Facebook Ads vs. Instagram Ads in 2022: Which Perform Better?

With so many brands turning to paid social media advertising to increase their sales and improve their ROI, you have to make sure you juggle paid marketing budgets as well as you can.

So, before starting an ad campaign, ask yourself a couple of questions that may save a great deal of your money and also generate incredible results, like:

• which platform has the lowest CPC?
• where to place the ads - stories, feed, or video?
• which platform gives the highest CTR?

Recently, the team fromSocialinsider has come up with a study regarding the performance of Facebook and Instagram ads,in which they showed which ad placement is more suited for different campaign objectives, along with other interesting findings of CPC and CPM on Facebook compared with Instagram.

In a nutshell, it seems that Facebook feed is the perfect ad type for generating traffic and conversions, while Instagram stories are an excellent ad placement to increase brand awareness.

The full report covers a range of elements, but here are the major actionable insights from the larger data set.

1. Increase your brand awareness through Instagram stories ads

Social media advertising implies a bunch of goals you can set for your ad campaigns. However, the two most common objectives businesses set for their paid posts are brand awareness and conversions.

This means paid ads on social media may have a crucial impact on those customers at the beginning of the buyer journey and those located towards the end of the marketing funnel.

First things first, before having gained the consumers’ trust and convincing them to make a purchase, any brand has to start by making itself known to a targeted audience.

And for being the king of engagement across all the social media networks, Instagram is the perfect platform to set your brand awareness ad campaigns.

The reason Instagram is such a success and why Instagram ads started to be on a greater focus for brands that are doing online advertising is simply because this platform targets a younger audience, those digital natives that brands dream of having in their corners.

This makes for a good reason why, at least by mid of 2021, brands started investing more in Instagram ads, as the ad spend increase is greater for Instagram compared to Facebook.

Despite allocating double budgets for Facebook advertising, this year brands seem to invest 7.16% more money on Facebook and 8.69% more money on Instagram.

Therefore, this is the moment you have to start analyzing your ads strategy because it might be the time for you as well to put more money on the table for Instagram ads.

Look at your competitors! Are they doing it?

Do your research! It may save you a great amount of time and money in the future.

Although most brands choose the Instagram feed as their primary Instagram ad placement, here’s a sweet tip for you: go for Instagram stories instead.

The Instagram story ad placement does not only have a lower price compared to the feed, but also a higher click-through rate.

With just a glimpse over the numbers, it’s no wonder why more and more brands are using Instagram stories as an advertising technique. Not to mention the fact that it is one of the most appreciated types of content on the platform.

2. Get more traffic by placing ads mostly in the Facebook feed

Once you have started creating brand awareness, you’ll want to get those potential customers as deep as possible into the marketing funnel.

When it comes down to conversions achieved through social media advertising, which is something brands monitor carefully, there ain’t nothing remotely similar to the power of Facebook ads.

For having an average click-through rate of 3.05%, compared to 0.67% which is Instagram’s, Facebook is certainly the go-to platform if you want to increase your traffic and your sales generation process.

The most converting ad type on Facebook is by far the one in the Facebook feed. For an average CPC of $0.26, which must be mentioned - it’s the second cheapest cost you may get an average click-through rate of 4.69%. Just how great is this?

When you’re going through your numbers, making and optimizing your ads budget, you should also take into consideration that Facebook video feeds is the second most converting ad type, having the lowest CPC, of $0.13 on average.

This surely emphasizes the popularity that video content has gained on Facebook and not only.

And here’s one more thing you need to know.

If you saw the story ad type works great on Instagram and thought about replicating it on Facebook, you shouldn’t bother.

Indeed, the story ad type is killing it on Instagram, but for Facebook, the situation couldn’t be more opposite.

For being the most expensive ad placement, with an average cost per click of $0.55 and having the lowest click-through rate, of about 0.09% it is certainly the last Facebook ad placement you should consider if you want to optimize your costs and have great results.