Driving consumers to the Gilt Groupe Inc. app is important for the retailer, as 50% of the luxury flash-sale e-retailer’s revenue stems from mobile devices, says Jessica Mann, senior marketing manager at Gilt.

Gilt places ads that appear within the content of a news feed on social network apps including  Facebook, Twitter and most recently, Instagram. Instagram opened up advertising options to all brands this August.

During an August campaign on Instagram, Gilt targeted consumers who didn’t have the Gilt app installed to download the app. If a consumer clicked on the ad, Google Play or Apple’s app store would open to the page to download the app. During the Instagram campaign, Gilt’s app downloads increased 85% overall Mann says.

On Instagram, Gilt’s ads takes up the entire smartphone screen, meaning consumers are not looking at other items on the screen. That is different from Facebook or other platforms where the ad could be in the corner of the screen and consumers are looking at other items, Mann says.

“Instagram impressions have more weight than on Facebook,” Mann says. “That real estate is so much more precious to us,” she adds.

Gilt also conducted advertising campaigns targeting consumers who already had the Gilt app. The advertising message was deep linked, meaning when a consumer clicked on the message about a red purse, the app automatically opened the app to a page related to red purses. Mann did not disclose results about this campaign.

Gilt’s advertising on Instagram is still new and Gilt is eager to do more testing, Mann says. Gilt also plans to advertise on Pinterest.

Gilt places and monitors  ads on the social network apps using social technology vendor Brand Networks Inc. Using a vendor like Brand Networks helps Gilt systematically generate more ad units. For example, if Gilt has 10 images and 10 messages and wants to mix each message with each image, a network can do that automatically without Gilt’s marketing team creating each one, Mann says. Having this platform shaves at least a quarter of the time off of creating the ads, she says. Since Gilt operates flash sales and has new promoted items each day, having this time savings is especially helpful, she says.

Mann also likes that all of the social apps where Gilt advertises, such as Facebook and Twitter, are on the same dashboard, which is a new feature for Brand Networks, says Jamie Tedford, CEO of Brand Networks. So when Gilt uploads its ad content for the day, Brand Networks will create the ad unit based on that content for each social network.

This also saves Gilt time when running reports on how ad units are performing across several accounts on the same social network, she says. For example, Gilt has multiple Twitter handles, such as @Gilt.com, @GiltMan, @GiltCityNYC, and with the dashboard Mann  can run each report in the same window, without having to log out and log in to each system.

Gilt and Brand Networks have worked together for about three years, Tedford says. Mann would not disclose costs for using Brand Networks. Costs depend on the size of the deployment and the amount of advertising spend managed through the platform, Tedford says.

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