Instagram analytics offer great tools to help you understand your audience, grow your account and improve your content. Thanks to the analytics provided by Instagram, you’ll learn how to create and target content to the audiences that matter the most to you. In this article, we’ll go through the basics of Instagram analytics and how they can be used to achieve results.
Understanding visitor data terms in Instagram Analytics
Before we get to the benefits, let’s go through some of the terminology used in Instagram analytics to better understand the content of this article.
Impressions
Impressions refer to the number of times a content (includes posts and stories) has been displayed or shown to the audience on Instagram. This includes multiple visibilities by a single person as a separate impression.
Reach
Reach is the number of unique accounts/people your publication has reached. A unique account refers to individual Instagram accounts and their one-off views of account posts. Reach differs from impressions in that it does not count multiple views from the same account.
Engagement
Engagement, on the other hand, is typically a percentage of the number of accounts that have seen your post and are interacting in one way or another with your post or account. Engagement can take the form of a click, comment, like, DM (direct message) or sharing a story.
Increase in followers
In its simplest form, follower growth refers to the increase in the number of followers of your account. Typically, in Instagram analytics, follower growth is viewed over a one-week period by default.
Clicks
Clicks usually refer to clicks on a link in your bio. If you have paid for visibility of your post and have added a webpage to it, clicks mean clicks on a link in the post.
Events
This section is seen in the analytics of your Instagram stories, which include everything you’ve done on your stories, such as sticker replies, page clicks, profile visits.
Follows
Shows the number of new account followers from your individual posts.
What kind of information does Instagram analytics provide?
Overview of your visitor data
An overview of Instagram analytics gives you an overview of your account’s visitor data within a given timeframe. The overview allows you to choose a timeframe to analyse, for example, a period of a week or a month of your visitor data.
The overview automatically compares the data to the previous reference period, so you can quickly see the percentage change over that time period.
The Instagram Analytics Overview includes the following sections, which you can tap to view each section in more detail.
Accounts reached
Reached accounts tell you how many unique accounts you have reached with your publications. Clicking here will give you a broader analytics view, allowing you to see in more detail which types of publications have brought you the most coverage (stories, reels, igtv).
You can also (from this view) look at data for individual publications to see which ones are attracting your audience and which ones are not. Instagram has made this easy by showing you the best to worst of your posts based on coverage.
The Reached accounts section of Instagram analytics also shows you how many people outside of your follower base you’ve reached, and what actions they’ve taken (when visiting) your Instagram profile.
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As you explore your posts in this menu in more detail (Figure 3), we recommend you scroll through all the sections provided by Instagram Analytics to get the broadest possible idea of all the data you can track. For example, see which of your posts have received the most likes, impressions, comments, text button or business address taps!
Keep an eye on this data whenever you implement new content. Keep in mind that in addition to valuable content, you also need to have the technical side of your publications under control, so that your content is seen by a wider audience and genuinely interested people can see it.
Content interaction
Content interactions provide you with valuable information about how your publications have engaged your followers. From this view, take a special look at which of your posts gained the most comments, likes and saves, and take advantage of the key features of the most successful posts.
Did your best-performing publications have exceptional visuals? Or was it the successful text content that got the comments? And, was your publication valuable enough to persuade your audience to save it for future reference?
Reflect on these examples of your best-performing publications to identify key factors and compare them with your worst-performing publications.
Also, consider the use of hashtags in your publications!
Tracking information (your audience)
On the Your Audience tab, you will first see an overview of the number of followers on your account, as well as any changes in your follower count over the selected reference period. From this view alone, you can quickly see, for example, the days on which you have lost followers. Just grab and go to your account to see what you’ve posted on those days.
The top locations section will show you a list of countries and cities where the majority of your followers are located.
The age group shows you the age and gender distribution of your followers.
The most active times – now watch out!
This is one of the most important points that will help you reach the largest number of your followers when publishing content. Once you’ve actively produced content on your account and interacted with your audience, Instagram analytics will give you a great overview of when your followers are most active on Instagram!
Under the Most Active Times section, you can see which days and times your audience spends the most time on Instagram on average. You can target your posts to these times to get them seen by as many people in your target audience as possible. As your followers like and comment on your posts, Instagram will be more likely to recommend them to people outside your following.
Tip: Interact with your audience before you publish content and test whether or not it has a positive impact on the analytics of your post.
How do I get access to Instagram analytics?
To get access to Instagram Analytics, you need to have a content producer or business account on Instagram.
Follow these steps if you want to change your account to a business account on Instagram:
- Go to your profile and tap the scraper button in the top right corner.
- Tap ‘Settings’.
- Tap ‘Account’.
- Navigate to the bottom of the menu and tap ‘Switch to a professional account’.
- Read your Instagram details and tap continue to repeat
- Select the category that best suits your account
- Tap continue
- Done
Please note that your account analytics will only start to accumulate at this point, so be active and keep track of your Instagram analytics from the beginning to the end of your posts. Once you have a longer period of collected data, you can analyse the performance of your account and posts, for example, every week, two or month.
Test, analyse and find the right path
Now you know what you can track and analyse in Instagram analytics, and you can more accurately identify the background of your followers. With this information, you can start testing different approaches and publish content that your followers like.
Here are a few more tasks to help you reach more audiences and produce even more effective content
- Go back through your most successful publications and find out why they worked.
- Go through your worst-performing publications and find out why they didn’t work.
- Could it be the wrong hashtags?
- What about publishing at the wrong times?
- Or text content that doesn’t appeal to your audience?
- Or is it related to your visuals (image/graphics/video)?
- Check if you are using the right hashtags for your content.
- Remember to always use hashtags that are appropriate for your content, so that Instagram can categorise your content into appropriate themes and display it to interested people accordingly.
Consider whether you are actively engaging with your audience. After all, social media is about social interaction, so Instagram’s algorithms favour genuine conversations with genuine users.
Summary
Instagram analytics provide you with great tools to track the performance of your account and posts, allowing you to provide even more targeted and actionable content.
Now that you have a better understanding of your Instagram account analytics, feel free to try something new, different publishing formats and ways to deliver valuable content to the audiences and followers that matter to you.
If you need help with social media, feel free to contact me.