Earlier this year, we invited a selected group of Instagram Marketing Partners to explore our newest ad unit, stories ads and share the way their technologies can help businesses stand out in a more ephemeral way.

While the release of ads in stories is fairly new – only having been made globally available to all businesses back in March – we've already seen tremendous momentum in how our trusted partners are building solutions that further drive the objectives of businesses on Instagram Stories.

Here are some of the successful solutions our partners have built.

Describing the work it does as "fun but focused", world-class ad tech company AdParlor is changing the way brands and performance marketers manage their advertising campaigns across social – particularly on Instagram Stories. Using creative tagging and analytics to build integrated solutions for businesses, AdParlor is helping brands streamline and scale their social advertising in a way that creates hyper-personalised experiences for their audiences. Brands like Today's Shopping Choice (@shoptsc).

Working with AdParlor and its unique Intelligence Tags technology, the Canadian-based home shopping brand was able to uncover micro-level insights around the creative elements that worked best for its recent campaign on Instagram Stories.

Not only did these insights help Today's Shopping Choice generate a higher return on advertising spending, but the campaign's results boasted (across the board) a lower cost per sale as well. The most notable being:

• 185% lower cost per sale when creative featured a call to action

• 172% lower cost per sale for blue colour schemes (over white schemes)

• 59% lower cost per sale in the fashion product category (compared to other categories)

Positioning itself on the cutting edge of innovation, fast-growing ad tech company MakeMeReach is empowering agencies and advertisers all over the world with simpler methods to create, manage and optimise marketing campaigns on Instagram (with ads in stories).

Emphasising a more intuitive user experience, the MakeMeReach platform features an easy-to-use campaign builder with highly targeted campaign reports and ROI optimisation to help advertisers increase their campaign performance¹, while saving them significant time in campaign management² – as seen during their recent collaboration with Disney (@disney).

Looking to engage audiences on Instagram with a unique ad experience in support of its upcoming releases, "Beauty and the Beast" and "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2", Disney used behavioural technology from MakeMeReach to create an immersive stories campaign that would get people to the cinemas to see its latest blockbusters.

By allowing the legendary brand to view and optimise each stories ad it rolled out through an online pin board and adjust behaviour based on performance, Disney was able to achieve a 23% lower CPM (cost per thousand) compared to its initial performance benchmark on Instagram video ads.

As a leading content platform for businesses to create, publish and centrally manage original video ads, social tech company Vidsy continues to redefine the way businesses push the limits of creativity on mobile with its unique technology.

By streamlining the entire video workflow experience from start to finish, Vidsy's network of 2000+ video creators are able to help businesses cut their dependencies on third parties and take back control of their content creation – producing mobile video ads faster, more cost efficiently and at scale as a result.

In addition to this streamlined workflow, the Vidsy platform also enables businesses to improve video creative and drive mobile ad performance across social (with recent successes on Instagram) with its powerful video analytics and data insights – as it did with online sports nutrition brand Myprotein (@myproteinuk).

Using the Facebook pixel to track, optimise and retarget potential customers, Vidsy was able to help My Protein reach a greater audience by creating a user-acquisition campaign that integrated ads within the dynamic capabilities of stories into its creative – resulting in the campaign completely shattering expectations and delivering a return on investment of £3 for every £1 spent³.

As Instagram Stories continues to evolve the way businesses connect with and inspire their customers, Instagram's growing community of best-in-class technology partners are helping businesses of all sizes get the most out of their ad spend with solutions and tools tailored specifically to their needs.

Learn how our Instagram Partners Programme can help your business unlock its true potential with ads in stories.