October 30, 2015 - 15:00 AMT
Instagram to let companies buy Carousel ads

Instagram said it will soon allow advertisers to buy carousel ads - a new way for brands to share more images with people interested in their posts - on a self-service basis, VentureBeat reports.

The Facebook-owned company will let advertisers buy the ads through its Ads API, Power Editor, and Ads Manager interfaces. Companies will be able to manage campaigns using Facebook’s Ads Manager within the next few weeks, Instagram said.

“By opening up the way advertisers can buy, businesses of all sizes around the world now have more flexible targeting, call-to-action button options, and can customize their offsite links to help drive maximum return,” Instagram said in a blog post today.

The company says that over the past month it’s been rolling out new ways for companies to run their ad campaigns on the platform. Campaigns can be designed to expose the company’s brand to more people with more messages. Or, they can be designed to deliver ads to people who are most likely to click through and purchase something.

These same controls can be used to manage campaigns across both Instagram and Facebook, Instagram says.

Instagram has grown from nothing in 2010 to a user base of 400 million people worldwide, 77 million of whom are in the U.S. Facebook bought Instagram for $100 million back in 2012.