Six weeks after Instagram began running ads on its platform, some results are in. They give a pretty positive — although incomplete — picture.
On Nov. 1, Instagram began running ad campaigns from 10 advertisers, including Adidas, Burberry, Michael Kors, Ben & Jerry's and Levi's, among others. The Facebook unit Thursday released results from the latter two advertisers plus two unnamed advertisers. Among the findings: There was a 32% incremental lift in ad recall per campaign for people who were repeatedly exposed to a particular campaign versus control groups. That means if you saw an Instagram ad for a new product, like Ben & Jerry's Scotchy Scotch ice cream, you were 32% more likely to remember that product than those who had not seen the Instagram ad. There was also a 10% incremental lift in brand message awareness per campaign for people who saw an ad or ads compared to those who didn't.
Levi's also reached 7.4 million people during a nine-day period, targeting consumers aged 18 to 34. Ben & Jerry's reached 9.8 million people in the U.S. over eight days, targeting people aged 18 to 35.
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To put that in perspective, Levi's has about 155,000 followers on Instagram. Running the ads let the brand reach an audience about 47 times as big. For Ben & Jerry's, which has 334,000 followers, the ads got in front of an audience about 29 times larger. Levi's also saw a jump of about 20% in its follower count since the ads started running. Reps from Ben & Jerry's could not be reached for comment.

Since Instagram and the advertisers aren't saying what they've paid for the ads, determining ROI is impossible. A study by Salesforce earlier this year found that Facebook Sponsored Page "Like" Stories were selling at a CPM (or cost per thousand readers) of $4.58.
A Facebook ad partner says the 32% is a solid number and should be encouraging. However, he cautioned that the one reason the ads worked is that Facebook kept meticulous control of the quality of the ads. When more advertisers come on board, it will be more challenging to maintain that. Nevertheless, monetizing Instagram users, who skew younger than Facebook users on average, will be a top priority for Facebook in 2014 as the platform struggles to keep teens engaged and from migrating to other apps, most notably Snapchat.
Julie Channing, head of digital for Levi's, says she thought the novelty of the ads probably boosted some results. "We suspected these ads would attract more attention regardless of the content, given their newness. That's partly why we didn't prioritize engagement as the primary performance metric out of the gate," she says. "Our focus was on metrics like recall, which reflects our success in capturing the attention of the user. It's doubtful this effect will decline over time, because the key to high recall is Instagram's ability to take over a small screen with a message that is fully integrated into the content being organically consumed by the user."
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Image: Getty/Lionel Bonaventure