Instagram ads for small businesses: how to set them up and what they cost.

Why advertise on Instagram at all?

Because your customers are there, and organic posts reach only part of them. According to DataReportal's Digital 2026 report for Greece, Meta's advertising tools showed 4.60 million Instagram users in Greece in late 2025, and Instagram's ad reach was equal to 46.3% of the total population (DataReportal).

An ad lets you choose who sees your post, for how long and with what goal. For a small business that is often the difference between a nice photo and a booking, a message or a visit.

Boost a post or use Ads Manager?

There are two ways in, and both run on the same system.

• Boost from the Instagram app. You pick an existing post and choose one goal: more profile visits, more website visits or more messages (Meta Business Help Center). It takes a few minutes and is a fair way to learn.
• Meta Ads Manager. You build a new campaign, choose Instagram as a placement and use your Facebook Page or a connected Instagram professional account (Meta Business Help Center). It gives you all objectives, separate ads for each placement and proper reporting.

Two practical notes. To advertise on Instagram you need a professional account and you must be over 16 (Meta Business Help Center). And if you add funds from the Instagram iOS app, Meta says an Apple service fee of 30% may apply in most regions, and suggests using instagram.com instead (Meta Business Help Center).

Our view: boosting is fine for testing a post. Once you spend every month, move to Ads Manager.

Which objective should you choose?

In Ads Manager, every campaign starts with one of six objectives: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion and Sales (Meta Business Help Center). The objective tells Meta which people to look for, so it should match what you actually want.

Sales needs the Meta Pixel, a piece of code on your website that measures what people do after they click (Meta Business Help Center). Meta's Conversions API sends the same data from your server and is less affected by ad blockers and browser errors (Meta Business Help Center). Without either, choose Traffic or Engagement and judge the results by your own bookings.

How much do Instagram ads cost?

There is no fixed price. You set a budget, which Meta describes as "the amount of money you want to spend on showing people your ads" and a cost control tool (Meta Business Help Center). What you get for it is decided by an auction.

• The auction. Each time someone could see an ad, Meta picks the ad with the highest total value, which combines your bid, how likely the person is to take the action you want and the quality of the ad. Meta says a more relevant ad can win against ads with higher bids (Meta Business Help Center).
• The daily budget is an average. On a single day Meta can spend up to 175% of your daily budget, but over a week (ending Saturday) never more than 7 times it (Meta Business Help Center).
• Minimum budgets vary. Meta does not publish one minimum for everyone: it depends on the country, the objective, the currency and other settings (Meta Business Help Center).
• More placements don't cost more. Meta says adding placements does not increase the cost of your ad (Meta Business Help Center).

In practice, the cost per result depends on your audience, the season, your creative and your competitors in the same auction. A beach bar in Rhodes advertising in July competes with every other business targeting tourists on the island that week.

How do you set up a first campaign properly?

1. Switch to a professional account and connect it to your Facebook Page and a Meta business account.
2. Install the Meta Pixel on your website, if you want to measure bookings or sales.
3. Choose one objective that matches one goal.
4. Define the audience: location, age and language. For tourism, target where your guests come from, not only where your business is.
5. Set a daily budget you can keep for at least two weeks.
6. Prepare creative for each placement (see below).
7. Let it run. After launch, or after a significant edit, an ad set goes through a learning phase that usually ends after about 50 results in the week after the last significant edit (Meta Business Help Center). Changing things every day restarts that learning.

What should the ad itself look like?

Instagram ads can appear in Feed, Stories, Explore, Reels and Shops (Meta Business Help Center), and each placement has its own shape.

• Feed: 1:1 or 4:5. Meta recommends 1:1 for single-image ads (Meta Business Help Center).
• Stories and Reels: 9:16, because most people hold their phones vertically (same source).
• Keep the edges clear. For 9:16 ads, Meta advises keeping the top, bottom and sides free of key text and logos, so the app's buttons don't cover them (Meta Business Help Center).
• Design for sound. Meta's developer blog says over 75% of Reels views on Instagram are sound on (Meta for Developers).

The best Instagram ads rarely look like ads. A short, real video of your place, your product or your team usually works better than a polished banner. If you are starting from zero on video, our notes on what to shoot first apply to Reels too.

What should you avoid?

• Boosting every post. Pick the posts that already do well organically.
• Too many small audiences. Each ad set needs enough results to finish learning.
• Judging after two days. Give a campaign at least one to two weeks before you decide.
• Political or social-issue ads. Since 6 October 2025, Meta no longer delivers political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU, citing the new EU rules on political advertising (Meta).

Vibrande is a digital marketing agency in Rhodes, Greece. If you want your ads planned, set up and watched every week, our Performance Marketing service covers Meta and Google, and our Short-Form Video service makes the Reels to run in them. Tell us where you're at.