OREANDA-NEWS. January 15, 2016. Instagram is one of the most important mobile platforms today, with over 400 million monthly active users, up from “just” 200 million in June 2014. Since it introduced advertising, and the ability to run mobile app install ads, in August 2015, advertisers have jumped on board this new opportunity to achieve their business goals on the platform, including app installs.  

One of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s advertising customers, Miniclip, did just that in our first published customer success story on Instagram.

Miniclip is was founded in 2001 and is a Swiss company with 140 employees in four countries and has 200 million monthly active users playing games in 195 countries. One of its leading games is 8 Ball Pool, which has over 10 billion game plays, and currently the 17th most popular free game on the iOS App Store according to App Annie.

It began advertising on Instagram because, as Jonathan Winters, User Acquisition Specialist at Miniclip, said, “Instagram has a huge audience and shares the strengths of Facebook. We reached a lot of people with simple yet engaging gameplay trailers that received extremely positive feedback: users tagged their friends below the video ad, which resulted in even more reach and installs. Instagram ads offer a very native experience, which users appreciate.”

It ran native video ads on Instagram, and for an initial campaign targeted men between 18 and 39 in the United States on iOS devices. The results were great — in that first campaign, 100,000 people clicked in the video for 8 Pool Ball, at a cost per video view of just \\$0.03. Fully 54% of people who clicked on the ad actually installed the app and people installed the game at a 22% lower cost per install than previous digital ad campaigns.

Miniclip especially appreciated the ability to measure and optimize all of their Instagram advertising in a single place with their other ads, saying, “It’s great to have all our Instagram and Facebook ads in Salesforce’s Advertising dashboard with one comprehensive view of all of our campaigns.”