There is no separate price list for Instagram, because Instagram is a placement inside Meta rather than a product of its own. What that means for your bill, why insisting on Instagram only tends to cost you more, and the one expense that genuinely is higher here.
People arrive at this question for a good reason. Their customers are visibly on Instagram, the competition posts there constantly, and it feels like the obvious place to put a few hundred pounds.
Then they go looking for the price and find nothing but averages that disagree with each other.
The reason there is no straight answer is more interesting than the usual "it depends". It is that the thing being priced does not exist as a separate thing at all.
You cannot really buy Instagram ads on their own
Instagram advertising is run out of Meta Ads Manager, the same tool that runs Facebook. Meta puts it plainly on its own Instagram advertising page: "Boost any post to turn it into an ad, or use Ads Manager for more advanced multi-platform campaigns." Multi-platform is the operative word. You build one campaign and decide which surfaces it is allowed to appear on.
Those surfaces are called placements. Instagram Feed is one. Instagram Stories is another. Reels, Explore and the rest sit alongside Facebook Feed, Messenger and the Audience Network in the same list.
Choosing "Instagram" is ticking some boxes on that list, not buying a different product with a different rate card.
Which means the whole pricing engine underneath is identical to Facebook's: the same auction decides what you pay, the same learning period applies before your costs settle, the same daily budget rules govern the spending, and VAT works the same way.
We have written all of that up in detail in our guide to what Facebook ads cost in the UK, and rather than repeat it here, this article sticks to the parts that genuinely change when the ad is going on Instagram.
Why insisting on Instagram only tends to cost you more
When you build a campaign you either let Meta decide where to show the ad or you pick the placements yourself. The default is the former, and there is a decent argument for leaving it alone even when Instagram is the platform you care about.
Meta calls the automatic option Advantage+ placements, and its own page for the feature lists the surfaces it can use: "Facebook from Meta, Reels, Instagram Stories, Instagram Feed, Messenger from Meta, marketing messages on WhatsApp and Meta Audience Network".
Meta also publishes a figure for it, saying "ad sets using Advantage+ placements saw an average CPA improvement of 11.7%".
Treat that with the scepticism any company's number about its own product deserves, but the mechanism behind it is real enough. Both of those quotations were read on 20 August 2026, direct from Meta.
The mechanism is simply auction maths. Every impression is bid for separately, and prices vary constantly by surface, by hour and by who else is competing.
Give the system six places to look and it can spend your budget wherever the same customer happens to be cheapest that morning. Tick one box only and it has to buy that customer in the one room you have allowed, at whatever the room is charging.
| Let Meta choose the placements | Instagram only | |
|---|---|---|
| What the system can do | Buy your result wherever it is cheapest that day | Buy it in one place at that place's price |
| Typical effect on cost per result | Lower, because it has options | Higher, because it has none |
| What you learn | Where your customers actually respond | Only how Instagram performs |
| When it is the right call | Almost always, for a local business | When the creative only works vertically, or your audience genuinely is not on Facebook |
There is a respectable case for Instagram only, and it is worth stating fairly.
If your ad is a piece of vertical video that would look absurd in a Facebook feed, or if you sell to an audience that genuinely does not use Facebook, then restricting delivery buys you consistency and is worth paying a bit more for.
What is not respectable is restricting it because Instagram feels more modern. That preference has a price, and it is your price.
Meta documents the full placement list and what each one supports on its page about ad placements across its technologies, which is worth ten minutes before you start ticking boxes.
The cost that genuinely is higher on Instagram
Here is where Instagram really does cost more, and almost nobody puts it in the budget. It is not the media, it is the making.
Facebook will happily run a landscape photograph of a finished kitchen with a paragraph underneath. Instagram's best placements will not.
Stories and Reels fill a phone screen top to bottom, which means vertical, which means the picture you already have is the wrong shape. And the surfaces that pull hardest on Instagram want movement rather than a still.
| Placement | What it wants | What it costs you to make |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram Feed | Square or upright image, or short video | Little, if you already photograph your work |
| Instagram Stories | Full-screen upright, text kept clear of the edges | A reshoot, or a careful recrop |
| Instagram Reels | Upright video that sits naturally among ordinary posts | Filming time, every month, not once |
| Explore | Whatever stops a stranger scrolling | Your strongest asset, not your spare one |
The practical consequence is that an Instagram budget has two lines where a Facebook budget can sometimes get away with one.
Plan for the second line and the campaign runs for months. Ignore it and you end up stretching one landscape photo across placements it was never cut for, paying full price for an ad that looks borrowed.
The cheap version of this is your own phone, filmed on the job, which genuinely works. The expensive version is a proper shoot, and our content creation service starts at £350 for a full day. Either is fine. Having neither, and hoping a still image will carry a Reels placement, is the one option that quietly wastes the media budget as well.
What you need in place before you can spend anything
Small thing, but it stops more people than you would expect, usually on the evening they finally sat down to do it.
- A professional account. Instagram advertising runs off a business or creator account, not a personal one. The switch takes a minute and changes nothing your followers see.
- A connected Facebook Page. Ads Manager is a Meta tool, so it expects a Page behind the Instagram account even if you never post to it. Plenty of businesses have one they have forgotten the login for.
- A payment method and, if you have one, your VAT number on the account before the first invoice rather than after.
That last point is worth a minute of somebody's time, because the VAT treatment is not what most people assume and it is not the same on every platform. We covered exactly how it works, and what it costs you to get wrong, in the Facebook ads pricing guide.
Where Instagram genuinely beats Facebook, and where it does not
Since you are choosing placements rather than platforms, this stops being a loyalty question and becomes a practical one. Some jobs suit one surface and some suit the other, and a campaign is allowed to use both.
| The job | Better suited to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Showing off visible craftsmanship | Upright video and strong photography are the native language there | |
| Emergency and same-day callouts | Older homeowners, community groups and a habit of tagging a tradesman in the comments | |
| Beauty, food, fitness, retail | The buying decision is largely visual and often impulsive | |
| Reaching people over about fifty | Simply where more of them are, in most UK towns | |
| Building recognition over months | Both | Repeated sightings across surfaces cost less than repeated sightings in one |
It is why we rarely recommend picking a side. Classica Beauty, on our portfolio, is exactly the sort of business people assume should be Instagram only: a private studio selling beautiful, visual work. What her published result actually credits is paid ads and local SEO working together, which is nearly always the shape of it. The platform is a detail; the diary is the outcome.
How to find your own Instagram number
Every average you will read came out of another business, in another sector, with another offer. Your own figure is knowable inside a month, and almost nobody goes and looks at it.
Ads Manager will break any campaign down by placement. Run one campaign with the placements left open, let it settle, then split the report by where the ads were delivered. You get exactly what Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories, Reels and the Facebook surfaces each cost you per result, from your own money rather than a benchmark.
That report answers the question this article is named after better than any figure we could print. It also settles arguments quickly.
Plenty of owners discover that the surface they were emotionally attached to is the expensive one, and that the enquiries were quietly arriving from somewhere they had written off.
What it costs to have it run for you
Our fee for managing paid campaigns is £300 a month, flat, whether the ads run on Instagram, Facebook or both, and it is published rather than quoted. Meta charges the media budget to your own card, and no percentage of it passes through us. Our paid advertising service explains what actually happens month to month, and every fee is listed on the packages page.
What you are paying for is largely judgement about the things above: which placements to allow, what to make for them, and when to stop doing something that is not working. The media budget buys attention. The fee buys somebody noticing.
Frequently asked questions
Are Instagram ads more expensive than Facebook ads?
Not inherently, since both run through the same Meta auction. What raises the cost is restricting delivery to Instagram alone, which narrows where your budget can be spent. The creative also costs more to produce, because Instagram placements are upright and video-first.
Can I run Instagram ads without a Facebook page?
Not through Ads Manager, which expects a connected Page even if you never post to it. You can boost a post from within the Instagram app with less setup, but you give up most of the control over objective, audience and placement in exchange.
Should I let Meta choose where my ads appear?
For most local businesses, yes. Letting the system deliver across its surfaces gives it more chances to find your customer cheaply, and Meta publishes its own figures claiming better cost per action as a result. Restrict placements only when the creative or the audience genuinely demands it.
Do I need video to advertise on Instagram?
Not for feed placements, where a strong upright image still works. You do need it for Stories and Reels, which are the surfaces that reach people who do not follow you. Filming on a phone at the job is perfectly acceptable and often outperforms polished work.
Do Instagram ads work for local service businesses?
They work well where the work is visible: beauty, food, fitness, gardens, bathrooms, anything that looks better at the end than the beginning. They work less well for urgent problems, where people search rather than scroll. Judge on enquiries rather than on likes.
Working out what to put behind it
What Instagram ads cost in the UK is really three decisions rather than a price: how much you can commit for long enough to learn something, whether you let Meta look beyond Instagram for the same customer, and what you are prepared to make for the placements that matter.
Get those right and the media budget stretches considerably further than it does for whoever is bidding against you. Rather than guess at any of the three, drop us a line and we will go through your numbers with you.
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