Instagram's first ad is a big success for Michael Kors

The Kors ad saw 370% more likes, a spike in followers and an audience of over 6 million

Late last week Instagram debuted it first ever ad, a picture of a gold watch, on a table, with some macarons next to it from designer Michael Kors.

Now, a little less than a week later, we have some numbers on how the ad performed. And Instagram must be very, very happy.

The post with the picture received a total of 217,700 Likes within the first 18 hours of it being posted, which is an increase of 370% compared to the average that Kors usually sees, according to new data from Nitrogram, a site dedicated to Instagram analytics, on Tuesday.

The picture now has over 230,000 Likes in total.

In addition, the ad also brought Kors a slew of new followers; 33,000 of them to be exact. That means that his number of followers jumped 16 times, from the 2,138 he was gaining on average.

And finally, there is the actually audience of the advertisement. Kors' average Engagement Rate is 3.57%, so that would mean that the ad had an audience of 6.15 million Instagrammers.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

The success of the Kors ad is excellent news for Instagram, and will propel their efforts going forward, even if a number of users did express their displeasure with seeing the ad, writing comments like: "Get this off if my feed. Ads suck" and "Get Tf off my TL !!!"

Instagram first revealed that it would be showing ads on user feeds last month, then, around two weeks ago, it showed a preview of what they would look like.

The ads look like any other Instagram picture that you might see, except for big blue "sponsored" label in place of the time stamp. Clicking on the link will bring users to a page explaining how advertising works on Instagram.

It should be noted that if a user clicks on an the picture directly on the users page, it will appear as any other image would, without the " "sponsored" label. So if you were to go to Michael Kors' Instagram feed and click on the picture, it would not look like an ad. It only appears that way on the feeds of users that do not follow him.

That the Kors ad did so well is very good news for Instagram and Facebook, which bought the service last year.

These ads be able to net quite a lot of money, potentially. Sterne Agee Analyst Arvind Bhatia believes that number to be close to a billion dollars in just a few years.

"Net, we estimate that Instagram could generate $800 million in revenue in the next three to four years. We note that Twitter, with roughly 50 million MAUs in the U.S., is on a run-rate to generate $350 million to $400 million in the U.S. this year."

These numbers are a step up from last year, when Bhatia predicted that it would makes between $500 and $700 million in the same amount of time. 

(Image source: https://favim.com)