How to Set Up Instagram Ads: The Agency’s Ultimate Guide

Instagram reaches over 1 billion people every month, making it one of the most used social media platforms. With that in mind, it’s only natural that your clients are hoping to get a piece of that pie.

To help your clients maximize their reach and performance on Instagram, you’ll want to run the quintessential Instagram ads campaign. This involves choosing the right objective, using the right creative assets, and targeting the right people.

Discover exactly how to set up Instagram ads that will get your clients the results they’re looking for with this ultimate guide.

What to Know About Instagram Ads: For Agencies

Instagram ads are photos or videos that promote a business and its products or services. Because of the visual nature of the platform, Instagram works well for brands with a visual product—i.e., retailers or software companies—that they can showcase with images or graphics and video content.

To get ready to run Instagram ads for your clients, you first need to set up your Meta Business Suite. Because Instagram and Facebook are both owned by umbrella company Meta, you can run ad campaigns for both platforms through the same dashboard.

But this also means that even if you’re not managing their Facebook ads or page content, you still need access to their Facebook page.

Typically, to run Instagram ads for your clients, you’ll need the following:

• Your own Meta Business Suite account set up
• Access to your client’s Facebook page
• Access to your client’s Instagram account
• Access to your client’s Meta ads account
• The Meta pixel installed on your client’s website
• Your client’s Facebook and Instagram pages connected

You can handle all of this within your Meta Business Suite. Once you’ve taken care of the above checklist, you’ll be ready to start running Instagram ads for your agency’s clients.

Types of Instagram Ads

There are eight main types of Instagram ads you might consider running for your clients. Learn more about each type of ad and when you’d want to use it.

Image Ads

Image ads are your most basic Instagram ad. They consist of three things: an image, a caption, and a call to action. This type of ad can be useful for any business, and are great ways to promote things like:

• Your products or services
• An upcoming event
• A sale or discount
• A new launch or collection

Video Ads

Next, you have your video ads. There are two different types of video ads you can run on Instagram: regular feed video ads, which we’re talking about here, and Reels ads, which we’ll cover shortly.

The main difference between the two is that Reels video ads are full screen (well, full screen on mobile) ads and feed video ads tend to have an aspect ratio of either 1:1 or 4:5. 

Reels ads also appear within the Instagram feed, but they can be opened to become full screen ads. You can tell when an ad can be opened by whether the brand name appears above the video (feed ad that does not turn to full screen) versus at the top of the video (Reels ad that does turn to full screen).

We’ve included an example of a regular feed video ad above. Below, we have a visual of a Reels ad in the feed and what it looks like when you tap it:

If you tap on a video ad, it will open the webpage that it’s linked to, rather than the video in full screen mode.

Video ads are useful for any business and can also be used to promote your client’s products or services. However, due to the nature of video, they can do a deeper dive, showcasing how a product or service can resolve pain points or walking viewers through a product tutorial.

Carousel Ads

Carousel ads are swipeable ads that can include up to 10 images and/or videos. Some creative use cases for this type of ad would be:

• Showcasing different products within a collection
• Sharing before and after photos or videos to promote services
• Walking viewers through a product tutorial or step-by-step
• Promoting features of an app or software

Reels Ads

Now we’ve got Reels ads, which are just full screen, vertical video ads. These appear both in the main feed and in between organic Reels in the Reels feed.

Just like with video ads, these can be used to promote products and services. Use the video format to do a deep dive into why your client’s target audience should click the “Shop now” button. Or, use a different call-to-action button, like “Contact us” as seen above or “Learn more.”

Story Ads

Story ads appear between user stories and are quick, 10-15 second full screen images or videos that promote a business and its products or services. These mimic the disappearing stories that users can share on their profile and are a great way to put a quick promotion in front of an audience.

Story ads can be used to showcase products and services, introduce a business to its target audience, or promote an upcoming event.

Collection Ads

Collection ads include a feature image or video alongside smaller images beneath it. As the name suggests, these are perfect ads for showcasing a complete collection of related products, but they can also be used to share features (as the example above does), different services, and more.

Shopping Ads

Shopping ads are image ads that link to products in a user’s Meta catalog. Interested customers can easily tap on the ad to be taken to an in-app product page and make a purchase, all without ever leaving the Instagram app. 

This type of ad is perfect for your ecommerce clients to increase purchases and generate a direct ROI from Instagram.

Explore Ads

The last type of Instagram ad you might consider running for your clients is an Explore ad. These are sponsored posts that appear on a user’s Explore page with the notation “Sponsored,” as you can see in the above example.

Just like posts in the Explore tab, they can be opened to view a regular image, video, or Reels ad. These can be useful for any business—the Explore ad placement simply provides yet another avenue for users to find your client on Instagram.

Your Agency’s Guide to Setting Up Instagram Ads

Ready to run an Instagram ad campaign for your clients? Walk through this step-by-step guide with us to make sure you get the absolute most out of Meta’s ad features and capabilities.

Step 1: Go to Your Meta Business Suite

Everything Instagram advertising will be handled within your Meta Business Suite. You can access this through the left sidebar on your Facebook page, or by simply going to business.facebook.com.

The home dashboard of your Meta Business Suite looks like this:

Step 2: Select the Right Client

Take a look at the dropdown menu that sits at the top left of your Meta Business Suite. This menu houses all of your business portfolios and pages/ad accounts you have access to.

The first thing you need to do is click this menu and make sure you select the right client so your new Instagram ad campaign is created within the proper ad account. 

Thankfully, even if you miss this step, you’ll have to confirm the right Instagram account later in the setup, so you won’t run an ad on the wrong account. But, it would require starting your campaign over again, so selecting the right client account off the bat will help save you a lot of time.

Once you’ve chosen the right client account, click over to the Ads Manager in the left hand sidebar.

Step 3: Create a New Ad Campaign

Click Campaigns in the left hand sidebar, then click Create at the top of your list of campaigns (if any have previously been run) to start a new one.

You’ll see this popup appear so that you can get started creating your client’s new Instagram ad campaign.

Once you’re here, read steps four and five before moving on.

Step 4: Choose Your Buying Type

The first thing you’ll do to start setting up your new Instagram campaign is choose your buying type. This pertains to the dropdown at the top of the Create new campaign popup.

You have two options: Auction or Reservation.

According to Meta, these buying types are described as:

• Reservation: Lets you plan and buy your campaigns in advance, with predictable performance goals and more control over your frequency controls. Ads can be placed on Facebook and Instagram.
• Auction: Offers more choice, efficiency and flexibility, with less predictable results. Ads can be placed across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Meta Audience Network.

Essentially, the Reservation buying type gives you an experience similar to media buying. You have a whole lot more control over your placements and frequency, but it also requires a lot more planning and overseeing.

We recommend starting with the Auction buying type to give your clients a more simplified ad experience.

Step 5: Select an Ad Objective

Next, you’ll choose an objective or goal for your Instagram ad campaign. What are you hoping to accomplish with this campaign? Boost brand awareness? Generate conversations amongst your client’s audience? Send potential customers to your client’s website?

Learn more about the different ad objectives you can choose from below:

• Awareness: This type of campaign is centered around putting your client’s Instagram account in front of as many people in their target audience as possible. It’s more of an introductory ad, using a simple visual that lets potential customers know that they exist.
• Traffic: A traffic campaign’s goal is to send people to a specific destination, like your client’s website, an app download page, an Instagram profile, etc. Use this to send potential customers to a website or landing page where they can learn more about a product or service.
• Engagement: An engagement campaign is meant to spark conversation with your client’s target audience by enticing them to engage with your client’s Instagram content, profile, or DMs. 
• Leads: This type of Instagram campaign works well for B2B companies looking to gather a list of potential clients or customers that they can nurture.
• App promotion: As its name suggests, this type of campaign is for brands looking to generate downloads or increase usage of their mobile app.
• Sales: A sales campaign is used to generate conversions on a client’s website or direct sales from their Meta catalog. This is perfect for SaaS or ecommerce brands that don’t need a salesperson or other middleman to complete a conversion.

Work with your client to gauge their overall goals of partnering with your agency so that you know the best objective to select for their campaign. You might also run multiple campaigns with different objectives. 

For example, you could start with an awareness campaign, then retarget those people who were introduced to your client’s brand with a traffic or engagement campaign to consistently nurture those users into becoming customers.

Step 6: Choose Your Campaign Setup

After you choose your campaign objective, you’ll be led to this popup (unless you choose Awareness as your objective). Although Meta’s ads manager is incredibly comprehensive, it also wants to make the ad creation process as basic as possible.

To do this, it now offers assisted campaign setup options to help brands new to Facebook and Instagram ads still get the most bang for their buck.

Testing out each option is always a great idea, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll be walking you through a more manual campaign setup process.

Step 7: Name Your Instagram Ad Campaign

After clicking Continue, you’ll be taken to the first page of your Instagram ad campaign setup. At the top, the first section asks you to name your campaign.

It’ll be auto-populated with something like “New Awareness Campaign” or “New Engagement Campaign” depending on your objective. However, you should name it something more specific (especially if you plan on running multiple campaigns) so that you can easily access it from the ads manager.

Create a naming mechanism that you can use for every campaign. For example, you might have each campaign include information like:

• Objective or what’s being promoted
• Target audience
• Date range

So you might end up with something like “Awareness – Millennials – January 2025” or “Olive Collection – Women 50+ – Spring 2025.”

Step 8: Explore Additional Ad Settings

As you scroll down this first page of setup, there are a few ad settings you might want to try out. First, under Campaign details, you can always switch up the objective or buying type you initially chose without having to completely restart your campaign. 

And if you click Show more options, you can add a maximum spending limit for your ad.

The other sections are about budget and A/B testing.

The Advantage Campaign Budget works well if you plan on creating multiple ad sets in your campaign. An ad set shares the same overall objective, budget, schedule, and targeting as others within a campaign, but uses different creative or other elements to maximize your budget.

While you can choose to set different budgets per ad set, using the Advantage Campaign Budget option helps to optimize your spending based on ad set performance.

And A/B testing allows you to create two different variations of an ad and test to see which outperforms the other. Once the initial test has been completed, the higher performing ad will be used for the remainder of the campaign.

We always recommend testing different settings out, but for your first campaign, you’ll probably want to skip these steps.

Step 9: Set Your Performance Goal

After finishing the first page of setup, you’ll click Next in the bottom right corner to head to page two. Here, you’ll get to focus a bit on what a conversion for your ad means by selecting the best performance goal to measure.

Each ad objective will give you different performance goals to choose from. There are a lot of different performance goals, but some common ones include:

• Maximizing reach
• Maximizing impressions
• Maximizing clicks
• Maximizing conversions
• Maximizing engagement
• Maximizing conversations

Select the performance goal that pertains to the main metric you’re wanting to improve through your campaign.

Step 10: Confirm Your Instagram Account

Now, depending on your ad objective, this step might appear above or below the “Performance goal” dropdown. However, with this step, you get the chance to confirm that you’ve selected the right client Facebook Page and Instagram account for your ad to run on.

Step 11: Set Your Budget & Ad Schedule

Now it’s time to talk budget. How much ad spend are your clients putting towards this campaign? And how do you want to disperse that budget?

You have two options for how to disperse your budget: by capping a daily maximum for a continuous campaign or by spreading out a set amount throughout a campaign’s lifetime.

If you choose a daily budget, you can have your campaign run indefinitely until you manually turn it off, or you can set an end date. If you choose a lifetime budget, you’ll have to set a start and end date for your campaign.

You can also choose to schedule out when your campaign spends most of your budget. For example, if you know your client’s target audience tends to be online more first thing in the morning, you can turn on budget scheduling and choose to have most of your ad spend used within those hours.

Step 12: Choose Your Audience Targeting

Next, you can select the audience you want your ad to appear for. This is another area where you can get Meta’s assistance in choosing the best audience—or you can take a more manual approach.

With audience targeting, you have a few different options:

• Use Meta’s Advantage+ audience suggestions
• Manually select an audience based on demographics, interests, and behavior
• Create a lookalike audience based on the profile of people who’ve been to your client’s Instagram account or website
• Create a retargeting audience of people who’ve been to your client’s Instagram account or website

Step 13: Pick Ad Placements

At the bottom of this page, you can pick your ad placements if you want your ads to appear in specific areas. Again, you can use Meta’s Advantage+ placements to leave this up to Meta’s delivery system.

Or you can click the Edit button that appears when you hover over this section to choose where you want your ad to appear. You can be as broad as simply choosing that you only want to run ads on Instagram or as specific as choosing each individual placement area.

Step 14: Create Your Ad

Once you’ve finished with the last few steps, you’ll click Next. This takes you to the ad creation area.

There are three main options when selecting your ad creative:

• Uploading a single image or video
• Uploading multiple images and/or videos for a carousel
• Creating a collection ad that consists of a featured image/video plus additional smaller images

Some ad objectives also allow you to simply select an existing post from your feed that you promote, instead of creating a new ad from scratch.

Once you’ve uploaded your creative assets, you’ll follow the additional prompts (these vary greatly from campaign objective to campaign objective) to ensure you’ve added all of the ad copy and other key elements.

Then, you can preview your ad in the section on the right of the screen before clicking Publish.

Step 15: Monitor Your Ad Performance

After your ad has been approved, you can view its performance in the Campaigns section of the Meta Ads Manager. By scrolling through each campaign or ad set, you can see data like:

• Reach
• Impressions
• Engagement rate
• Conversion rate
• Amount spent

Keep an eye on these numbers so that you can go in and make necessary tweaks to improve your overall ad performance and get the best results possible for your clients.

You can also take advantage of a third-party tool’s capabilities. For example, Swydo offers comprehensive campaign monitoring features that let you keep tabs of each Instagram ads campaign you’re running for your clients.

Select the Instagram Ads metrics or KPIs that you’re trying to measure with each campaign so you get a focused view of your ad’s performance. This will help you understand at a glance whether your campaign is performing well or if you need to make some adjustments.

Run Successful Instagram Ads for Your Clients

Ready to start running effective Instagram ad campaigns for your agency’s clients? Follow our step-by-step guide to make sure you don’t miss any key elements in your ad setup. And to ensure you’re making the most of your client’s ad budgets, take advantage of Swydo’s comprehensive Instagram Ad reporting tool.