Introducing the ‘Instagram Explore home’ Ads Placements via the Instagram Marketing API
Instagram is a social media platform with over 1 billion users. It is particularly popular among younger generations, and many businesses use it to connect with their audience since it offers easy ways to engage and interact with other users. One of the most interesting features of Instagram is Explore home, which helps users discover content that’s relevant for them based on their interests and preferences. If you are interested in advertising on this platform, this article will tell you all about new features introduced via the Instagram Marketing API that help developers create ads with this placement type as well as get insights into how they perform once they run campaigns.
Ads creation:
Developers will be able to use “INSTAGRAM_EXPLORE_HOME” as one of the placement options when creating ads
The new ads placement will be available on all current Marketing API versions, and does not require an upgrade.
This will not require the use of a new endpoint.
The ‘Instagram Explore home’ placement option will be available via the current Marketing API endpoint you may already be familiar with, which is: https://api-sandbox-api.instagram.com/v1/ad_placements
Ads insights:
When breaking down insights by Placement level, it will be possible to see how ads perform via Instagram Explore home placement
For example, if you have an ad running on Instagram Explore home and want to see how it’s doing, you can access insights by placement in the [Analytics Tool]
The [Insights tool] allows you to explore your Instagram account’s performance based on various metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).
In our next article we’ll take a look at how ads insights work across placements and what kind of information is available for each one!
Ad preview:
Developers will be able to fetch the preview in the INSTAGRAM_EXPLORE_GRID_HOME format
This feature update will enable the following three capabilities / use cases:
Ads creation:
Developers will be able to use “INSTAGRAM_EXPLORE_HOME” as one of the placement options when creating ads. By doing this, they will be able to target users who browse their own profile or the Explore section more than once a day. Ads placed in this placement will only show up at Facebook’s standard ad display rates and not through any other pricing structures (like auction).
Ad preview: Developers will be able to fetch the preview in the INSTAGRAM_EXPLORE_GRID_HOME format via an API call. The preview data included here comes from Instagram’s servers and can change on a daily basis based on user behavior patterns across different device types (mobile vs desktop) as well as geography (US vs Europe).
These actions are now available via the Marketing API.
You can create ads using INSTAGRAM_EXPLORE_HOME as one of the placement options when creating an ad from your app. If you’re not familiar with creating ads, check out our docs for more information.
Ads insight users will see that it’s possible to segment campaigns by Placement level and see how well they perform on Instagram Explore home placement, as well as other placements like Stories Highlights and Feeds.
This is a great time to get started with advertising on Instagram. As an advertiser, you can be sure that you’re reaching the right audience and your ads are performing well. For developers, there are many new ways to interact with the Instagram marketing API, including targeting and placement options for the Explore home carousel.
