How to Get Your Facebook Ad on Instagram

Thinking about running ads on Instagram? Good call. But if your entire advertising setup lives inside Facebook Ads Manager, creating a whole new campaign just for Instagram can feel like unnecessary extra work. The good news is you don't have to. You can easily get your existing Facebook ads to run directly on Instagram's feeds, Stories, and Reels.

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This guide will walk you through exactly how to do it using Facebook’s ad platform. We'll cover the simple, automatic way and the manual approach for more control, plus offer tips to make sure your ads look great and perform well once they're there.

Why Place Facebook Ads on Instagram?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." While they're both owned by Meta, Facebook and Instagram have distinct user bases and content styles. Advertising on both isn't just about showing your ad to more people, it’s about reaching the right people in the environment where they spend their time.

• Expanded Reach: Instagram offers access to a younger, highly engaged demographic that might not be as active on Facebook. Placing ads there instantly expands your potential customer pool.
• Streamlined Management: Why juggle two separate ad platforms? By managing everything through Facebook Ads Manager, you keep all your campaigns, targeting, and budgets in one centralized place. It saves time and reduces complexity.
• Efficient Budgeting: Using a single campaign that runs across both platforms allows Meta's algorithm to allocate your budget more effectively. It will automatically shift spend toward the placement (Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, etc.) that delivers the best results for the lowest cost, maximizing your return.
• Consistent Audience Targeting: You get to use Facebook’s powerful and detailed targeting engine across both platforms. The audience you meticulously built based on interests, demographics, and behaviors can be used to find similar people on Instagram without starting from scratch.

The Magic Is in the "Placements"

The single most important concept to understand is Placements. In the world of Meta Ads, "Placement" is simply where your ad gets shown. It could be the Facebook Feed, Facebook Marketplace, Messenger Inbox, Instagram Stories, the Instagram Explore page, and so on.

Getting your Facebook ad on Instagram isn't a separate, secret process. It's just a matter of selecting Instagram as one of your placements during your campaign setup. Meta gives you two main ways to handle this:

1. Advantage+ Placements (formerly Automatic Placements): This is the default, recommended setting. When you choose this, you are giving Meta permission to show your ad across its entire network of apps and services - including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and its Audience Network - wherever its algorithm believes your ad will perform best.
2. Manual Placements: This option gives you full control. You can manually check or uncheck boxes to tell Meta precisely where you want your ads to appear. For example, you could choose to run ads only on Instagram Reels and nowhere else.

For most advertisers, especially those getting started, sticking with Advantage+ Placements is the best move. It takes the guesswork out of the equation and lets the algorithm find the most efficient way to spend your money. But if you have specific goals or creative tailored for a certain format, manual placements are your best friend.

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Step-by-Step: Getting Your Ad on Instagram Feeds, Stories, and Reels

Let's walk through the exact steps inside Facebook Ads Manager. Whether you're making a new campaign or editing an existing one, the process is largely the same and happens at the "Ad Set" level.

Step 1: Start a New Campaign in Ads Manager

Inside the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, click the green "Create" button to begin.

First, you’ll choose a campaign objective. This is what you want people to do when they see your ad. Your choices include:

• Awareness: Show your ads to people most likely to remember them.
• Traffic: Send people to a destination, like your website or app.
• Engagement: Get more post-engagements, Page likes, or event responses.
• Leads: Collect leads for your business.
• App Promotion: Get people to install and use your app.
• Sales: Find people likely to purchase your product or service.

Choose the objective that best matches your business goal and click "Continue."

Step 2: Define Your Audience and Budget in the Ad Set

After setting up your campaign essentials, you'll move to the Ad Set level. This is where you configure your targeting, budget, and schedule. You'll define factors like:

• Conversion Location: Where you want the desired action to happen (e.g., on your website).
• Budget & Schedule: How much you want to spend (daily or lifetime) and when you want your ads to run.
• Audience: Who you want to see your ads. You can define this based on location, age, gender, detailed targeting (interests, behaviors), custom audiences (e.g., your email list), and lookalike audiences.

Step 3: Choose Your Placements (This is The Important Part)

As you scroll down the Ad Set page, you'll find the crucial "Placements" section. This is where you tell Meta where to run your ads.

You’ll see the two options we discussed earlier:

• Advantage+ placements (recommended): By default, this option will be selected. If you leave it as is, Meta will automatically start showing your ads on Instagram placements when its system predicts it will get you good results. No further action is needed. Your Facebook ad is now eligible to run on Instagram. Easy, right?
• Manual placements: If you want more control, select this option. A menu will appear with a list of all possible platforms and placements. You can go through this list and check or uncheck each box.

If you choose manual placements, you'll see a breakdown like this:

• Devices: Target mobile, desktop, or both.
• Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. To ensure your ads run on Instagram, simply make sure the "Instagram" box is checked. You can uncheck "Facebook" if you only want the ads to appear on Instagram.

Under the Instagram platform dropdown, you can get even more specific:

• Feeds (Instagram Feed, Explore, Shop)
• Stories and Reels (Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels)
• In-stream video ads
• Search results

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What If You Don’t Have an Instagram Account?

You can still advertise on Instagram! When you set up placements to include Instagram, Meta gives you the option to use your Facebook Page as the identity for your ad. Your Facebook Page name and profile picture will appear at the top of the ad on Instagram.

However, it's highly recommended that you connect an Instagram account to your Facebook Business Page. When you do, your Instagram handle will show up, people can tap through to your profile, and any likes or comments on the ad will be associated with your actual Instagram account, helping you build a following there.

Tailoring Your Ad Creative for Instagram

Just because you can run the exact same ad on Facebook and Instagram doesn’t always mean you should. Instagram is a much more visual-first platform, and users consume content differently, especially in Stories and Reels.

Think Vertical First

While a square (1:1 aspect ratio) or landscape image (1.91:1) works fine in the Facebook and Instagram Feeds, it doesn't look native in Stories or Reels. For these full-screen, vertical placements, a 9:16 aspect ratio creative (like a standard phone video) will always perform better. It fills the whole screen, feels more immersive, and doesn't look like a lazy ad tacked on from another platform.

Optimize with Advantage+ Creative

Thankfully, you don't always need to create a dozen versions of every ad. At the "Ad" level of your campaign setup, look for "Advantage+ creative." This tool allows Meta to automatically make optimizations for you, like:

• Adjusting image brightness or aspect ratio.
• Applying a visual template to make your creative more eye-catching.
• Showing different headlines or descriptions to the audience that is most likely to respond to them.

This is a great feature that helps bridge the gap between having one standard creative and making it suitable for multiple placements, like taking a square image and automatically turning it into a polished vertical Story creative for you.

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How to See if Your Ads Are Performing on Instagram

Once your campaigns are live, you'll want to know what's working and where. Inside Ads Manager, you can easily break down your campaign performance by placement.

1. Navigate to your campaign report.
2. Find the "Breakdown" dropdown menu positioned above your data columns.
3. Select "By Delivery" and then click "Placement."

Your report will now show separate rows for each placement your ad ran on, such as "Instagram Feed," "Instagram Stories," and "Facebook Feed." This allows you to directly compare metrics like Cost Per Click (CPC), Click-Through Rate (CTR), and conversion rates across different platforms and formats. If you see that Instagram Stories are driving sales at half the cost of the Facebook Feed, you know where to invest more of your creative energy and budget.

Final Thoughts

Effectively placing your Facebook ads on Instagram is as simple as tweaking the "Placements" setting within your ad set. Using the recommended Advantage+ setting does all the heavy lifting for you, while manual placements offer granular control for more advanced strategies. Remember to customize your creative for different placements, especially vertical formats like Stories and Reels, to maximize your campaign performance.

Of course, running the ads is just step one, understanding their true impact is what actually helps grow a business. Tracking which Facebook or Instagram ad generated a sale in Shopify or a qualified lead in HubSpot often involves hours of sifting through spreadsheets. To remove that friction, we built Graphed. It connects to all your marketing and sales platforms (like Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and Salesforce) and allows you to create real-time performance dashboards in seconds just by asking questions in plain English, helping you see the full picture of what’s really working.