How to Create Instagram Stories Polling Sticker Ads

Are you interested in increasing knowledge through your Instagram Advertising promotions, knowing their pain points, gaging their curiosity in preferences, and driving more engagement? Of course, you are as a company or ad-account director! You can now achieve all of these objectives by adding an interactive polling sticker onto your Instagram Story ads.

Read on as we explain how you can easily set up polling in your Instagram Ads promotions, discuss the different ways different brands are currently using them, and how you can also obtain your Instagram Story ads poll results — because they’re quite hidden in Ads Manager — and how you can use that knowledge to enhance your comprehensive business objectives.

Why use polls in ads for your Instagram stories?

Instagram polls provide you with an opportunity to connect with your clients and prospects, find out what they care about, and test new ideas on content. Instagram launched this feature in last year’s Stories ads so you can actually pay to have these questions answered now and discover new ways to reach your audience.

Upon viewing your ad, users can tap on one of the two poll options, and Ads Manager will record all of their responses. So, beyond just engaging with your Stories ad, material, and brand, interactive polls give you valuable insights into the desires and expectations of your audience. Plus, you can build custom audiences to re-engage certain people who have been associated with your survey.

1. Pick the Placement of Instagram stories only

There are a couple of settings you need to know about when you set up your Instagram Stories ad while using polls in your Stories ads.

When you access your ad collection in Facebook Ads Manager’s Placements section, select the Manual Placements option.

You’ll also see types of placement for Feeds, News, In-Stream, etc. Instagram Stories is the one box that should be opened. If something else is tested, the poll option will immediately disappear from your creative.

2. Set up ad poll for your Instagram stories

Now let’s step creatively onto your ad. 

The first choice for your creative person to make is whether to run a video or a picture with your vote. I typically suggest that marketers stick to still images with polls because audiences are still trying to find out quickly what’s happening in the story. That makes it harder to have too many things on the screen at once.

When there are a video playing, a polling question, and only 15 seconds to find out your post, people will most likely only understand one of those things before they’re on to the next story. You want to base the survey on them. From that, the video will distract.

Choose your question and two choices for the interactive survey

After uploading your advertising image, scroll past where you see items like Website URL and Call to Action, and see a category called Stories Customizations. Select Add an engaging poll checkbox, and you will see a bunch of survey-related fields.

The first area is for your question about the poll. It has a boundary of 90 characters, which is pretty long too. Look at the preview pane on the right after you type in your question, to see how it will appear on your picture.

In white Times New Roman font, the text for your item will be. This is the norm, and you can’t alter it sadly. The white text in the illustration below is against a black background, so it works perfectly.

If, though, the white text is on a predominantly white or busy background, it doesn’t work either.

Thinking through what your history is about to be is critical. Even though you can not change the appearance of the text, you can monitor which picture of the ad will be in the background.

Tip: One way to work around the limitations of text formatting is to leave the field of Poll Question blank and then use the text on your ad image to ask your question. Ads Manager allows you to adjust the sticker’s positioning (as I will talk about in a moment), so it’s in the correct place in your image.

You will also need to pick the two choices that you enter in the boxes of Poll Options 1 and 2 for your vote.

Choose Your Vote Positioning Settings

The challenging part of your poll design is changing the sticker’s width (size), rotation (angle), and horizontal and vertical positioning. It would be awesome if you could click on the picture to show where you want the poll to be, but this is not how the setup process works.

And if you mess too much with these settings, it starts to get strange, because Ads Manager will refuse to make your picture and say you’re outside of the showable area. So you may want to mess around with just one setting at a time until you get your bearings on how to use it.

I suggest you keep it easy with your Instagram Stories ads when you start running polls first. You’re probably going to want to say your settings are going to drop about 50 percent for horizontal and 50 percent for vertical.

Once you have finished setting up your creative ad, you will be ready to run your ad for story.

3. Check your interactive poll results

To view poll results in your Instagram Stories ad, go to Ads Manager’s creative pane to find your ad. Click the Show Charts choice and swipe over it.

When the window opens to the right, scroll down past the ad preview to find the effects of the interactivity. You will see the answers to your polling here.

Ads Manager shows you the spread of the ad (which is the number of people that you reached), how many polls you got out of that, and how many responses each alternative received. You can also see the ratio of the total received in each answer.

Build Personalized Poll-Taker Audiences

Facebook allows you to create unique groups of people who interacted with your Instagram posts or ads, and anyone who interacted with your Instagram Stories advertising falls into that category. But instead of just being a person reacting to a question, the poll-taker is now part of a re-marketing group based on the fact that they were engaging with you. Of course, they are interested in your brand.

In Advertising Manager, go to the Audiences dashboard to build this audience. Then press Build Audience, and from the drop-down menu, choose the Custom Audience.

In the Build a Custom Audience window, you’ll see a whole host of different choices for this audience to choose from as the source. You want to pick Business Profile for Instagram.

By selecting an option from the drop-down menu below your Instagram account name, you can now narrow this audience up a bit. To build an audience of people who have interacted with your ad, select Someone who has communicated with Any Post or Ad.

Facebook also lets you decide how many days people will stay in this group after they engage with your posts or advertisements. You may want to create various segments of how people have recently interacted with you because that audience can change over time.

Click on Build Audience after you enter a name for that audience.

At this point, whenever someone interacts in any way with your Instagram ads, whether they take a poll or not, they’ll be added to that group. They picked themselves as someone ready to connect with your brand. Right there’s an incredible opportunity to run engagement ads, get more people interested in your company, and then make them move forward in a re-marketing audience.

Conclusion

Instagram Stories ads running social polls is a perfect way to interact with your fans and customers and get input from them. You invite them not only to be part of your brand story and its development but also to gain valuable insight into their desires and preferences.

To customize your poll for optimum engagement follow the above steps. Make sure you review the results of your survey and build custom audiences to re-engage the people who were engaged in your polling.

What are you thinking? Will you consider running a poll ad on Instagram Stories? What kind of questions will you ask? Share your opinions in the comment section below.