The problem advertisers were having is that links inside Instagram were not clickable. Marketers, always looking for inventive ways to get their advertisements to their targeted audience, began to use the “link in my bio” approach to go around Instagram’s lack of a clickable link. Now that Instagram will allow in-app clickability on ads, is viewed by many, is an attempt by Instagram to court ecommerce brands.

It is now well established that over half of all ecommerce traffic is coming from mobile devices. Therefore; businesses are hungry to tap into visual social networks like Instagram and Pinterest and use them in order to drive measurable traffic and sales back to their own websites.

Marketers and advertisers will be scrambling to devise slogans and catchy phrases to take advantage of the new carousel functionality to get users to “swipe to the left.” Instagram has suggested that a “fashion company could use the carousel to deconstruct the individual products in a “look.”” Advertisers could also use incentives such as discount codes if users swipe left.

Instagram is rolling out the new ad format on a limited basis. They will eventually become available to all.