After last month’s demonstration of what Instagram ads would look with Levi’s, Michael Kors became the first brand to actually post an Instagram ad this week, featuring a luxury watch amidst a table of macarons.
Nitrogram, an analytics platform for Instagram, took a closer look at this first sponsored post and analyzed the key metrics behind their first including engagement and estimated reach, a few of their results are below:
The post generated 33,000 new followers for Michael Kors
That’s 16 times the average number for the brand’s past 5 non-promoted posts, which were all featured on Insatgram’s popular page
As a comparison, here are the follower graphs for two previous Michael Kors posts
The ad generated 370% more likes and was likely seen by 6.7MM People
The post generated more than 218,000 likes within 18 hours, 370% more likes than the average of their last five posts.
According to Nitrogram. judging by this time decay in likes and reach as compared to their five previous posts it was likely the ad was shown only once in the user’s feed, unlike on other networks where promoted posts stay longer in the feed.
As Instagram Ads continue, it will be interesting to see if these numbers increase, as right now they show a strong surge initially, but then trail off both in new followers and engagement.
Users Talk Back
While the number of likes was significantly higher than average, the comments on the post reflected a disdain for advertising by people on the platform. This is somewhat expected, and Nitrogram found that 20% of the comments were negative on this post. As Instagram ads become more routine this will probably die down.
Insights
Instagram success for now will continue to be judged by engagement per post and increase in followers and while these numbers certainly provide a positive outlook, there are a lot of unknowns still.
GE has started rolling out their own Instagram ad this week as well, this time of a giant fan.
Will the introduction of new ads compete for attention? Will ads be shown more often? Only time will tell as we continue to watch how the ads develop.
Update: Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said of these ads this morning at the GigaOm Roadmap conference: “Over 5% of the impressions led to Likes on these ads that we’ve run. That’s pretty tremendous considering most of the ads we see on the internet we ignore.”
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