#Ad on Instagram grows by 44% in first half of 2018, says Buzzoole

The report also found that Fashion (33%) Beauty (13%) and Food & Drinks (13%) brands were the most mentioned, accounting for almost 60% of global sponsored content production. Globally, more than 559K creators were involved and produced an overall engagement of almost a billion interactions (988 mm), showing an average engagement per post of over 1K.

In 2017, 1.5 million #ad posts were shared on Instagram, 58% of them in H2, the time of year when brands invest most of their online marketing budget.

Ian Samuel, chief commercial officer at Buzzoole, said: “The influencer marketing industry is booming. It isn’t just about projections, the data we have collected shows that marketers continue to double down on investment. The challenges we are now working on are helping marketeers answer the big questions around attribution, measurement and transparency to justify continued budget shifts."

The study is still ongoing and aims at understanding the market size as well as the opportunities presented by the influencer marketing sector.

Presently, the aforementioned data does not include Instagram Stories, a format which has been increasingly adopted in the influencer marketing space thanks to functions such as the swipe up. Buzzoole has recently launched an integration that will allow advertisers to track the impact of this format on the targeted audiences, and that would give results on the adoption of the Stories in influencer marketing campaigns. However, this data is not currently available for the campaigns that aren’t run through the Buzzoole platform.

The analysis was conducted through Buzzoole using social listening tool BlogMeter.