Instagram ads You get one second and no sound.
That is the honest brief for Instagram. Full screen, thumb moving, phone on mute. Everything else — the audience, the budget, the bidding — matters far less than whether the first frame earns the next one.
250+ active client engagements · Creative produced in-house, vertical and captioned · Campaigns running in five countries
Seven ways Instagram
spend leaks.
Almost all of them are creative problems wearing a targeting costume. Worth knowing before you spend another month adjusting audiences.
Facebook creative pasted straight into Instagram
Square images in a full-screen placement, landscape video letterboxed into Reels, and copy written for a desktop feed. The two platforms share an ad account; they do not share an audience's behaviour.
Promoting posts from inside the app
The Promote button optimises for profile visits and engagement, not for the thing you sell. It is the fastest way to spend a few thousand dollars and be unable to say what a customer cost.
Video that needs sound to make sense
A great deal of Instagram is watched on mute, in public, one-handed. If the first three seconds do not work without audio and without captions, the rest of the video is never seen.
The first frame doing no work
A logo card, a slow pan, or two seconds of somebody walking toward the camera. The scroll decision is made before any of that finishes, and the ad is charged for either way.
One creative running for a quarter
Instagram burns through creative faster than any platform except TikTok. Frequency climbs, the cost per result follows it, and the account gets blamed for something the calendar caused.
Shopping tags and catalogue left switched off
If you sell products, a tagged post is a shorter path to checkout than any landing page. Plenty of the stores we open are running Instagram traffic ads into a homepage instead.
Reported in saves and shares
Saves and shares are useful signals about creative. They are not results. If the report does not end in enquiries or orders and what each one cost, it is not telling you whether it worked.
A phone screen, and nothing else.
No sidebar, no second column, no room for a brand story. On Instagram the format is more of the strategy than it is on any other platform we buy.
The offer, in one line a stranger understands.
So the crop is a decision, not an export setting.
Vertical for Reels and Stories, portrait in the feed, captions burned in because most of it is watched on mute. The hook sits in the first second, and the offer stays legible at the size a phone is actually held.
Then we read which placement and which hook Meta actually served, which is regularly not the one we expected. That check is the difference between making six pieces of creative and knowing which two are doing the work.
9:16
the full-screen shape
1080 × 1920 for Reels and Stories. Anything else leaves bars, and bars read as an ad before a word is registered.
4:5
the tallest the feed takes
Portrait occupies noticeably more of the screen than square on the way past. Square is a habit, not a decision.
15
seconds per Stories card
The whole idea has to land inside one card, because the next tap is always available and usually taken.
10
cards in one carousel
Ten services, suburbs or products in a single unit, each with its own image and its own destination.
2,200
characters in a caption
The ceiling, not the target. The feed truncates long before it, so the offer lives in the first line.
5
placements from one build
Feed, Stories, Reels, Explore and profile feed. Each wants its own crop and its own first frame, from the same idea.
Instagram format specifications, not performance claims.
SoudCoh · all channels
250+
Active client engagements
Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and organic, run by one team
Where campaigns run
5
Countries
Australia, the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand
Where an engagement starts
A$3,000
Minimum monthly ad spend
Our largest clients run multiple eight figures a month across paid
Figures trace to live engagements and to our published engagement terms. Public-sector and cultural clients are identified by sector and jurisdiction only. None of it is a forecast for your account.
Ten things happen on an Instagram account. Here they are, in order.
This is the part most agency pages keep vague, and it is the only part that decides whether the money works. So it is written down.
Fix the measurement before anything runs
Meta pixel and the Conversions API together, so conversions the browser loses are still sent from your website's server. Instagram and Facebook share an ad account, so this is one job, done once, properly.
Decide what a result is
Calls, form submissions, bookings, direct messages and purchases counted separately, with values attached. Saves and shares are read as signals about the creative, never as the outcome.
Brief Instagram separately from Facebook
Same account, same audiences, different room. The idea can be shared; the crop, the first frame, the caption length and the pacing cannot. Duplicating a Facebook ad in here is the most common thing we undo.
Shoot vertical, and shoot for silence
9:16 for Reels and Stories, captions burned in, and the hook inside the first second. If the opening works with the sound off and the phone held at arm's length, it will work with the sound on.
Use your own footage where it exists
The job site, the before and after, the install, the finished room. On Instagram, real material shot on a phone regularly outperforms a studio shoot, and it is far cheaper to refresh.
Build audiences from your own data first
Customer lists, website visitors, people who watched most of a video, people who opened a lead form and stopped. Instagram engagers are a real audience and almost nobody retargets them.
Keep prospecting and retargeting apart
Exclusions on every campaign, so your warmest audience is not sitting inside your most expensive one. Otherwise the reported cost per result is an average of two completely different things.
Turn shopping on properly if you sell products
Product feed, tagged posts, catalogue campaigns and dynamic retargeting for people who browsed or abandoned a cart. Instagram is one of the shortest routes to a checkout there is, and it is usually the piece a store has not switched on.
Refresh creative on a schedule
Frequency and cost per result read weekly, and new concepts queued before the current ones fade. Waiting for the numbers to drop is a month of budget spent learning something predictable.
Report in enquiries and orders, then move the budget
A fixed cadence covering what was spent, what it produced, what changed and why. If Instagram is doing the awareness and Facebook is closing, the report says so and the budget follows.
The first ninety days, honestly.
- Week 0
The audit and the first call
Thirty to forty-five minutes on what you sell, who buys it and what a customer is worth. Then we open the ad account and your profile, and write down what is missing from both.
- Week 1
Tracking, then creative
Pixel, Conversions API, conversion definitions and CRM routing go in first. Where you sell products, the catalogue and shopping tags are set up in the same pass.
- Weeks 1–2
The build and the shoot list
Audiences, exclusions, campaign structure, and a creative plan naming what needs filming versus what already exists. A second person checks all of it. Nothing is live and nothing has spent.
- Day one
You press go
Campaigns are created paused so you can read the whole build first. You activate when you are ready, not when we are.
- Weeks 2–6
Which hook, not which audience
On Instagram the creative usually explains the result more than the targeting does. We hold the structure steady long enough to read it, then keep the hooks that earned attention and replace the ones that did not.
- From there
Rhythm
A creative refresh cycle, weekly optimisation, reporting on a fixed cadence whether the news is good or bad, and a proper conversation each quarter about where the next block of budget should go.
Campaigns are created paused, every time. You read the build before a dollar moves — that is a rule we hold ourselves to, not a favour.
On Instagram, two of the six stages do most of the work.
Compound is how our team works on any account — six stages every change passes through. Creative moves fastest here, so these two carry it.
Sweep
Waste is found daily, named, and priced.
On Instagram the waste is creative rather than search terms: the Reel that has stopped earning attention, the placement quietly absorbing budget, the audience overlapping another one. Each is named and dated in a record you can open.
Ledger
Every change we make becomes a record you can open.
Creative changes hands quickly here, so “we refreshed the ads” has to mean something specific. Every concept launched, paused and replaced is logged with a date and a reason — which is also how we know what to shoot next.
Four clients. Four real numbers.
Three of these are Google Ads accounts and the tiles say so. They are here rather than dressed up as social results, because the point is the measurement: Instagram is held to the same standard, in the same units.
- Roof restoration · Melbourne · Google Ads68quote requests in 35 daysReady before the storm · insurance-literateCornerstone Roofing
- Carpet cleaning · Perth · Google Ads53jobs in the first 15 daysA$24.92 cost per job · brand-new account, no conversion history at launchCleanetic
- Automotive · Melbourne · Google Ads17calls booked in 7 daysOne service, one city, measured in answered calls rather than clicksBudget Towing Melbourne
- Media buying · AustraliaA$634Kof media kept workingFrom a A$750K annual budget, at a 15.5% agency fee against a typical 18–22%National cultural institution
Before you ask us anything
Here is what everybody asks first.
Instagram ads, answered.
Cost, timing, contracts, who owns the account and the content, reporting, and what happens when a campaign is not working.
The first call is free and there is no deck.
Talk to us about your adsTwo separate numbers. Your ad spend goes to Meta, and what it needs to be depends on how many results you want and how competitive your audience is — the smallest companies we work with invest a minimum of A$3,000 a month, and our largest clients run multiple eight figures a month across paid channels. Our management fee is separate and scales with the work. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, which is why the first call is free: you get a real number for your situation before you commit to anything.
We can usually have a first campaign live within five to seven business days — strategy, audience research, creative production, tracking setup and campaign build. After that, the first two to four weeks are a learning period while Meta works out who to show your ads to and we cut what is not carrying its share. Campaigns generally settle into their best rhythm around 60 to 90 days.
No long-term lock-in. We would rather keep the work because it is producing than because a contract says you have to stay. What we do ask for is enough runway to be fair to the account — Instagram judged on its first ten days is being judged during the part where the platform is still learning and the creative has not been tested yet. The terms are put in front of you in plain English before anything is signed.
Your Instagram profile stays yours throughout, and so does everything we shoot and edit for you — you can post it organically as well as run it as an ad. We own and run the ad account itself, because the build is proprietary methodology refined across 250+ engagements: audience architecture, exclusion logic, creative testing frameworks and conversion tracking. You get full-visibility reporting on performance and spend at all times, and on long-term marketing agreements ownership and handover options are available to discuss.
We tell you, in the report, in plain English, and we change what we are doing. On Instagram that usually means new creative before new targeting, because the hook explains more of the result than the audience does. If the honest answer is that this is not the right platform for your business, we would rather move the budget somewhere that is than keep billing you for it.
A fixed cadence, good news or bad. Each report covers what was spent, what it produced, what we changed and why, and what happens next — written in the language you use about your own business rather than platform jargon. You can also see live performance and spend for yourself at any time. If a number moved, you will find out from us before you find out from your bank statement.
Feed ads as a single image, a carousel or video; Stories ads as full-screen cards; Reels ads as vertical video between organic Reels; Explore ads that reach people in discovery mode; and shopping ads with products tagged directly in the post. Each does a different job in the customer journey, and the strongest accounts use several together rather than picking one. We build the campaign around which stage of the journey needs help, not around which format is fashionable.
We do, and it is part of the job rather than an extra — Reels scripts, Stories cards, static images, carousels and the captions that go with them. Where your own footage exists we will use it, because on Instagram real material from the job site regularly outperforms polished production. We also run a refresh cycle, so creative is replaced before fatigue shows up in the cost per result rather than after.
No. Authentic, phone-shot content often outperforms overproduced material here, because it looks like the rest of the feed rather than like an interruption. What matters is the first frame, the vertical crop, burned-in captions and a clear next step. We produce a mix of both and let the results decide which gets more budget.
Yes. Product feed and shopping tags first, then catalogue campaigns and dynamic retargeting for people who browsed or abandoned a cart, with full pixel and Conversions API tracking so revenue lands back in Ads Manager accurately. A tagged post is one of the shortest routes to a checkout available, and it is often the piece a store has not switched on. The finish line is an order rather than a booked job, but the discipline is identical.
Ads Manager, without exception. The in-app Promote button hides the objective, the audience controls, the exclusions, the placement breakdown and most of the reporting. Everything we build runs through Ads Manager so campaigns can be structured, tested and read properly — and so you can be told what a customer actually cost rather than what a profile visit cost.
Yes — by suburb, by postcode, or by a radius around your premises, set to people who live in or were recently in the area rather than anyone who has merely shown interest in it. It works the same way in any city we run: Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, and outside Australia in the UK, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and New Zealand.
The account, the pixel, the audiences and the billing are shared. The behaviour is not. Instagram skews younger, is consumed full-screen and vertically, and rewards showing the work rather than describing it. Facebook reaches a wider age range and is where lead forms do most of their work. We plan them together and brief the creative separately — the common mistake is duplicating one into the other and then concluding that the second platform does not work.
Instagram is one of five ways we buy attention.
Most accounts we run use two or three of these together, with the budget moving between them on evidence rather than being split by habit.
- Facebook adsThe same Meta account and the same tracking. Broader reach, a wider age range, and where lead forms do most of their work.
- TikTok adsThe closest platform to Reels. If vertical video is already working here, this is the cheapest place to find more of it.
- LinkedIn adsIf you sell to businesses, councils or enterprise procurement, this is the platform that targets by job title rather than by interest.
- Catching the demand Instagram createsThe other half of paid. Search catches the demand Instagram creates, and most accounts we run use both.
- One pixel, two placementsInstagram and Facebook share a single pixel. Setting it up once, correctly, is what makes the two comparable at all.
- Every paid channel we runThe hub above this page: Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok compared on cost, intent and how fast each one produces.
- Turning a tap into a counted conversionHow a tap becomes a measured conversion. Nothing on this page means anything without it.
For trades and service businesses weighing paid social against search, what is actually working on paid social right now is the shorter answer. Once the enquiries arrive, how a small contact list quietly loses warm leads is the next thing to read.
Get the Instagram audit
We read your ad account and your last ninety days of creative, tell you which hooks earned attention and which did not, and check whether your conversions are actually being counted. Yours to keep either way.
No pitch deck. No upsell. A real conversation and a written list of leaks.