5 Reasons Your Instagram Ads Are Not Performing

With ‘over 2.35 billion monthly active Instagram users’, Instagram remains one of the most popular platforms for advertisers.

However, the competition to compete is becoming more challenging. This means if your ad creative isn’t quite right, your Instagram ads might not be performing as well as you’d hoped.

There are a range of different mistakes that can contribute to your ad performance falling flat.

5 Reasons your Instagram ads are not performing well include, but are not limited to:

1. Your ad creative doesn’t grab your audience’s attention
2. You’re not reaching the right audience
3. You’re not prioritising storytelling
4. You’re neglecting your Instagram community 
5. You’re not providing any offers 

‍

1. Your Ad Creative Doesn’t Grab Your Audience’s Attention 

The first potential reason why your Instagram ads are not performing well is your ad creative doesn’t grab your audience’s attention. 

Competition has never been higher, but the key to grabbing your audience’s attention is to design an ad that targets them in as little as ‘1.7 seconds’.

This isn’t an easy feat, especially when you’re first starting out. So, to improve your ad creative and create scroll-stopping ads, why not try hiring a professional video production company?

At Aura Ads, our unique creative-led service has helped to drive growth for some of the world’s leading brands, including Huel and Wild Deodorant. 

If you’re interested in boosting your ad performance, schedule a call with a member of our team today.

2. You’re Not Reaching The Right Audience 

A potential reason why your Instagram ads are falling short is that you’re not reaching the right audience. 

It can be tempting to steam ahead and begin creating ads straight away, but without getting to know your audience, your advertising efforts will be wasted.

To learn more about your audience, Instagram offers a wealth of data within the app itself and this can be found within Instagram Insights. Here, you can learn everything from gender to age to the location breakdown of your Instagram followers.

Once you gain a deeper understanding of your audience, you can develop a range of different campaigns that speak to that specific audience.

Putting your Instagram ad in front of the right audience is crucial to boosting your ad performance.

To discover Instagram ad tips for businesses, read our blog here.

3. You’re Not Prioritising Storytelling 

Another reason why your Instagram ad performance might be poor is that you’re not prioritising storytelling. 

The main purpose of telling a story with your ad is to evoke an emotional response from your target audience. Not only can this help your audience relate to your brand, but it also helps them to understand why they should care about your business.

In turn, this helps to create ‘an emotional connection between a company, its products and its customers’, emphasising the impact it can have on your Instagram ad engagement.

Storytelling, therefore, emboldens your ad strategy by making people care about your service or products.

4. You’re Neglecting Your Instagram Community 

A significant reason why your Instagram ads are not performing well is that you’re neglecting your Instagram community. 

People respond well to brands that interact with their audience, especially if they’ve experienced a problem and need help, as this helps to garner their trust and establish brand authority.

There are a few ways to build an Instagram community and engage with your audience, from answering queries to engaging in influencer marketing to posting user-generated content on your business Instagram page.

Building an Instagram community takes time, but you can start by simply creating a brand hashtag that users and influencers can use when they are posting photos of your products.

Reposting these photos not only provides your audience with publicity but also humanises the people behind your brand, helping to build a deeper connection with your audience. 

5. You’re Not Providing Any Offers

Last, but not least, your Instagram ads might not be performing as well as they could be because you’re not providing any offers. 

It's no secret that customers love to feel like they’ve received a good deal, emphasised by the fact that ‘about 93% of shoppers use a coupon or discount code throughout the year’.

By providing your audience with tantalising offers on your Instagram ads, you can reward users who engage and click through on your ads and encourage further engagement in the future.

That said, it’s important to strike the right balance between providing enough offers and not overdoing it, as you don’t want your offers to become so frequent that your audience doesn’t engage with them.

‍

Hopefully this article has given you a wider perspective of the potential reasons why your Instagram ads are not performing as well as they could.

We are Aura Ads, an ecommerce ad service designed for D2C eCommerce brands. We help clients sell more online and grow at scale with our bespoke video and static creative delivered on a monthly basis. For more tips and tricks from our experts, head over to our blog page.

Written by Jemima Thomas for Aura Ads.

‍

‍