Social media marketing is a key component of digital marketing. These days almost every company has a presence on social media, with various accounts on different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest. Instagram alone has over 25 million Business accounts, with over 200 million users visiting a Business Instagram account daily. A huge follower count is great, but how do you know if the time your spending posting on Instagram is worth it?
This is where looking at your Instagram analytics can help. They are a great way to see if the money and time you’ve spent on Instagram marketing has been worthwhile. You will learn which goals to focus on and which you shouldn’t.
Instagram analytics will help you learn more about your audience. Your company will better understand what resonates with them based on your Instagram analytics. This information can help you better reach your audience and grow a loyal customer base.
When you track your Instagram analytics, you can learn a lot about what you are doing right or wrong with your Instagram marketing efforts. You could be targeting the wrong audience completely and missing key opportunities for engagement. You can learn how often to post and even what time of day you should be posting from your Instagram analytics.
If the idea of learning about Instagram analytics overwhelms you, we get it. It is a ton of information that can seem daunting. We’ve done our best to keep it simple here in this article, breaking down where you can find your analytics, what each metric means, and what other resources you can use to better analyze this information.
Welcome to Your Instagram Insights Page
The Overview: General and Profile Information
You can find these on your ‘Insights’ page under the section titled ‘Overview’. This section helps you learn how much your visitors, especially new visitors, are engaging with your Instagram profile and your posts.
This page shows you information from the last 7 days or the last 30 days, which you can choose between. On this page you can see the following Instagram metrics:
- Accounts Reached: the number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts
- Impressions: the number of times your posts have been seen during the time frame
- Profile Visits: the total number of profile views over the week
- Email/Call Button Taps: how many times visitors have clicked the button to email/call your business
- Website Clicks: the number of times visitors have clicked the link to your website from your profile page
- Mentions: the number of times your account’s handle has been mentioned by other users
- Content Interactions: these Insights measure how your visitors interact with your Instagram posts, stories, and even IGTV content. We’ll cover this more later.
Your Audience
Did you know there’s an entire section of your Instagram analytics all about your audience demographics? This section provides you with some great information to help you check if your audience on Instagram lines up with your brand’s target audience. It’s awesome if your brand has amazing engagement in Europe, but if you’re a small swimwear company that only ships in the US, this audience won’t land you any new customers or sales. This information can help you learn if you’re targeting the right audience and if not, whether you need to change your Instagram marketing strategy to do so
This section contains your ‘Follower Breakdown’, which relays your exact follower count and any percentage change in the time frame of your choice: the last 7 days or last 30 days. It also contains a relatively new section about your titled ‘Growth’ that focuses on your follower change in that same time period. It includes the exact numbers of both your follows and unfollows for that period and a chart that breaks the changes down to the exact day during that period.
There are also several other key analytics to focus on on this page, including:
- Top Locations: this information allows you to see the top five cities and countries where your followers are located, broken down by percentage
- Age Range: here you can learn the age of your followers broken down by range (13-17, 18-24, 25-34, etc.) by percentage
- Gender: here you can find out the gender of your followers with a pie chart accompanied by a percentage breakdown
- Most Active Times: this is a handy bar graph that shows you the average times your followers were on Instagram in the selected time period; you can change between two different graphs to see your followers’ most active days of the week or most active hours of the day! This information can help you learn the best times to schedule posts for optimal engagement.
Content You Shared
After you know you’re targeting the right audience, you want to learn about how your individual efforts (posts, stories, etc.) are engaging with your followers. You can do this easily with your Instagram Insights, either through ‘Content Interactions’ in your ‘Overview’ section or in the section titled ‘Content You Shared’. Both of these sections are helpful, with the ‘Interactions’ section focusing simply on your Interactions, which are actionss that were taken directly from your post, whether that’s visiting your profile, a hyperlink, or using the call/email button in your post.
When you dive into the analytics provided for each individual Instagram post, story, or even IGTV video, you can learn an amazing amount of information, including:
- The amount of Likes, Comments, Shares, and Saves that post received
- How many actions like Profile Visits were taken from that post
- How many new followers you received from a post
- Reach: How many unique accounts the post reached.
- Impressions: The total number of times your post was viewed, and then broken down by where the post was viewed: from home, from profile, or from other
- Promotion: if the individual post was promoted, you can learn about the results of those efforts here
- Exits: the number of times someone exited your Instagram story mid-way through
- Replies: The total number of replies to a video or picture on your Instagram stories
Clearly there is a lot of crucial information that can be learned about your Instagram marketing from your Instagram Insights page, from Instagram stories analytics to audience trends. It’s important to note that you’ll need to have an Instagram business profile in order to access the Insights page, but these Insights are invaluable if you want to succeed with your Instagram marketing strategy.
Instagram Analytics Made Easier
Digging through all of these numbers within your Instagram Insights page can feel overwhelming and time-consuming. There are a lot of third-party apps that have been designed to make tracking and evaluating your Instagram analytics easier and faster for your business.
Many of these apps can even provide more detailed data, a longer-range view, or the ability to export for reporting purposes. These services can calculate your engagement rate and ROI for you, leaving you more time to focus on your Instagram marketing efforts.
Here are a few of the best Instagram analytics tools that we would highly recommend to track and evaluate your Instagram Insights.
#1: Squarelovin
Squarelovin is specifically focused on Instagram Insights, so it provides some really helpful reporting features for improving your strategy. For example, they provide engagement charts to show when your content gets more interactions, as well as graphs showing the best days and times to post. They offer a free 14-day trial!
#2: Socialbakers
Socialbakers offers beautiful, free Instagram analytics tools that help you analyze your hashtags, filters, and more. Socialbakers is unique in that they will analyze your profile and categorize you as a leader, spammer, sleeper, or shy, which is basically their own evaluation of the success of your Instagram efforts. They also provide a chart detailing how often you post over the last 12 months, which can help you learn to post more regularly and consistently.
#3: Iconosquare
With a Instagram Business account, Iconosquare will offer you a free Instagram audit, showing where you’ve succeeded and how you can improve, based on the last 30 days. You can even get a free trial of their “pro dashboard” that includes the standard metrics like engagement rates and follower stats.
#4: Sprout Social
If you’re looking to stand out among your competitors, Sprout Social may be the tool for you. With Sprout Social’s Instagram Analytics, you can also build customer reports and spy on your Instagram competitors. They provide visual graphs so you can track your follower growth, likes, and comments while tracking similar data for your competitors.
#5: SocialRank
SocialRank is a tool focused on better understanding your Instagram audience. They provide information about your follower patterns, popular words used in your followers’ bios and posts, and even popular emojis used among your target audience. This will not only help you better understand your audience, but it will also set you up to tailor your content more effectively. This is a great tool if you already have the audience you want, but would like to see more engagement out of them!
These tools represent a small portion of the resources available to help you understand your Instagram Insights. Instagram analytics are an important step of any Instagram marketing strategy – why bother with all the effort if the return isn’t worth it? Understanding Instagram analytics and applying what you’ve learned to your Instagram marketing strategy can help you reach your target audience and convert them into loyal customers for life!
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