Instagram has some powerful ad targeting options. Learn how they work and how to set them up.
Instagram is the third largest social media platform, following only Facebook and YouTube. (Yes, YouTube is a social media platform.) It has 2 billion monthly active users, so there’s a pretty good chance your audience is on there. Even better, there are several Instagram ad targeting options you can use to reach exactly who you want when you want.
In this guide, we’ll show you many of Instagram’s most useful targeting options and explain how they work. We’ve organized them into four categories so you can quickly pick the ones that are right for you.
❓ What opportunities are you missing in your Meta ads? Find out with the Free Facebook Ads Performance Grader.
The first distinction to make is how to target only Instagram. Instagram is owned by Meta, and its ads are placed on the same platform, which includes Facebook. By default, all campaigns will target both Facebook and Instagram together, so segmenting them out takes a little additional setup (read here if you’re interested in Facebook ad targeting options).
During campaign creation, the platform targeting settings will live in the Placement section of the ad set builder. Start by hovering over the default setting of Advantage+ placements and click the edit pencil in the upper right.
From there, select manual placements, then uncheck the boxes next to all of the platforms other than Instagram. Now, your ads will only show on the Instagram feed, Explore, Explore home, Stories, Reels, and search results.
🔎 See how much your competitors pay for Facebook ads! Download the Facebook Ads Benchmarks: Trends & Insights for Your Industry.
The first type of targeting you come across in the ad set settings is audience controls, but to actually use them, we need to scroll down the page a little bit.
In the Advantage+ audience section, we need to turn off Advantage+ to leverage the individual targets. To do that, click “Switch to original audience options” at the bottom right. Meta will then ask if you’re sure, and yes, you’re sure.
Once you’ve done that, we can move on to the custom audiences section. This section actually leverages two types of audiences: custom audiences and lookalike audiences.
To cover those, we’re going to hop into the audiences section within Ads Manager. In the menu on the far left, either click the shortcut to audiences, or if that’s not listed in the shortcuts, you can find it in the far right column.
Let’s start with custom audiences. When you create a new custom audience, you’re grouping users based on actions they’ve taken in the past. This is similar to remarketing since you’ll be serving ads to people who have engaged with your brand already.
Website is the first option under sources. It lets you create a list of users who have visited your site and taken certain actions there.
There are many different actions to choose from depending on your chosen source. Since this is a post about Instagram targeting, let’s choose the Instagram account option to use as our example.
With Instagram, you can create audiences of users who have engaged with your profile, seen certain posts as ads, and a few other options. These custom audiences help you create lists of users to re-engage with and can narrow your audience to a very small group of people if you so wish.
The second type of audience is called a lookalike audience, and it’s designed to be a true prospecting targeting type, meaning it’s intended to generate an audience of new users and not target anyone you could put in a custom audience.
In fact, the first thing you select when creating a lookalike audience is a custom audience source. The Meta Ads platform will analyze the source audience you provide, then put together a group of users that look and behave like those users on Facebook and Instagram. This is your lookalike audience.
Once you’ve added your source audience, choose the country in which you will use the list. Lastly, you can determine the size of your Lookalike audience by choosing a percentage of the country’s population that you chose before. For the United States, about 280M people are on the Meta Ads platform, so a 1% model gives us about 2.8M users to target in the lookalike audience.
This type of targeting has been Meta’s bread and butter for a long time and has historically performed very well for them. It’s also a personal favorite of mine as it leverages advertiser-provided lists and Meta’s machine learning to find new customers.
After creating your custom or lookalike audience, you can return to it by selecting it from the custom audience drop-down menu in the ad set settings.
As we move further down the page, we come to the targeting options that we can still choose manually but that aren’t audiences. Each of these sections is a group of users Meta provides based on information about them, their whereabouts, their interests, or their behaviors.
Instagram ads can be targeted to users based on their location. Advertisers can set the location by country, region, state, city, postal code, address, DMA, or congressional district level. Pretty much whatever your targeting preferences are, there’s an option to use that for Instagram ads.
The next targeting setting is around the most basic demographic information: age and gender.
For age, you can select any age from 13 to 65+ in single-year increments, meaning you can choose 17 to 56-year-olds, 23 to 27-year-olds, or whatever ages make the most sense for your target audience.
The last section of manual targeting we have lets you target very specific audiences. In this group, we’ll have three distinct types of targeting.
Click the browse button on the right side of the search bar, and you’ll see them at a high level.
This section has much more detailed demographic targeting than just the location, age, and gender options we had before.
If we click on the dropdown, we’ll see the high-level categories for education, finances, life events, parents, relationships, and work.
Here’s where you can target parents based on how old their kids are, whether someone is married or single, and if they have a birthday coming up.
I’m going to skip to the third option on the list for just a second. (We’ll come back to Interests in a minute.)
Behaviors are slightly different because the options will change based on your existing audience. Nearly all accounts I’ve looked at have different lists available, but this is where you’ll target users based on how Meta knows they act. This could include when their anniversary is coming up, whether they’ve started a business recently, or if they’re what Meta calls “Engaged Shoppers.”
One of my favorite behavior targeting options is travel. You can target users based on who commutes to work, who travels frequently, and how recently they got home from a trip. It’s a little wild but pretty cool if you’re in that space.
Now, let’s pop back up to interest targeting. These are all topics that Meta users have shown an interest in based on the posts they’ve engaged with on Facebook or Instagram, as well as sites they’ve visited that are part of the Meta Ads Network.
If you open the dropdown, you can find many options to target here. They can be tough to sort through because there are so many, and some are pretty broad.
Instead, I’d suggest you use the search functionality in the bar at the top.
If I look for photography manually, I click through the arts and music section, then the hobbies and activities section. But if I search for it, it comes up with several variations.
Here, I can target people based on their interest in photography and choose a specific subtype of photography, whether for weddings, travel, or just digital photography in general. You’ll always have quite a few more options showing up if you use the search function, but it’ll also show you options for demographics, behaviors, and interests all in one view.
The last type of targeting for Instagram ads leverages Meta’s machine learning. It’s the newest option for targeting, called Advantage+ audience, and there are two ways you can use it.
The first option is likely Meta’s preferred option, but it’s certainly not mine by default. With Advantage+ audience, you can simply create a campaign and ad set, add no additional targeting, and turn your ads on to let Meta handle all the targeting automatically.
The trick to this performing well is your goal and conversion tracking. The first portion of the ad set builder will focus on conversion settings. Make sure your conversion event and conversion event location settings are correct, and ideally, you have a decent amount of performance volume coming through. This is likely in the 30-50 conversions per week range. If you have that, you have a much better chance of seeing decent performance with the Advantage+ audience without any guidance.
I prefer the advertiser-assisted approach.
When you opt into Advantage+ audience, you’ll see an option to add an audience suggestion. Choose it, and you’ll be directed to use the exact same builder you were for all of the manual and audience targets we’ve already talked about. But rather than using these as the only audience you’ll reach on Instagram, Meta uses it as a starting point before searching more widely for similar audiences.
In my experience, Advantage+ audience with advertiser guidance performs pretty well and can be a great way to make sure you have your hand in the direction of your advertising. It also lets Meta’s intelligent machine learning find new users you might not have thought of before.
There’s no right or wrong way to reach your audience on Instagram. You can be fully hands-on with the audience and manual targets or completely hands-off and use the fully automated Advantage+ audience. Like many advertisers, you could be somewhere in the middle and provide some guidance to Meta’s algorithms.
Which you choose and how you manage it will determine how well your ads perform on Instagram. If it still seems like a lot, contact us, and we’ll walk you through how we can target and optimize your ads for faster, better results.
