Dive Brief:

• Instagram is now selling clickable ads to directly reach businesses and brands on Facebook Messenger, according to a blog post by the company. The ad placements will be available to all businesses in the next few months.
• The click to Messenger ads can direct Instagram users to a business' content, including text, image and video, and takes them into a text-based conversation. Marketers can place the ads through its Ads Manager and Power Editor dashboards or the app program interface.
• Facebook says more than 1.2 billion people use Messenger every month, while 20 million active pages on the social media platform also use the chat service. In addition, more than 100,000 bots interact with people through Messenger, Facebook said in the blog post. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, now has 700 million users worldwide.  

Dive Insight:

Facebook first introduced the click to Messenger ad format on its main platform November. Now, users can more directly connect with brands via Instagram, while brands can better extend their reach and customer service facilities across more Facebook properties. Instagram has the highest user engagement rate of any social network, according to a study by content marketing platform Yotpo, with users spending an average of 192 seconds looking at the app with each visit, compared to 106 seconds on Facebook.

Facebook Messenger, after some rocky early integrations of chatbot technologies, is looking to become more accommodating to businesses, with some notable successes. After incorporating its digital assistant into Messenger, cosmetics chain Sephora saw an 11% higher boost in conversions than it did through other media, Facebook said. That lift echoes Yotpo's finding that about one-third of Instagram users have purchased a product they first saw on the mobile app, and tying the two platforms more closely together could prove to be a powerful driver of engagement and sales for brands. 

The addition of Instagram's click to Messenger ads comes a week after the app began testing direct response ads in its Stories section, which lets users share vertical video clips for a 24-hour period in a manner emulative of Snapchat. Before adding the direct response element, Stories ads were geared more toward advertisers whose goals were to boost reach and frequency. Click to Messenger ads will also likely help close the loop between seeing an ad and engaging with it directly.

For another look at Instagram's new direct to Messenger ads, check out Andrew Hutchinson's analysis over at Social Media Today.