The 10 Best Instagram Insights to Track
What are Instagram Insights and why do they matter?
With 500 million daily active users (DAU) on Instagram, it’s important to do what you can to keep your account growing, reaching your target audience and staying ahead of your competition. It’s vital to check the metrics and analytics of your Instagram to make sure you’re heading in the right direction and not missing out on any growth opportunities.
Insights data will help you understand your target audience. Whilst you can make business decisions based on gut feeling, you’re much more likely to get it right when you can validate those ideas with facts and figures. More importantly, you can better identify where you might be going wrong.
Data and analytics can help you measure the impact of your marketing efforts across all social media channels to see if there’s something you need to change — like targeting a different audience, posting at a particular time of day, or trying a new content format.
Where are Instagram Insights?
In order to access analytics on your Instagram account, your profile must the visible to the public and needs to be set up as a business account rather than a personal one. If you need a quick reminder of how to switch your account type, you can watch this short video.
Once these two steps are complete you’re ready to start exploring your insights! You can reach these insights via the profile page as a button under the bio, or click on the hamburger icon and navigate down to “Insights”.
The different types of Analytics on Instagram
Within Instagram alone there are many different metrics that can be tracked and they can be broken down into Overview, Audience, Content Shared, and Discovery. Within that, there are metrics that can be measured as Reach and Impressions.
Reach: This is the total number of unique accounts that saw your content.
Impressions: This is the total number of times your post was served to Instagram users.
Overview:
Within this section of Insights, you can see a broad overview of how your account is performing including accounts reached and content interactions. These can be viewed as the last 7, 14 and 30 days or comparing the previous calendar month.
- Accounts Reached
Clicking on “Accounts Reached” will show you how many of those accounts were followers vs. non-followers and how many people were reached segmented by content types such as Posts, Stories or Reels. This section also breaks down profile activity by impressions, profile visits, website, email, and call button taps.
- Content Interactions
Clicking on “Content Interactions” will detail how many post interactions you have had over a certain period of time including likes and comments. This section will give you an overview of interactions on Stories, Reels, IGTV and Live Video too.
Audience:
- Followers
In this section, your total number of followers is displayed with a percentage of change over the last 7, 14 or 30 days. Under this, the follows and unfollows are shown alongside a graph depicting the days where these follows and unfollows happened. This can be useful for pinpointing any large increases or losses after posting some content.
- Demographics
Further down in the followers’ section, there are some graphs showing your followers’ top locations, age ranges, genders and their most active times by hours and days. This is vital information for personalising content to your audience and then posting it at the optimum times and days to maximise reach.
Content Shared:
Scrolling down to the bottom of the main insights section you will find “Content You Shared”. This is then broken down into the following categories:
- Posts
Here you can see all your feed posts that have been made between the last 7 days all the way up to the last 2 years. After choosing a time period, you can further filter them by individual photos, videos or carousel posts. Lastly, you can organise these posts by various metrics such as Reach, Profile Visits, Likes, Follows, Comments and more detailed stats such as Call or Email button taps. This is helpful to find your most popular and engaging posts so you can keep on producing similar content!
- Stories
Similar to Posts, you can view your stories from the last day or over a 2 year period. These stories can then be organised by Reach and Impressions but then story-specific stats such as Next Story, Forward, Back, and Exits. These metrics show if people fully watch your stories, are just flicking through or exiting completely back to the main feed.
- Reels
Instagram Reels analytics are a fairly new addition to the Insights tab, and the metrics include Plays, Accounts Reached, Likes, Comments, Saves and Shares. It’s worth noting that views of Reels shared to Instagram Stories are also included in the overall view count.
- Live Videos
Instagram Live Video metrics are now also available on Insights. Users can see the number of Accounts Reached, Peak Concurrent Viewers, Comments, and Shares.
Individual Post Metrics on Discovery:
Lastly, you are able to view metrics on a post by post basis via your profile page. By tapping on a piece of content you can see “view insights” under the post. Clicking on this brings up a tab that shows how many interactions that post has received as well as how people found that content; This could be through Home, Hashtags, Profile or Location. It can also tell you if you received any followers directly from that post!
How to calculate Instagram Rates + free tool!
- Profile engagement rate
Average across all posts: [Post interactions ÷ total follower count ✕ 100]
This metric is a baseline for evaluating how well your content is resonating with your audience and can be worked out automatically with a tool such as Phlanx.
- Post engagement rate
Post interactions ÷ total follower count ✕ 100
Engagements (likes, comments, and saves) show that you’re connecting with followers on Instagram.
- Stories engagement rate
Total actions ÷ Total reach X 100
To measure engagement on your Stories, add up the replies, profile visits and sticker taps etc that have been earned.
- Follower growth rate
Number of followers gained ÷ previous number of followers ✕ 100
This is easy to do if you are keeping track of your follower count on a weekly or monthly basis.
To Summarise…
Keeping track of Instagram Insights will keep you at the top of your game. Exporting this information on a spreadsheet to keep a track of it on a weekly or monthly basis will help you gain a deeper understanding of your content performance and audience. Couple this with our Social Media Audit and you will be well on your way to mastering your Instagram channel!