How Do I Run Ads Using Instagram Reels? A Straight-Through Guide That Works

The short version: you run ads on Instagram Reels either by tapping "Boost" on an existing reel or by building a proper Reels placement inside Meta Ads Manager, and if you want actual sales rather than vanity views, Ads Manager wins every time. Budget at least £10-15 a day for a week before you judge results, use vertical 9:16 footage with the first three seconds doing all the work, and stop making your ads look like ads because that is precisely what tanks them.

The two routes into Reels ads, and why one of them is a trap

There are two ways to get an ad in front of someone scrolling their Reels feed. The first is the little blue "Boost post" button under a reel you've already published. Instagram makes this look like the whole job. It isn't. Boosting sends your money into a simplified, watered-down version of the ad system, with fewer targeting options, weaker reporting, and objectives that usually default to "profile visits" or "reach" rather than anything that touches your bank balance.

The second route is Meta Ads Manager, the same tool that runs Facebook ads, where Reels is simply one of several placements you can select. This is where real advertisers work, and it's where you get control over the objective, the audience, the budget, the creative, and the actual conversion tracking. If you have ever wondered why your boosted reel got 4,000 views but zero sales, this is why. It was never built to sell.

Setting it up, step by step

Here's the sequence I use with clients, and it takes about twenty minutes once you've done it once.

• Go to Meta Ads Manager, not the Instagram app. You need a Facebook Business Manager account linked to your Instagram business or creator profile. If you're still running a personal account, switch it first.
• Choose your objective. Meta gives you options like Sales, Leads, Traffic, Engagement, and Awareness. For most small businesses I work with, "Sales" or "Leads" is the right pick, because it tells the algorithm to find people likely to buy or fill in a form, not just watch.
• Set your budget. Daily budget is easier to control than lifetime budget when you're testing. Start at £10-20 a day.
• Build your audience. You can go broad (18-65, one country, interests turned off) or narrower with interests and lookalikes. For new advertisers with no pixel data yet, broad targeting with strong creative often outperforms clever targeting with weak creative, which surprises almost everyone the first time they try it.
• Pick placements manually. Meta defaults to "Advantage+ placements," which spreads your budget across Facebook feed, Stories, Reels, Messenger, and the Audience Network. To specifically run ads using Instagram Reels, click "Edit placements" and select only Instagram, then only Reels underneath it. This forces every penny into that one placement so you can judge how it performs.
• Upload vertical creative. 9:16 ratio, ideally 1080x1920 pixels, 15-30 seconds long. Anything shot horizontally will get cropped or letterboxed and look amateur in the worst way.
• Add your primary text, headline, and call to action, then hit publish.

The creative rule nobody selling you an ads course wants to admit

Here's the uncomfortable bit. The best-performing Reels ads I have built for clients over the past two years were not the polished ones. They were filmed on an iPhone, in a kitchen or a car, with imperfect lighting and a slightly wobbly hand. One client, a skincare brand based in Hertfordshire, spent £3,000 on a slick agency-produced video ad with a voiceover artist and motion graphics. It got a 0.6% click-through rate. Three weeks later her founder filmed herself on her phone talking about why she started the brand, no script, one take, and that ad got a 2.4% click-through rate and cost her nothing beyond her time. Four times the performance from a video that cost £0 to make.

The reason is simple and slightly annoying if you've spent money on production. Instagram Reels is a feed people watch to see other people, not to watch adverts. The moment your footage looks like a TV commercial, the brain flags it as an interruption and thumbs scroll past. Footage that looks like it belongs in the feed, shaky, honest, human, gets watched because it doesn't trigger the "this is an ad, skip" reflex until it's already earned three or four seconds of attention. That's often enough for Instagram's algorithm to register a watch-through and start showing it to more people.

What it costs, with real figures

Meta doesn't publish a fixed price list, and costs shift by industry, season, and audience size, but here are the ranges I see most often for UK and US accounts running Reels-only placements:

• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions): roughly £4 to £9 for Reels placements, often cheaper than Facebook feed because there's still more ad inventory space relative to demand.
• CPC (cost per click) for a Sales objective: typically £0.30 to £1.20, depending on niche. Ecommerce and lower-cost consumer goods sit at the cheaper end; B2B and financial services sit higher.
• Minimum viable test budget: I tell clients not to draw conclusions on anything under £70-100 spent per ad. Below that, Meta's algorithm hasn't had enough data to leave the learning phase, and your results will bounce around meaninglessly.

A candle business I advised last spring ran three different reels through Ads Manager, £15 a day each, for seven days, £105 per creative. One reel (a "packing your order" behind-the-scenes clip) returned a 3.1x return on ad spend. The other two barely broke even. Without splitting the budget across three creatives and giving each one a full week, she'd never have found the winner, because averaging the three together would have shown a mediocre 1.4x return that looked fine but hid a strong performer underneath.

Common mistakes that quietly burn budget

• Using an existing organic reel without editing it for ads. Reels made purely for organic reach often bury the offer at the end. Ads need the hook and the offer within the first ten seconds, because people are less patient when they know, even subconsciously, that they're watching a paid placement.
• Ignoring the safe zone. Instagram overlays profile info, captions, and the like/comment buttons on the right and bottom of every reel. If your text or product sits behind those, viewers can't read it. Keep key text within the centre 1080x1420 area of the frame.
• Turning ads on and off constantly. Every time you edit an ad significantly or pause and restart it, it re-enters the learning phase and gets more expensive again for a few days. Let a test run its full course before touching it.
• Forgetting sound isn't guaranteed. Roughly a large share of Reels are watched with sound off in public settings. Always add captions burnt into the video, not just relying on Instagram's auto-captions, which can misfire on names or numbers.

If you're also trying to build organic reach alongside paid, it's worth reading up on how to grow Instagram followers and views organically, because a healthy organic account tends to make paid ads perform better too. Meta's system does look, quietly, at whether an advertiser's account behaves like a real, active business rather than a shell built purely to run ads.

Repurposing and troubleshooting your creative

Most of my clients aren't filming fresh content for every single ad. They're pulling from a bank of reels they've already posted, which is smart, but it does introduce a couple of practical headaches worth flagging. If you're gathering reels from a client, a freelancer, or your own archive to test as ads, knowing how to download multiple Instagram reels using saved links without wasting an afternoon clicking one by one saves genuine time when you're building out a test batch of ten or fifteen clips.

Playback problems also show up more with ads than organic posts, because ads get served on a wider range of devices and connection speeds. If your own preview keeps stuttering while you're checking the creative before launch, it's worth ruling out device issues first, and this piece on why Instagram Reels keep pausing mid playback covers the usual culprits, from file compression to app cache, before you assume the ad itself is broken.

And if your Reels ad is performing well and you want it working double duty, you can push the same creative to a wider audience by learning how to share Instagram Reels directly to Facebook, since Meta will often let strong organic performance on one platform inform how the paid version behaves on the other.

When Reels ads are the wrong tool

I'll say the thing most guides skip. Reels ads are brilliant for awareness, for warming up cold audiences, and for products that are visually interesting or emotionally simple to explain in fifteen seconds. They are a poor fit for complicated B2B services, high-ticket consulting, or anything that needs three paragraphs of context before someone understands the offer. I've had clients insist on running Reels ads for a £15,000 consultancy package because "that's where the attention is," and it burns money because nobody makes a £15,000 decision off a fifteen-second video, no matter how good it is. For that kind of offer, Reels ads work better as the top of the funnel, feeding a retargeting campaign or an email list, rather than trying to close the sale on the spot.

One more thing worth knowing before you commit budget: if a chunk of your audience has Reels turned off or minimised in their feed preferences, your ad simply won't reach them regardless of targeting. It's a small percentage, but it explains part of the gap you sometimes see between projected reach and actual delivered impressions, and it's covered from the audience side in this piece on how to turn off or disable Reels on Facebook.

For the rest of the series, see the Instagram Help: 81 Guides to Followers, Hashtags, Money, Accounts and Fixes.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a big following to run ads on Instagram Reels?

No, and this trips people up constantly. Ads run through your Instagram business profile regardless of follower count, because Meta's ad delivery is based on your targeting and budget, not your existing audience size. I've launched Reels ads for accounts with under 200 followers that outperformed accounts with 20,000, because the creative and offer mattered more than the follower count behind it.

How long should a Reels ad be?

Between 15 and 30 seconds tends to perform best. Under 15 seconds often doesn't give the algorithm enough watch-time signal to judge quality, and over 30 seconds sees a sharp drop-off in completion rate unless the content is gripping. Keep your hook, the visual or line that stops the scroll, within the first 3 seconds.

Can I boost a reel and still get good results, or do I have to use Ads Manager?

You can boost and still get reach, but boosting limits your objective options and targeting, and it doesn't reliably optimise for sales or leads the way Ads Manager does. Use boosting only for quick awareness pushes on content that's already proving itself organically, and use Ads Manager for anything where you need a return on the spend.

Why did my Reels ad get approved but isn't spending my full daily budget?

This usually means your audience is too narrow, your bid is too low for the placement's current competition, or the ad is still early in the learning phase and Meta is deliberately spending cautiously while it gathers data. Widening the audience slightly or increasing the daily budget by 20 to 30 percent for a few days often resolves it.

Sources worth reading

• Instagram's own Help Centre
• Meta's Business Help Centre