Instagram announces three new business tools for brands: Account insights, Ad insights, and Ad staging

Instagram today announced three new business tools to help brands build their following on the social network: Account insights, Ad insights, and Ad staging. The Facebook-owned company says the new suite will be rolled out “over the coming weeks and months,” but wouldn’t provide details regarding timing or markets.

Instagram says the dashboards are a response to brands asking for more insight into how users engage with and respond to their photos and videos. The tools will thus let brands monitor the reaction to posts and campaigns, as well as give them suggestions for the best time of day to post a photo or video.

The suite is broken up into three sections:

• Account insights allows businesses to see how they’re increasing brand awareness on Instagram through impressions, reach, and engagement.
• Ad insights shows the performance of paid campaigns with brand analytics (impressions, reach, and frequency) for each individual ad delivered to the target audience.
• Ad staging allows advertisers and their creative teams to preview, save, and collaborate on ad creative for upcoming campaigns.

All Instagram advertisers will be getting access first. The company then plans to use their feedback will to improve the tools before releasing them more widely to additional brands “later this year.”

Remember: ads on Instagram are still quite rare, limited to the US, and only a handful of companies can post them. Facebook is making a point to take things very slowly with ads on Instagram so as not to scare off users. Ads are differentiated from regular content in two ways: a Sponsored label in the top-right corner, which you can tap to find out more about ads on the social network, and an option in the bottom-right corner to hide the photo or video and provide feedback.

See also – Zuckerberg: Facebook will generate ‘a lot of profit’ from Instagram, expect ads ‘when the right time comes’ and Instagram previews how ads will look in its apps, will push a one-time sample ad to US users in the next week

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