“With these ads, we are able to showcase more and utilize the most ad real estate as you can use up to ten carousel cards,” said DeFazio, “Our sweet spot tends to be three to five cards as we suspect users don’t want to see too many options.”

Andrew Foxwell, co-founder of the social media advisory firm Foxwell Digital, said user generated content that looks native to platform performs best for the campaigns he is running: “For example, boomerangs and still images that are shot quickly and simply on phones, and generally look like something you’d see posted by a friend versus a more stylized image shared by a brand.”

Foxwell’s agency is also seeing a lot of success with Instagram Story Ads that include polls.

“In one instance, we inserted a discount code directly into a poll, with one choice being ‘Do you love it?’ and the other being ‘Get 15% off with code IG15’ and that specific Story Ad helped us scale one brand from $500 to $15,000 a day.”

According to Sánchez, brands need to continually test their creative against different attribution models to determine what’s going to work best for them.

“I recommend analyzing the performance of the creative mix by using different attribution models and comparing the creative mixes,” said Sánchez, “The conflict in results based on different attribution models makes assessing results challenging. Incrementality is ultimately what matters most, which is why I would recommend understanding the optimal creative mix.”

Instagram versus Facebook

In terms of adoption — both from users and advertisers — Instagram Story Ads have had a sizeable head start over Facebook Story Ads as they were launched more than a year before Facebook’s ad unit. Foxwell said his agency isn’t even recommending Facebook Story Ads to any clients right now since they haven’t proven to be a reliable source for direct-response conversions yet.

“Compared to time spent in the Facebook News Feed, users simply aren’t turning to Facebook Stories as much,” said Foxwell, “You also can’t add a poll on Facebook Story Ads, which has proven helpful for Instagram Story ads.”

DeFazio’s agency is testing Story Ad campaigns on both platforms for e-commerce clients with audiences that include younger and older demographics, but is finding the same results as Foxwell.

“The impression share isn’t there for Facebook, and click-through-rates (CTR) are much lower,” said DeFazio, “For one of our water bottle clients, the CTR was two-times higher on Instagram Story Ads compared to Facebook.”

Take advantage of Facebook’s ad tools

For Story Ad campaigns, Foxwell recommends advertisers take advantage of the Asset Placement Customization tool in Facebook Ads Manager that lets users customize ad assets by placement within the same ad set.

“For example, this tool allows you to target a 2% Lookalike Audience of your best customers with both an image that’s sized properly for a video link post (4:5 aspect ratio) and an Instagram Story asset (16:9). This tactic keeps the learnings at the ad set level, which can help advertisers get through the learning phase more quickly,” said Foxwell.

He also recommends building funnels entirely dependent on Instagram Stories via Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization feature.

“We’ll commonly build out a Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) campaign and have multiple audiences within the same CBO running only to Instagram Stories,” said Foxwell, “We’ve seen this strategy be impactful for incremental results, particularly in the lower part of the sales funnel.”

Build toward the audience

For Foxwell’s clients, most of which are B2C-focused, he has found that Instagram Story Ads perform particularly well if the client is already actively posting organic Stories on the platform — even more so if the client’s target audience is age 45 or younger.

DeFazio doesn’t count out Story Ads when building campaigns aimed at older audiences — instead, her agency is using creative to help drive the results they want to see.

“With accounts where we target older demographics, one thing we’ve noticed that works well, as older audiences get familiarized with ephemeral content, is to educate them in the process by adding overlay text to ‘Swipe Up’ with an arrow pointing to the call-to-action button to click through to the website from a Story Ad.”

History shows that Story content is likely to draw the attention of more people, regardless of their age. In 2017, when Instagram first launched Story Ads, the company reported 150 million users were engaging with Stories. Two years later, that number is now up to 500 million. With more and more users turning to Stories, both to post and consume, Story Ad performance is bound to grow right along with the content’s adoption.

As Sánchez points out, “A big part of the News Feed audience has moved to Stories, and thus, brands need to always be ready to adapt to new consumer behavior.”