A quick note on best practice for Instagram Stories Multi-Card Carousel ads. Our team has found that Instagram Stories ads with multiple cards (ie. Native Stories Carousel) have performed much better than single image/video stories ads. If seems like the multi-click functionality gives us a little more screen time with users, and leads to better conversions. 

Per Facebook, the only way to run these carousel ads is to create them within their own ad sets. At this time, you cannot run 9:16 creative as a placement alongside standard feed ads. This has given us trouble, as we then have generally opted to run these ads within their own campaigns. 

Note that you can run carousel ads using automatic placements BUT they will only run in the 1:1 or format, and not 9:16.

You can see the difference here:

https://business.instagram.com/a/carousel-ads-for-stories

What we found is that moving these stories into their own campaign caused us to move away from Facebook best practice (and hurts our overall internal metrics with Facebook).

Luckily, there is a quick solution to this issue. Moving these single placement stories ads back into campaigns with other ad sets that contained 3 or more additional placements, brought us back into good standing. 

It is yet to be seen how moving these ads into campaigns containing other creative will perform, but for now we’re leaning into following best practice until we see negative effects on our campaign goals.