How to Analyze Your Instagram Marketing: Metrics that Matter

Instagram photo of pizza

Hopefully, by now, you’ve set up your business Instagram account and may even be running ads on it. Using Instagram to market your business can actually be fun.

Yes, fun!

And it might be just what you needed to inject some real personality into your products and brand.

So what’s the next step?

How to Analyze Your Instagram Marketing: Metrics that Matter

With an Instagram Business Account, you have access to a lot of really amazing data. Measuring success through Instagrams analytics and metrics is how you keep from wasting time (or money, or both).

There are 3 sections of data to be aware of –

1. Account Insights

Instagram’s analytics are called “Insights”, and you find them in the app by clicking on the little gray bar chart in the top right corner of your profile.

There may also be a message across the top of your profile that gives you a few stats… click on that message, and it will also take you to Insights as well.

Once inside Insights, you’ll see three options across the top:

Activity  |  Content  |  Audience

Activity: How many people have seen your posts (reach) and how many times they have viewed your posts (impressions).

Content: Individual post statistics for the posts in your feed as well as your Stories.

Audience: Who your followers are… gender, age range, location, plus when they use Instagram.

2. Individual Post Insights

Underneath each post, at the left corner, you will see “View Insights” in blue. Click those words to see the basic data for that particular post. If you click on that data and slide up on your touchscreen phone,  you will open the full post Insights screen with even more information.  Think of this as a shortcut from the post itself, but know that you can also view post insights from the Content section of Insights.

Individual post Insights will show you how many hearts the post got (likes), how many comments it received, and also how many people saw it (reach).

3. Story Insights

Under the Content section of Insights, you will be able to see your Stories. Click on any of the words in blue (impressions, reach, etc.) at the top of the screen to change them to a different view. These are called “filters”.

You can also find Story metrics by clicking on the “Seen by” names in the bottom left of the screen of an active Story. Once your Story’s 24 hours have passed, use the above method to see the statistics.

Instagram Stories have a few additional metrics you can view since they have more opportunities for interaction.

  • How many times did someone tap forward, or backward, on your Story?
  • Did someone X out of your story?
  • If your Story included tags, did they get clicks?

These are metrics that tell you whether people like and are looking at your Stories, or whether they are quickly tapping past them. Lots of X’s or forward taps means your audience don’t like what you are posting and that would be a big red flag!

Now that we know where to FIND EVERYTHING, what does all of this stuff TELL US?? This is the fun part!

INSIGHTS – What do they mean?

Ready to become an Instagram scholar?

Impressions – The number of times your post was seen in someone’s feed, or how many times the Story was viewed. On individual posts, this is the place for finding hashtag data. How many people found that post through your hashtags? Impressions can be an important number if you use hashtags as part of an overall strategy or as part of a campaign.

Reach – The number of individual Instagram accounts your post or Story reached. This number is usually smaller than impressions because many times one account will see your post more than once, maybe because they like your posts and they seek you out, or you happen to show up in their feed again because of the Instagram algorithm. If your goal is to get a lot of people to view your content, reach will help you to know if you are reaching that goal.

Website clicks – Did someone click on a website link found in your profile? I hope you have a link there for them to click on!! This is great information to have, especially if you are using Instagram to drive traffic to a specific website or campaign landing page.

Followers (or Audience) – Find information about your follower’s age, gender and where they are located. You can also see the average days and times of day that your followers are on Instagram. This info will help you make sure you are posting when the most people will be on Instagram to see your posts. 

Top Posts – You can click the blue words at the top of the screen to change the filter, just like with Stories. Filter by type of post (video, photo), metric (comments, engagement, follows, etc.), and timeframe. Your top posts will show you what your audience likes best, so you can do more of that!

Engagements – How many times your post was liked (got a heart), commented on, or saved… all added together into one number. Handy, especially if your goal is lots of interaction from your audience!

All of these metrics are there to help you have the best Business Instagram possible.

Look at them and let them guide you in doing more of what people like, and less of what sucks. Now be amazed at the data!