How do I run the same ad on Facebook and Instagram?
You do not create two ads. Facebook and Instagram are placements of a single Meta ad, controlled at the ad set level: with both platforms selected, which is the default under Advantage+ placements, one ad serves across Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, Stories and Reels from one budget. Connect your Instagram account to the Facebook Page in business settings so the ad runs under your own Instagram identity, and supply 9:16, 1:1 and 4:5 versions so every surface gets a native shape.
Last updated 2026-08-11
One ad, many surfaces
Meta's ad system treats Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network as delivery surfaces for a single ad object, not as separate products. The ad set's placement settings decide where the ad may serve, and delivery allocates impressions across the allowed surfaces auction by auction. This is why there is no such thing as duplicating a campaign for Instagram: the duplicate would just be a second ad set competing with the first for the same people. One ad set with both platforms enabled gets you cross-platform delivery, unified reporting under one ad, and a single learning phase fed by events from every surface at once.
Link the Instagram account first
Connect your Instagram account to the Facebook Page in your business settings before launching. Without the link, Meta can still serve to Instagram using your Page's name and picture as a stand-in identity, but viewers cannot tap through to a real profile and engagement does not accrue to your account. With it, ads run under your actual Instagram handle, comments land where you can moderate them, and profile visits become an asset you keep. The link is set once per Page and applies to subsequent ads. Agencies should confirm the client's own Instagram is linked, not a placeholder, because retrofitting identity after launch means new ads.
Automatic versus manual placements
Advantage+ placements, the default, lets Meta serve wherever it expects results, which generally includes both platforms and is the reasonable starting point: broader placement inventory gives the auction more chances to find cheap impressions. Manual placement selection exists for deliberate exclusions, like a brand that does not want Audience Network inventory or a creative that only makes sense full-screen. What to avoid is superstitious pruning, cutting placements because their surface-level metrics look worse without accounting for the cheaper impressions they contribute. If you do customise, revisit the list occasionally, since new surfaces are added over time and a stale manual list silently excludes them.
Make the creative native everywhere
Cross-platform delivery is only as good as the shapes you supply. Provide 9:16 for Stories and Reels, and 1:1 or 4:5 for the feeds, using Meta's per-placement asset customisation so each surface receives its intended version rather than a crop. Placement customisation also allows different text lengths where surfaces truncate differently. The overlay rules differ too: vertical surfaces stack interface elements on the top and bottom of your creative, so compositions need safe zones there. A single square asset serving everywhere technically works and is the most common quiet quality leak in small accounts; the ad runs, it just runs badly on the surfaces it was not shaped for.
Reading results per platform without breaking delivery
Use the placement breakdown in reporting to see impressions, clicks and conversions per surface. Expect differences: audiences and behaviour differ by surface, and CPMs vary. The trap is reacting to the breakdown by splitting platforms into separate ad sets so you can control budget per platform; this fragments event volume, doubles your learning phases, and replaces Meta's per-auction allocation with your slower manual one. Act on the breakdown only when a surface shows a real problem on real volume, like a placement whose traffic never converts over a long window, and prefer fixing the creative fit for that surface before excluding it.
At batch scale
For a single ad, placement setup is a few clicks. Across a forty-ad launch, the failure modes are per-ad: one missing vertical asset here, a placement customisation not applied there, an Instagram identity wrong on a subset. The properties worth systematising are that every launched ad carries assets for every enabled surface, and that a dry-run review shows which shapes each ad will serve before anything publishes. Volume Creatives checks asset-to-placement coverage at launch and flags gaps before publish. Launching by hand, put the placement and identity checks into your pre-publish checklist, once per batch rather than trusting each ad individually.
Platform-level performance differences are real but usually smaller than creative-quality differences. Before excluding a platform on performance grounds, check whether the creative was ever native to that platform's surfaces, because a bad crop underperforming is not evidence about the platform.