How to Choose Interests for Instagram Ad

Choosing the right interests for your Instagram ads can be the difference between a high-performing campaign and lighting your budget on fire. Going too broad wastes money showing your ads to people who don't care, while going too narrow means you miss out on potential customers. This guide breaks down exactly how to find, test, and scale the right interests to get profitable results from your ads.

Why Instagram Interest Targeting Still Matters

In a world of lookalike audiences and algorithm-driven targeting, you might wonder if manually selecting interests is still relevant. The answer is a resounding yes. Interest targeting puts you in control, giving you a powerful way to reach new cold audiences and tell Meta’s algorithm exactly who to look for.

Think of it as giving the algorithm a clear starting point. While creative and ad copy are essential, showing the best ad to the wrong person is a recipe for failure. Effective interest targeting gets your ad in front of people who are already primed to care about what you offer. This immediately leads to:

• Higher Relevance Scores: Instagram wants to show users ads they find interesting. Relevant ads get rewarded with more reach.
• Better Engagement: The right audience is more likely to like, comment, save, and share your ad, creating positive social proof.
• Lower Ad Costs: Higher relevance and engagement lead to lower costs per click (CPC) and costs per acquisition (CPA), making your campaigns more profitable.

How Instagram Knows Someone's Interests

Ever wonder how Instagram knows you're suddenly into sourdough bread or Peloton workouts? It’s not magic, it’s data. Meta (the parent company of Instagram and Facebook) builds a detailed profile of each user based on their behavior across both platforms. This includes:

• Pages and Accounts They Follow: Following brands like Lululemon, influencers like Pat Flynn, or publications like The New York Times are strong interest signals.
• Content They Engage With: Every "like," comment, share, and save tells the algorithm about what a user finds interesting.
• Apps They Use: If someone connects a fitness tracking app or a Shopify store through their Facebook account, that's another data point.
• Ads They Click On: User behavior with other ads helps refine their interest profile.

Understanding these signals is your first step. Your job as an advertiser is to accurately describe your ideal customer's digital "body language" using the interests available in the Ads Manager.

A Step-by-Step Method for Finding Winning Interests

Don't just type broad terms into the targeting box and hope for the best. Follow this structured process to build a comprehensive list of high-potential interests to test.

Step 1: Build Your "Customer Persona" Interest List

Before you even open Ads Manager, grab a pen and paper or open a Google Doc. Start by brainstorming all the things your ideal customer might be interested in. Think bigger than just your product category.

Let's use an example: you sell high-quality, eco-friendly yoga mats.

• Brands They Like: What other companies would they buy from? (e.g., Lululemon, Athleta, Patagonia, Whole Foods Market)
• Influencers or Public Figures They Follow: Who are the thought leaders, celebrities, or authors in your niche? (e.g., Yoga with Adriene, Tara Stiles)
• Magazines, Blogs, or Books They Read: What media do they consume? (e.g., Yoga Journal, Mindbodygreen)
• Events They Attend: Are there conferences, festivals, or retreats your audience would go to? (e.g., Wanderlust Festival)
• Tools or Software They Use: What apps or websites do they frequent? (e.g., Headspace, Calm, a specific yoga studio’s booking app)
• Related Hobbies and Interests: What else are they passionate about? (e.g., Sustainable living, meditation, wellness, organic food, hiking)

This initial list gives you a rock-solid foundation of "seed" interests to use in the next step.

Step 2: Use Ads Manager to Expand Your List

Now, head into Meta Ads Manager and create a new campaign. When you get to the "Advantage+ audience" section in your ad set, click "Switch to original audience options" and navigate to the Detailed Targeting section. This is where the exploration begins.

Enter one of your seed interests from Step 1, like "Yoga Journal." Once it's added, click the "Suggestions" button.

Ads Manager will now show you a long list of related interests that users who are interested in "Yoga Journal" are also interested in. You’ll see things like "Yoga Pants," "Meditation," "Spirituality," and "Asana."

Repeat this process for each of your seed interests. Put one in, check the suggestions, add relevant new ideas to your master list, and repeat. You will quickly turn your initial list of 10-15 ideas into 50+ high-potential targets.

Step 3: Analyze Your Competitors and Adjacent Brands

Your competitors have already done some of the work for you. Go to a direct competitor's Instagram page and look at who they’re collaborating with, what hashtags they're using, and who is engaging with their posts. This can spark ideas for interests you hadn't considered.

Check out their "Page Transparency" section on Facebook. This shows what ads they are currently running in the Ad Library. While you can't see their exact targeting, you can get a powerful sense of the messaging and angles they are using to appeal to their audience, which can inform your own strategy.

How to Structure Your Ad Sets for Proper Testing

A great list of interests is useless if you don't test it correctly. Jamming 30 different interests into one ad set is a common mistake that masks what’s actually working.

Let’s say you target "Yoga," "Patagonia," and "Whole Foods" in the same ad set. If that ad set starts getting conversions, you have no idea which of those three interests is the true winner. Is it the yoga enthusiasts, the outdoorsy crowd, or the health-conscious shoppers? You can’t know.

Instead, structure your tests to isolate variables.

Method 1: Single Interest Ad Set (SIAS)

The purest way to test is to create separate ad sets, each with only one interest. This gives you crystal-clear data.

• Ad Set 1: Targets "Yoga Journal"
• Ad Set 2: Targets "Lululemon"
• Ad Set 3: Targets "Meditation"
• Ad Set 4: Targets "Patagonia"

Run these ad sets with the same ads and the same budget. After a few days, you'll see exactly which interest is driving the best results (e.g., lowest CPA or highest ROAS). You can then turn off the losers and allocate more budget to the winners.

Method 2: Thematic "Stacking"

Running dozens of single-interest ad sets can be a lot to manage. A more common approach is to group highly related interests into thematic "stacks." The key word here is related.

• Yoga Enthusiast Ad Set: Yoga, Yoga pants, Yoga with Adriene, Hot yoga
• Eco-Conscious Ad Set: Sustainable living, Eco-friendly, Plastic free, Veganism
• Outdoor Hiker Ad Set: Patagonia, The North Face, Hiking, National Park Service

This method works well because you’re targeting a well-defined persona in each ad set. If the "Eco-Conscious" ad set performs well, you know that entire audience profile is a good fit, and you can look for similar interests.

Best Practices for Refining Your Interest Targeting

Once you've found some winning interests, use these tips to refine and scale your campaigns.

1. Target Specific, Niche Interests

Broad interests like "Fitness" (100M+ people) are often too expensive and competitive. You're competing with massive brands with huge budgets. Instead, look for more specific interests that indicate higher purchase intent.

Instead of "Fitness," try "CrossFit," "Peloton," or "Beachbody." These smaller audiences are often more passionate and easier to convert.

2. Pay Attention to Audience Size

The Audience Definition meter in Ads Manager gives you an estimated audience size. There's no single "perfect" number, but here's a general guide:

• Less than 100k: Often too small to scale. Your ad frequency might get too high very quickly.
• 100k - 2 Million: A great sweet spot for testing. Big enough to gather data, but niche enough to be specific.
• 2 Million - 10 Million: Good for successful interests you are ready to scale.
• 10 Million+: Tends to be too broad unless you have a massive budget. Treat with caution.

3. Layer Interests with Demographics or Behaviors

The real power of Instagram's ad platform comes from combining targeting layers. Use the "Narrow Audience" function to get hyper-specific.

For example, instead of just targeting "Real Estate Investing," you could target people who are interested in "Real Estate Investing" AND match the behavior "Likely to move." This focuses on people who are not just passively curious but are actively making plans you can help with.

Another example: Target an interest like "Luxury watches" AND layer in a demographic for the top 10% of household incomes in a specific country. This weeds out aspirational browsers from actual potential buyers.

4. Exclude Audiences to Improve Efficiency

Don’t forget to use exclusions. If you’re running campaigns to acquire new customers, make sure you exclude people who have already purchased from you. There's no need to waste money showing acquisition ads to your existing loyal customers. You can create custom audiences of past purchasers or even email subscribers to exclude them from your cold traffic campaigns.

Final Thoughts

Finding the right interests on Instagram is a process of disciplined research and structured testing. It begins with truly understanding your ideal customer beyond just the product you sell, then using the tools inside Ads Manager to validate your assumptions and uncover new opportunities. By isolating your interests in testing, you gather clean data that tells you exactly where to put your money for the best return.

Once your campaigns are running, manually exporting performance data and cross-referencing it with your sales data to find the true winners can be incredibly slow and tedious. We know how frustrating it is trying to connect your ad spend in Meta Ads Manager to actual revenue in Shopify or HubSpot. That’s why we built Graphed. You can connect all your platforms, then simply ask in plain English, "What's the ROAS for my 'Yoga Enthusiast' ad set this month?" and get an instant, real-time visual. This trims hours of reporting work down to a few seconds, letting you act on campaign insights twice as fast.