This week marks a year since Instagram introduced its Stories feature and to coincide, it's revealed the first case study results from an advertiser.
Qantas was one of the first brands to start running paid ads in Stories, with a campaign for AWOL, its youth travel media brand.
It set out to drive brand awareness, ad recall and recommendations among a millennial audience, particularly young men.
The ‘Off the beaten track’ campaign developed with Junkee Media, which runs the AWOL content platform, reached 1.95 million people on Instagram, and resulted in an uplift in brand recall and brand awareness among the target audience.
Facebook says more than 250 million people are using the Stories feature daily, but hasn’t provided any numbers for the Australian market.
The initial results for the campaign show a five-point lift in ad recall among males aged 25-34 and a four-point lift in brand awareness among the same group.
It achieved three-point lift in brand awareness with millennials, and a four-point lift in ad recall with females aged 18-24.
“We’re constantly innovating to tell our brand story in new, creative ways on mobile. Instagram was a natural fit to launch the first brand campaign for AWOL because it resonates with the millennial audience and allows us to tell really impactful visual stories that move brand metrics,” says Clarabella Burley, digital communications manager at Qantas.
Instagram was unable to provide any further info on how that compares with other campaigns, or whether it reflects the kind of results most advertisers are seeing.
Instagram says in the last month, over 50% of businesses on Instagram produced an Instagram Story and claims one in five organic stories from businesses gets a direct message in response.
To calculate brand lift for a campaign, the campaign's target audience is divided into a test group and a control group. The test group contains people who are eligible to see the adverts and the control group contains people who won't see the adverts. The people within the test group that actually see your adverts become part of the exposed group and both are polled. The difference in responses between the two groups is analysed.
Users are polled on things including brand awareness, campaign awareness and advert recall, with questions along the lines of:
- Do you recall seeing an advert for [Qantas/AWOL] online or on a mobile device in the last two days?
- Which of the following comes to mind first when you think of [AWOL]?
- Would you recommend [Qantas/AWOL] to a friend?
- Have you heard of [Awol]?
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