With 1 billion active users Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms. As a digital marketer, it’s important to understand who’s using which apps so that you can most effectively reach your target audience - but it can be challenging to understand the analytics. The most important analytics to focus on are the ones that help boost your engagement and growth.
Instagram analytics provides more information than just what post gets the most likes and comments. Analytics look at the overall picture of an account and help you understand your audience’s demographics, behaviors, and patterns. Understanding that data will help you make informed decisions and adjust your strategy.
The first step to learning more about your analytics on Instagram is to create a business profile. If you already have an Instagram business profile, access your analytics by tapping on the three lines icon on the top right side of your profile, then clicking on Insights.
Here is more information about each option in your Insights Dashboard:
The Content Tab
The data you find here shows you what type of content your followers are engaging with the most or least. This is an important section if you want to increase engagement on your posts. You can break down content and filter it by things like type, photo, video, shopping, carousel, and by clicks, comments, engagement rate, impressions, and reach. A great way to measure your growth on Instagram is by monitoring your engagement rate. This is the percentage of followers that engage with your posts. If you want to calculate your average engagement rate for Instagram, you would divide the total number of likes and comments by follower count, which would give you a percentage. Engagement rate = (likes + comments) / followers x 100. A good engagement rate will differ for every account, so it’s more important to focus on monitoring the growth overall. To learn more about calculating your engagement rate, read this blog post.
The Activity Tab
Interactions - This shows you the number of actions taken on your account from people clicking the link in your bio. This is helpful if you recently launched a new product or are trying to send people to a different page, like your YouTube channel or website. Discovery - The Discovery area under the Activity tells you how many accounts you reached and impressions you gained. Reach relates to the number of views on your posts. It narrows the views to only unique ones. Impressions are the total number of times you post has been seen. This could be from the feed, scrolling through your business profile page, or by viewing it through a direct message on Instagram.
The Audience Tab
Followers - This is an important piece of data to track because you want to see how your account is growing over time. You can track your follower count by creating an Excel spreadsheet and review the growth each month. If you notice a change you can monitor it to see if it’s related to your content or changes to your Instagram strategy. Location - Instagram shows you where your audience is based. This important to look at when you’re scheduling content because you should keep the time difference across the country in mind. Gender and age - You want to know if you’re reaching the right audience on Instagram and this data allows you to check that. If you notice your social audience is younger or older than you expected, adjust the type of content you’re posting. This section is also important to see when your followers are most active because that’s when you should be posting.
Measuring the success or failure of Instagram posts depends on your specific business goals. Focus on understanding the Instagram analytics for your account and choosing goals, also called key performance indicators (KPIs), that will you test if you’re content is performing well or not. If you want to learn more about using analytics to grow your account, read this blog. If you want to learn more about digital marketing as a whole and key terms, read our other blog post.