Instagram is a powerful social media platform for brands of all sizes. It is widely used for effective influencer marketing and is growing as a way for brands to connect with consumers.
There’s a lot of buzz on social media now, too, from shoppable posts to an emphasis on video, and it’s good to keep an eye on the latest video formats for Instagram. So it’s worth taking the time to understand who you can reach on Instagram and the most effective way to do it.
So how do you know if your Instagram marketing strategy is working? This is where analytics come in. Instagram Insights will give you valuable data to help you get more likes, more followers and raise your company’s profile online.
Let’s explore Instagram analytics and see how you can get the most out of the platform to create content that attracts and engages.
How to set up Instagram Analytics
First, you need a business or creator account to view analytics. It’s easy to change your personal account to one of these by clicking on your profile picture and selecting ‘Account’ followed by ‘Settings’. Then you just need to select ‘Switch to Professional Account’.
Once you have access, to view account insights you simply:
- Go to your profile.
- Tap the Insight Action button. You can also go to ‘Menu’ in the top right corner, and tap on Insights.
- Select metrics under ‘Overview’ or select the content you’ve shared.
What metrics can you track on Instagram Analytics?
To monitor and analyze your Instagram account and content, you need to understand what metrics are available. You should also think about which ones are most important to your business.
All insights can be viewed by date range so adjust them as needed based on the data you’re looking for.
In the ‘Overview’ menu you can find:
- Accounts Reached – This is the number of unique accounts that have viewed your content at least once. This includes demographic information on the accounts you’ve reached, including top countries, top cities, top age ranges, and gender.
- Connected Accounts – This shows the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content and provides a breakdown of each (as above).
- Total Followers – This shows the number of people who follow you and you can track whether you have gained or lost followers over time. It also includes an ‘Active Times’ section so you can see when your followers are most active.
You can also see insights for individual posts like videos, posts, reels, or IG Live. Here are the metrics:
- Accounts Reached – This is the number of unique accounts that have viewed your content at least once. This includes demographic information on the accounts you’ve reached, including top countries, top cities, top age ranges, and gender.
- Connected Accounts – This shows the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content and provides a breakdown of each (as above).
- Content Interactions – This looks at the actions people take when engaging with your content including likes, comments, shares, saves, and replies.
- Advertising – This provides more information if your post has been promoted or paid for as part of paid advertising on Instagram.
- Plays – This insight shows the number of plays played on a video (through autoplay or one click).
How to use Instagram Analytics
Having data is great, but what you need is data insight for your marketing. As with any channel, gaining clear insights is essential to driving performance and growth on Instagram. Let’s see what metrics you can use to do this.
Follower growth
This insight is important because it shows the number of followers you have and can correlate a spike or dip to a particular campaign or time frame. So if you see a big jump in followers, look at what content was posted during that time. Was it a reel or a video on a particular topic?
Understanding what attracts new followers can help you understand what your audience is (and isn’t) looking for!
Audience demographics
What do you see when you look at your followers? With Instagram Analytics, you can access their location, age and gender.
This will show you who is interested in your content and if it matches your buyer persona profiles. If not, why not? Is there a new audience emerging that you didn’t know about or an activity in an unexpected city that you can now tap into?
It will also help you post content at specific times. For example, if you have a lot of followers in Western Canada, think about posting during times when they are awake and active.
Engagement rate
Your engagement rate in terms of followers and reach is an important insight to know.
This will help you gauge the performance of your account and posts and set a benchmark to measure and drive growth.
Engagement rate by followers – likes + followers / number of followers x 100
Engagement rate by reach – likes + comments/reach x 100
Posts of feed and stories
When you tap on individual Instagram posts, you can find a lot of data. It not only stores likes, comments and saves that you can see, but also your interactions, discoveries and feedback.
- Interactions – This shows profile visits and website clicks.
- Reach – You can see the accounts that reach and follow.
- Impressions – It shows impressions of hashtags, home, profile, and others.
By analyzing data from individual posts in your feed, you can determine what content is working and what people are responding to. It also gives you insight into what hashtags are searched and what content gets clicked on your website or landing page.
For Instagram stories you can see interactions or profile visits, impressions, follows, replies and navigation. The last metric is interesting because it shows where people moved on to the next story or left your content.
These insights can steer your content strategy for Instagram in the right direction and mean you spend time creating content that’s valuable to your followers instead of guessing.
Instagram shoppable posts
Now that shopping on Instagram is becoming the norm, it’s important to know what people are buying and why. Your Instagram Insights gives you a lot of data for shoppable posts. You can see comments, likes, and reach, but also look for product-specific metrics (like page views and button clicks).
These metrics will enable you to see what people are clicking on. For example, are there people in the photos who perform well, or is it just the product? Which CTA Performs Best: Is It ‘Find More’ or ‘Buy Now’? Are people searching for products through hashtags?
These will help you create better and more effective posts that drive people to visit your site or make a purchase.
Want to leverage the power of Instagram Analytics in your digital marketing strategy? Contact us at support@sunnydayconsulting.com or check our website at www.sunnydayconsulting.com!
