It’s time to stop guessing with your Instagram strategy. Let’s take a deep dive into your Instagram analytics so we can determine exactly what to post next. So, pull out your phone and let’s dive deep into understanding Instagram insights, what metrics are the most important, and how to use them when creating Instagram content!
How to Access Instagram Insights
So, you’re gonna tap the three lines in the upper right-hand corner of your Instagram app and tap Insights. This is gonna take you to the homepage of your Instagram Insights, and this is available for creator accounts and business accounts. And if you want more information on what account type is best for you, make sure to check out this post!
Insights Date Range
The first thing you can toggle is the date range that you’re looking at. And Instagram recently updated this so you can look up to 90 days worth of your Insights. It can be helpful to look at your analytics from the past week to just see how your content’s working. But if you look up to 90 days, you can get a holistic view of your strategy over the past quarter if you’ve ran campaigns or launches.
Important Instagram Metrics
First, let’s start with the four most important metrics that you probably already are familiar with, likes, comments, saves, and shares, are all metrics that we can look at for content shared to the feed, including Instagram video and reels.
Likes are the ultimate vanity metric. This is a quick indicator that people just liked or resonated with your content. A comment means that your content was thought-provoking and conversational. This means that people took that extra next step to engage or even thank you for a valuable insight that you shared. A share means someone liked your content enough that they wanted other people to see it, like their friends or their community. And saves means that your content was worth looking at again or referencing in the future!
How Metrics Relate
It’s important to understand why people would be engaging with your content so you can create more informed content in the future. And that next step is looking at how these metrics are related to a certain piece of content. Is there a reason why a post got a lot of likes, but wasn’t conversational enough to get a lot of comments? It’s important to look at the content type and how it relates to those metrics. Are you sharing something that’s very saveable and shareable, or is it something that should ideally get all the different types of engagement?
Instagram Post Insights Explained
Now, let’s take a deeper dive into your analytics, specifically things you need to know for a brand growing their business on Instagram.
First, you want to think about what action are people taking from your Instagram content? Are they clicking in your website or are they visiting your profile? It’s also important to understand are people following and discovering you from your content?
Let’s go into Accounts Reached. This is gonna help you see who you’re reaching and how you’re reaching them. So first, you’ll see the breakdown of who are your non-followers and then your current followers that you’re reaching. And then you’re also going to see the breakdown of how that goes into the different types of content you’re creating.
For example, you may tend to see that a lot of your reels helps you reach non-followers, while stories and lives mostly reach current followers. You’re also able to see for the time periods you selected, the top content for reach. Under Audience, you’re able to see your total followers. This is how you’re able to track your growth.
You might also notice a lot of unfollows, but don’t worry, this is a part of the growth game. It’s natural for people that just no longer are a great fit for your brand or are never gonna be customers of yours, to unfollow you. But also, Instagram is constantly cleaning out bot accounts, spam accounts, so it’s natural to lose followers. You just want to be sure that you are maintaining a constant growth rate.
If you want to get to know your Instagram audience a little bit better, you can look up the other demographics and information so you can create content with that ideal follower in mind!
Insights Filtering Options
And if you go into your posts under Insights, you’ll have a few options for filtering what you’re seeing based on what you’re wanting to analyse. So, you can do it based on content type and also different metrics, so you can see your most highly saved, shared, or commented on posts.
It’s also important, you can change the timeframe of this to see what performed best in the last month or even the last year. This is really helpful because if you’re curious, what should I continue posting? You should look at what has performed best in the past and continue to create content similar to that. That could be the visual format, it also could be the topic!
Instagram Stories Insights Explained
When it comes to Instagram stories, here’s some important insights that you want to note. Replies is one of the most valuable metrics you can look at because this means you’re having a one-on-one conversation with your ideal customer. You want to look at what was the component to that Instagram story that made those people reply. Which stories are getting the most replies? A good sign that your Instagram stories content is resonating with your audience is if you see the tap backs being higher on a certain story series than others. This means that something was so great about your story that people wanted to tap to the previous one to watch it again.
Next Story and Exited are not as great because this means that there was something about your story that made people completely drop off or stop watching stories entirely. If you struggled with getting your audience engaged with your stories content, it’s important to look at how many people that are viewing and interacting with each story, specifically, your stickers. Do you post a question sticker that gets absolutely no responses? But on another day, you get a lot of responses. Was it how you worded the question, the time of day that you posted it, or even how many story stickers you posted before that one? This helps you see the patterns in your Instagram stories engagement, so you can create informed content for your stories in the future.
Instagram Live Insights Explained
You want to apply that same concept to your Instagram Live Insights. You want to look at your entire views, but you also want to look at Peak Concurrent Viewers, which is the highest number of viewers at one time. This is gonna help you understand the ideal length of your live streams, maybe the time of day that you should go live more often, if people enjoyed having guests doing Q&As. But it’s important to not obsess over your analytics, but instead use them to inform your next decision.
How Often to Review Analytics?
So, if you’re creating a new launch or campaign, or if you’re maybe revamping your Instagram strategy, it’s important to take the time to look back at the insights we’ve shared. You can do this on a monthly or quarterly basis. We hope that this clarifies how to use Instagram insights to help you create more informed content with your ideal follower in mind, instead of just guessing!
