Have you checked your Instagram numbers recently? You may be keeping track of your likes and follower growth, but have you explored the analytics behind your account and analysed that data? If not, then now is the time to start.
By understanding your Instagram analytics you’ll have a full picture of how well this platform is performing as part of your marketing strategy. With this data, you’ll be able to grow your brand with this incredibly powerful social platform.
If you’re still unsure of how to use Instagram analytics, we’ll walk you through why they’re so important, which data matters the most for your business goals, and what you can do with this data to improve your page performance.
The Facts About Instagram Analytics
To begin, let’s start by talking facts! Instagram has over a billion monthly active users and there are around 995 photos uploaded every second.
Some more interesting facts about Instagram include:
- Currently, more women use Instagram than men
- Most Instagram users are aged between 25-34
- 60% of users go onto Instagram to find new products
- Instagram stories receive more than 500 million users daily
Why Should You Care About Instagram Analytics?
They’re many reasons why you should care about Instagram Analytics. You could take the facts from above, you could consider that there are 25million+ Instagram business profiles worldwide, or over 200 million users are visiting at least one of these 25million+ profiles daily.
So, if you don’t know who views your profile or how your posts and stories are performing, then you could be squandering your time.
There are many drawbacks to not evaluating your analytics regularly. You might be targeting the incorrect audience, driving irrelevant users to your website, posting at the wrong time, or missing vital opportunities.
This is exactly why you should care about your Instagram analytics.
The Instagram Metrics That Matter the Most
Impressions
You want to see if your ads and content are reaching your desired audience, which is why the ‘impressions’ metric is so vital.
Let’s say your post didn’t receive many likes or comments, you’re probably wondering how many people actually saw your post. This justifies how important ‘impressions’ are.
A good way to ensure your content gets the most attention possible is to use hashtags to their greatest capability. By adding hashtags to do with your post or even the most trending topics around Instagram, you could see your impressions increase.
Engagement Rate
When you produce content for Instagram, the main goal is to get as many likes, comments, shares, and even saves as possible on your posts.
The key one to look at is the comments. When you look at a post that’s got a high engagement rate, it’s impressive, but when that post also receives many comments, that’s even more impressive.
It’s comments that really grow your account so it’s best practice to read every comment and reply if you can.
Trending Hashtags
A post with at least one hashtag gains around 12.6% more engagement than a post without a hashtag. Think of keywords for SEO – hashtags have a similar effect.
The best method to find which hashtags are the most effective is just like keyword research, you want to research the best trending, and find the hashtags that are getting the most engagement on other posts.
Clicks From Your Bio Link
You should include a link to your website in your Instagram bio. The number of users that will click onto your profile after enjoying a piece of your content is high, so ensure to maximise that opportunity with a single click link.
This is also a great metric to measure. You’ll see not only how many users engage with your Instagram content, but also how many go onto your website and delve deeper into your content.
Follower Growth
Follower growth is probably the most important metric. You and others can see if your content is reaching new people and catching their attention. Although followers add brand credibility, they may not always represent the health of your content and marketing.
What determines the health of your marketing is monitoring how your follower count changes over time. The more followers you gain, the more effective your campaigns will be, however, if they are dropping then the interest from viewers may plummet.
Instagram Story Engagement
Instagram stories can be a mix of photos and videos but only stay live on your account for 24 hours. So, it’s important to make sure these story posts are engaging as possible. There are several ways you can track how successful your stories are:
- Unique views: How many people saw your story
- Completion rate: How many people viewed your full story
- Direct messages: DMs to your story is the easiest way to immediately track who has viewed your story
Be sure to keep notes to track your performance over time manually as there is no historical data for stories.
How to View Instagram Analytics
Now we’ve gone through how important your Instagram analytics are, you may not know how to view your insights.
To gain access to Instagram insights for your account, you need to convert your personal account to a business account. Once this has been done, you will see “insights” on your business profile, however, this is only available for mobile.
Once you tap the “insights” button, you will see your data from the last 7 days from content interactions, followers, stories, photos, promotions, and more.
What to Do with Your Instagram Analytics
Once you gather all your metrics and insights, you may be thinking… what now? Here are a few suggestions on how you can proceed with the data you’ve gained.
- Change your posting day or time as there isn’t a single best time to post on Instagram. You can test this by using Instagram insights and see what times or days your audience engages with your content.
- Monitor your live content and see if needs adjusting to attract more attention.
- Experiment with stories and engage your audience as quickly as possible. On average stories with one to 7 posts is the perfect story length to not overwhelm your followers.
- Consider engaging with Instagram Live or IGTV depending on what your desired users are interacting with on Instagram.
Final Thoughts
With Instagram analytics, there are so many ways to dig into your Instagram metrics and make more data-driven decisions, that could boost the performance of your page.
Whether you opt to consider all the metrics above, or only a few, having this data at hand could help grow your business on this powerful social platform.
