5 Instagram Ad Mistakes Costing You Sales

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If you are using Instagram ads to supplement your organic methods, you are headed in the right direction. But if you aren’t generating enough engagement or sales from your ads, you are probably making a few mistakes. 

If you can identify these mistakes and make some simple rectifications, you should see a quick improvement. Therefore, to help you get this right quickly, I have shared the most common Instagram ad mistakes you might be making and how to rectify them…

Avoiding research:

Research can be boring. But it is probably the most important part of creating successful ads. Through research, you can identify your ideal audience and find out what type of ads your competitors’ are using. This will help you quickly create ads that work. Instead of creating something and hoping it sticks. 

So, before you create an ad spend an ample amount of time conducting some quality research on your competitors’ Instagram accounts and ads. It might take some time and effort, but it will pay for it in the long run when your ads bring in the high ROAS quickly. 

Not warming up your audience:

One of the reasons why several ads fail is because people make no effort to warm up the audience. When you warm up the audience, people learn about you and trust you. Therefore when you serve them an ad later, they will be more likely to convert. 

So, have a plan in place to warm up your audience. This can be through sharing videos and other types of posts. After you warm up the audience, you can retarget them with ads and get them to convert. 

This process of warming up is especially necessary if your product costs more than $20. For best results get yourself a good social media posting tool and then schedule your Instagram posts in advance. It will be better to warm up your audience through a series of posts instead of just one. This can be a combination of stories, in-feed posts, IGTV videos, etc. 

Not starting out slow:

You should always start out slow with ads. You need to keep budgets low at $5 to $10 per day and test them out. And only when you know that the ads work should you increase the budgets. This way you won’t lose much money during the testing phase. A better thing would be to create several versions of your ad during the testing phase and test them out simultaneously. Then pick the winner and scale the budget. 

The Instagram metrics you gain from all this testing will help you create better ads quickly in the future. They can also help you create better organic Instagram posts. 

Not creating more video ads:

Video ads, in general, tend to generate more clicks than photo ads as they are moving. The movement helps them attract more attention. Also, you can include more information in video ads. These two benefits together can help you get better results with video ads. 

So, try and create more Instagram video ads. They will take more time to create than images. But they will pay for themselves in the long run when you scale up the budget. 

Not paying attention to the caption:

The images/videos in the ad are important as Instagram is a visual network. Most people come here to look at photos and videos. But there will be several people on the network who prefer reading or will want to read the caption after viewing the visual. 

So, make sure you pay attention to the caption too. For best results write captions that are 1,001 to 2,000 words long as they drive the most engagement according to a study from Mention

But make sure you simplify the writing level to that of a 4th grader. As people on Instagram don’t want to spend too long reading your caption. They can finish reading simple captions in a short bit. 

Conclusion:

These are the common mistakes people make while running Instagram ads. Stay clear of these to skyrocket your performance.