Instagram is undoubtedly a great place to market yourself. With 28% of internet users active on it, you can tap into its massive potential. If used strategically, it can significantly help in growing your business.
However, the focus should be on strategy or marketing ‘strategically.’ rather than tactically. To make the most of Instagram, you must have a powerful strategy. And the best place to carve and implement your marketing efforts is Instagram Insights.
Why are Instagram insights important?
Insights hold importance in every field. They help you gauge your efforts and turn on alarms when something goes wrong. Similarly, on Instagram, metrics matter too. Without them, you will throw darts in the dark and have an aimless marketing strategy.
Instagram insights allow users to gain valuable info on their target audience, reach, engagement levels, and conversion. When applied optimally and tied with marketing efforts, they can benefit your business in many ways.
We are mentioning a few reasons why insights are essential, as listing all of them down is not possible:
- Instagram analytics can enhance a brand’s reach drastically and thus are highly beneficial for raising brand awareness
- The insight can help business understand their target audience better and engage with them on a more personal level
- Companies can improve their content creation by analyzing and applying the right metrics, leading to more conversion.
- Instagram analytics can also help in increasing followers and building more collaborations and connection
- They also allow the portrayal of a brand’s personality pleasingly in front of a vast audience.
So it is established that Instagram analytics is a great place to start if you wish to manage and grow your business. But how to gain maximum value from these insights is not everyone’s cup of tea.
For a newbie, these analytics may seem daunting. So if you are in the same boat, let us help you. This article will walk you through each metric and how you can use it to create a winning marketing plan.
Accessing Instagram Insights
Before we dive deep into each technical insight, first discuss where you do you find all these metrics huddled up together. There are two ways to access Instagram analytics. The easiest way is via the app itself.
You will find a small menu icon on the top right side of your profile. Tap on it, and you will find the Insights option, which will give you access to all your Insta analytics.
The other way is through the business suite. If you have connected your Facebook and Instagram accounts, you can use meta’s business suite app to gain in-depth knowledge. It provides a whole dashboard of metrics.
Remember, these insights are only available for business or creator accounts, not personal ones. And they are free.
Once you have access to all the data, its time to dissect it and drive value from it:
3 significant Instagram insights fully explained
1. Follower growth
This is a crucial metric and helps you monitor your following over time. For example, you can see an overview of how many people followed or unfollowed you over 90 days.
By making a comparison with the past performance, you can see whether your content is getting you new followers or not. For example, if there is a rise in following after you upload a particular reel, it will mean that type of content works for your account.
Tip: To make most of follower growth data, analyze it over time, such as one week, and upload different forms of content throughout the 7 days. When your account experiences a significant uptick in followers, note it down and see which content caused it. Then add more such content to your future strategies.
2. Audience demographics
Instagram insights also provide information regarding your audience to understand them better. It breaks down your audience based on their:
- Location: Which city or country they are based
- Gender: Whether males follow you more or females.
- Age: Does your content attract young, adults, or older people.
- Most Active Times: The hours/days your audience engages with your account the most
By discovering this data, you can revamp your content to serve your followers better. For example, if you see that most of your followers are young females from a particular city, you can create visuals and captions they can relate to. This increases engagement and re-sharing, which leads to rising followers.
Moreover, the insight showing active time can help you schedule posts. For example, you can use it to decide the best time to publish your content so that it reaches maximum people.
Tip: The demographic breakdown of your audience not only helps optimize your current content, but you can also use it to improve your future posting. If you feel you need a shift in the audience, you can do that by curating different content targeting that specific group.
3. Post, videos, and stories analytics
Instagram’s most significant content sources are posts, videos, and stories. These drive the most traffic. So getting performance-related information on these dramatically helps to improve both current and future performance.
- Likes: The number of thumbs up your post receives shows that your content resonates with your followers.
- Comments: This, on the other hand, shows that your post encouraged your community to participate in the conversation.
- Saves: This number shows that your audience deeply felt your content and wishes to return to it later.
- Interactions: This indicates that your content inspired your followers to learn more, so they visited your profile or website.
- Discovery: This reflects whether a post was able to reach new accounts and got you more followers or not.
- Impressions: This shows how well your content performs with the Insta algorithms (hashtags, profile, or another source). You can check where your impressions are coming from and focus on recreating them.
- Navigation: This is only for stories and shows how many back and forwards taps your stories receive. Also, pay attention to the ‘exited’ metric, as it indicates where you lost the interest of your followers.
- Average Percentage Watched: this is for videos only and shows what portion of the video on average was watched by your follower. As most users leave videos incomplete, it is critical to know their attention span to make the most out of it.
Each metric is valuable, showing which posts have more lasting value and what creates that value. By reading into these, you can understand what works with your audience and then work more on it. Over time you can try to make them trend upwards.
Tip: These content insights are the most significant indicator of success as they help you create a winning marketing formula. For example, if you see a post getting more impressions thanks to a specific hashtag, you can add that hashtag to all your future posts.
Moreover, by reviewing video and story metrics, you can check which form hooks your viewers and keep them engaged. You will find other metrics, too, such as Shopping analytics, Insta Live data, and reel insights if you use these features. They are pretty much similar to the ones mentioned above.
Track Instagram Analytics
There are many Instagram metrics, but there is no need to feel overwhelmed. Just keep track of the important ones mentioned above, and you are good to go. Trying to tackle all of them may not be a good idea, and you will only get confused.
Lastly, remember that driving value from Instagram analytics is an iterative process. So some trial and error will be required before you can grasp them fully. But once you pass the learning curve, it will level up your account and help it thrive beyond imagination.