How to make Instagram ads: a beginner’s walkthrough
From the first campaign to the first result, without the settings that quietly waste money.
The Krevya team
Paid media8 min read
Setting up an Instagram ad takes about fifteen minutes. Setting one up that does not quietly burn money takes a handful of decisions that the interface does not draw attention to.
Boost or Ads Manager?
The Boost button is fine for one thing: paying to show a post that is already performing organically to more of the same kind of people. For anything you want to measure, sales, sign-ups, cost per purchase, use Ads Manager. Boost cannot optimise for what you actually care about.
The setup, in order
- Objective: Sales if you have a checkout, Leads if you have a form. Not Traffic, traffic buys you visits, not customers.
- Pixel and events: install it and confirm a real purchase fires before you spend anything.
- Audience: start broad, with your country and a wide age band. The algorithm finds buyers faster than your interest guesses do.
- Placements: leave them automatic, but upload 1:1, 4:5 and 9:16 versions so nothing gets cropped through the logo.
- Budget: enough for around fifty clicks per creative before you judge anything.
The mistakes that cost the most
- Editing a campaign every day. Every edit restarts learning and you pay for it twice.
- One creative per ad set. You are testing the audience and learning nothing about the ad.
- Text baked into the top and bottom edges, where the interface covers it.
- Sending every ad to the homepage instead of the product it is about.
Your targeting is mostly your creative. Show the product to the wrong person and they scroll; show the right idea and the algorithm finds the person for you.