Instagram's cheat code: Carousels?

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are wicked 👻

↗️ META: $8.95 CPM | ↘️ TIKTOK: $5.21 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $10.34 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 📸 Instagram’s new engagement cheat code

• This TikTok update is good news for music marketers 🤘

• 📌 Four things you need to know about Pinterest

But first…

🚀 Are social media ad rates going up in 2025?

In short: Almost certainly. In our annual report on the True Cost of Social Media Ads in 2024—built on billions of ad impressions across the top social media platforms from our real-time Social Media CPM Tracker—we uncover seasonal and year-over-year trends for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. 

So yes, social media ad rates have been going up—as they have been for the past four years. But the smarter questions are: How much, and when, and on which platforms? 

The results may surprise even seasoned media buyers: 

• Given the hype about Meta’s ad inflation, we found Facebook’s and Instagram’s ad rates are rising more slowly than their competitors. 

• And while TikTok has been the top challenger platform for the past two years, in 2024, by far the fastest-rising ad rates belong to Snapchat—where CPM rates rose by 27%.

▶️ Dig into the data to find out the most and least expensive months, weeks, and days of the year for each platform.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

📌 Pinterest joins the many platforms who are testing quality-of-life and performance-enhancing ad options. Here’s an advance look at what they’ve announced recently: 

• Ad Group Scheduling: Pinterest is Alpha-testing new functionality that allows ad-group level scheduling, which can simplify the workflow for advertisers seeking to schedule ad groups. 

• ROAS Bidding Beta with Performance+: Also in the testing phase, this feature can help you focus on maximizing conversion value, therefore increasing the potential to drive Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). 

• Auto UTM tagging is now available. This can be enabled in Business Manager or when creating an AI-enabled Performance+ campaign.

Holiday Campaign Launch Guide: Set up your campaigns for success during the peak holiday season with Pinterest’s new best-practices guide.

📸 Instagram has revealed another cheat code for organic engagement: Carousels. Doubling down on advice the platform has hinted at previously, Mr. Instagram himself, Adam Mosseri, says you’re going to want to use them. Why are carousels receiving expanded reach? “Two main reasons,” Mosseri says. 

• “One, multiple pieces of media are going to mean more interactions with your carousel posts, and more interactions is going to mean more reach on average.” 

• “And two, if someone sees your carousel post but they don’t swipe, we’ll often give that carousel a second chance and automatically move to that second piece of media for the viewer.”

📽️ Mosseri also clarified a long-standing question for brands who post video to Reels. A few years back, Instagram began punishing Reels uploaded with a TikTok logo—part of a move to discourage reposting from its competitors. That led to a suspicion across the industry that any videos with a watermark could get dinged by the algorithm—but Mosseri says that’s not true. Specifically, brands that upload videos watermarked with a logo are fine. “That’s actually good to go,” Mosseri said in a recent video.  

🧐 Ever wonder why some of your Instagram videos look blurrier than others? According to Mosseri, it’s because Instagram reduces the quality of posts that get less engagement. If the number of views increases, Instagram will re-render the clip to make it look better. 

📖 With more and more of Instagram’s engagement happening privately — in users’ DMs — the platform is testing a new “Social Library” feature. Spotted by a user in the wild, the library lives in your DMs and is described as a “section where you can easily find posts, Reels, and media you’ve shared or received in chat threads, collections, and likes.”

⏰ TikTok is expanding its “Add To App” feature—which allows users to save their music to streaming services like Spotify—in ways that music marketers will adore.

🎵 First up: it appears TikTok will allow listeners to pre-save albums in Spotify, not just songs.

🤝 Next: TikTok just introduced a new Page Visits x Add to Song solution that will serve content to users who: are more likely to visit the sound page AND are also more likely to watch and create content on the page AND add the song to their music app. There's an optional "Add song to music app" CTA, either alone or with other CTAs dynamically. Keep in mind: 

• This is available for Spark Ads only (Push or Pull is fine)

• Music Sharing must be turned on

• Minimum budgets may apply depending on the market you’re running in, as well as the number of video creations attached to the sound page. 

• TikTok is negotiating with the DSPs to be able to report on the number of sound page video views, video creates, and add songs.

⏱️ Coming Soon: TikTok is testing a Dual Event Optimization objective that lets advertisers optimize for a secondary event—such as “complete payment”—in addition to their primary lead-gen event, such as “submit form” or “complete registration.”

🧵 Threads — not to be confused, ahem, with the best performance marketing newsletter in the world — is now at 275 million monthly active users (MAU), up from 200 million in August, according to Meta’s Q3 earnings report. Separately, Meta is also rolling out best-practices on building engagement on the platform. Among the highlights: 

• Writing is good! “Video, photos, and carousel posts with text outperform those without text.”

• Reply guys are good! “We’ve found that replies account for almost half of the views on Threads, so try joining a conversation to reach more people.”

• Comedy is good! “Funny content receives a higher number of views on Threads, so don’t be afraid to add a little humor.” 

🔥 Hot Tip: While you’re testing all those new engagement ideas, you can now check out your Threads insights on mobile. 

🔎 Google Ads is piloting a new Search Ads feature called Business Links. They function similarly to sitelinks, but with added flexibility in the form of customizable headlines—up to three per link—and generative AI enhancements that are enabled by default, but can be disabled in campaign settings.

🛒 Looking for a deeper dive on Amazon Advertising? Check out the new and improved version of their learning console, Amazon Ads Academy. There are modules on Prime Video ads, Twitch, Sponsored Brands and more.

🐘The Elephant In the Room: Our weekly office poll!

Sorry, we didn’t have time to come up with a real poll today, we’re too busy playing with Instagram’s secret Halloween DM animations.

📊 Last edition’s poll results: After you pay $20/month for ChatGPT4, what would you spend the rest of your $300 million AI budget on? 

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ An Airbus A380 

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ A 500-foot Lurssen yacht 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 A trip for 3 to the U.S. Space Station

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

In the meantime, stay up to date with the latest performance marketing intelligence by following us on Linkedin, Instagram, and X.