In many ways, advertising on Instagram is the same as advertising on Facebook. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since Instagram is part of the Facebook network. We recently talked about how to calculate the cost of your Facebook ads. This article shifts the focus to Facebook’s highly visual, fast-growing brother, Instagram. How much does it cost to advertise on Instagram?
Like Facebook, there is no fixed price for advertising on Instagram. You create a bid for placement of your ad. Theoretically, Instagram will place the ad of the company that places the highest bid for a given ad space. In reality it is much more complicated and you cannot guarantee that Instagram will accept every ad you provide and serve it on the Instagram accounts you bid on. In order to get a spot for your ad, you have to do more than just place the highest bid.
You can expect to pay anywhere from 20 cents to $2 per click (CPC) for an Instagram campaign. According to Revealbot data, the average Instagram CPC in July 2021 in the United States was $1.28 per click, as opposed to 2022 CPC which is $1.33 per click. However, if you prefer to run your ads on a cost-per-mille (CPM) basis and focus on impressions, the average Instagram CPM in the United States in July 2021 was $8.51, compared to 2022 CPM , which is $10.39. In comparison, the average Facebook CPC per click in July 2021 was $1.01 and the average Facebook CPM was $12.91.
Smart Insights has compiled statistics comparing click through rates (CTRs) for display ads, paid social ads and Google ads. Unfortunately, over the past few years, CTRs have generally gone down for most types of online advertising. They found that the ad click rate on the Instagram feed was 0.22% in Q1 2020. This was significantly lower than last year when it was 0.60% in Q1 2019. However, the CTR for Instagram Stories was higher at 0.33%. For comparison, the average Facebook CTR in the news feed is 1.11%, also a downtrend from 2019.
Advertising on Instagram has increased significantly in recent years. In March 2017, they celebrated their 1 millionth advertiser.
Instagram is part of the Facebook advertising platform
If you have read our previous article on Facebook ad costs, you will have seen that Facebook offers Instagram as one of the places where you can bid to place your Facebook ads. When you bid on your Facebook (group) ads, you will be asked to place your ads in the following locations:
feeds:
Start Your Web/Blog & Earn Money Online
 |  |
|---|---|
| Renewal: From $0.99 p/m | Renewal: From $4.99 p/m |
| Free SSL: Yes | Free SSL: No |
| Free Domain: No | Free Domain: No |
| Promotions: Yes | Promotions: Yes |
| Used By Over: 10+ Billion | Used By Over: 5+ Million |
 | |
Facebook News Feed (desktop or mobile, depending on how people access Facebook)
Instagram feed (mobile feed only when using the app)
Facebook Marketplace
Facebook video feeds (on Facebook Watch and Facebook News Feed)
Facebook right column (on computers only)
Explore Instagram
Messenger inbox
Stories:
facebook stories
Instagram stories
messenger stories
In Stream:
Facebook In-Stream Videos
IGTV Videos
Instagram roles
Seek:
Facebook search results
Messages:
Messages sponsored by Messenger
In article:
Facebook instant article
Applications:
