If you are using social media for business, it’s imperative to track your metrics. Each social media network has its own in-app tools available to track metrics within the app. By tracking these stats, you will be able to know if what you are doing on social media is helping you achieve your goals.

What are Instagram Insights?

The goal of Instagram Insights is to help you learn more about your followers and the people interacting with your business on Instagram. The type of information provided via the Insights functions are details about gender, age range, and location of the people who follow and engaging with you. You also have access to information about which stories and posts are engaged with the most. This information is also available when you run ads on Instagram. It’s important to understand that you must have a business profile to access your Insights.

How to view your Insights:

1. Go to your Business Profile in the Instagram app.
2. Tap the hamburger menu icon.
3. Tap Insights.
4. Select the posts, stories or promotions you'd like to view insights on.

Where you can find the hamburger menu.

Where you can find the Insights.

You can view Insights on your account, on a specific post, and on your stories. In addition, you can learn more about your audience.

Important Metrics to Track

Activity

The Activity tab shows you information about interactions, discovery, reach and impressions.

Interactions:

This is a summary of how many times users, both followers and non-followers, have engaged with your Instagram account over the last seven days.

These interactions are measured by calculating:

• The number of LIKES on your posts
• How many users that VISITS your Instagram profile
• The amount of times users have called you via your Instagram profile CALL call to action button on your profile.
• The amount of times users have emailed you via your EMAIL call to action button on your profile.
• The number of users who have gone to your WEBSITES via the link in your profile
• The quantity of COMMENTS that have been made on your posts

An example of what the Activity tab looks like.

Discovery

The Activity tab also has a Discover section which shows the general performance of your account. These stats are from the past seven days and focus on both reach and impressions.

• REACH is the number of accounts that have seen any of your posts.
• IMPRESSIONS are the total amount of times that all of your posts have been seen (and yes, this can be the same user looking at your account multiple times).

Content:

The Content tab displays metrics related to the content that you post. There are three sections which display more detailed information about your metrics: Feed posts, stories and promotions.

1. Feed posts – The photos and videos you share to your feed. This is where you will see Insights for all the photos and videos you’ve shared to your Instagram feed. This information only dates back to when you switched to a business profile.
2. Stories – These are the Insights from the posts you make to your stories and you can view Insights by 24 hours, 7 days, or 14 days. Here’s what each metric means:
   
   

• Back – The number of times that users tap to see the preceding photo or video in your story
• Calls – The number of times that users followed the CTA to call
• Emails – The number of times that users click Email
• Exited – The number of times that users tapped to leave your story
• Follows – The number of unique accounts that started following you because of your post
• Forwards – The number of times that users tapped to see the next photo or video in your story
• Link opens – The number of times that users opened a link you included in your story
• Next story – The number of times that users tapped to go to the account’s next story
• Reach – The number of times that unique accounts saw your posts
• Replies – The number of replies to this photo or video in your story
• Texts – The number of unique accounts that followed the text option
• Website clicks – The number of times your website was clicked from a specific post

Story Insights

The Insights from your stories will help you understand if you are creating the right content for your target audience and if you are posting at the right time of day.

An example of story Insights from the past 14 days. The numbers on the images are the number of impressions on each post.

3. Promotions – These are the Instagram posts that you pay to share.

The last section in the content tab shows you the Insights for the posts that you’ve spent money on to boost exposure. Here you can view:

• Audience demographics – The gender, age, and location of the people who viewed your post
• Engagement – The number of Saves, Likes, and Comments
• Impressions – The amount of times your post has been seen
• Profile visits – The amount of times your profile was viewed
• Reach – The amount of unique accounts that have seen your posts

You can use these Instagram Insights to evaluate the performance of your paid campaigns.

An example of Promotion Insights on a single post where $5 was spent.

Audience

The third tab under Insights is the Audience section and here you learn more about your audience.

The metrics displayed here are:

• Location (cities and countries)
• Age Range (including age range by gender)
• Gender
• Followers (average times and says when your followers are most active)

A snapshot of the Audience metric.

Best Practices for Instagram Insights

Each business will find value in different insights and this information will depend on your objectives. These stats will help you understand not only your audience but will help determine if the content that you are producing is helping you achieve your goals. It’s important to frequently check your Insights and because Instagram only displays certain metrics from the past seven days. We recommend that you track your stats once a week.

Disclaimer

Social media will always continue to evolve which means that each social media platform will have to keep innovating. Part of this evolution means that features will be updated. Part of these updates may involve updates to the esthetic, layout and functionality. That means that the Insights functionality of Instagram will inevitably evolve. By following our blog along with the Instagram blog, you will stay updated on all things related to Instagram.

Filed in // Social Media Marketing, Digital Analytics Reporting, Strategy