Instagram does a really great job of providing their business profiles with useful tools that can help them be successful and really find their footing on the app.
Following these analytics and learning how to decipher them and adjust to or for them is essential in order to find success.
Understanding Instagram analytics is crucial, but it can also be a little bit overwhelming. You’ve got to learn how to read the data and figure out just exactly what it means. Once you get the basics of sifting through your analytic data on IG, you can then shape this information to improve your strategy or your approach.
Analytics are powerful if you know how to make them work for you.
In this guide, we will provide a complete rundown of Instagram analytics and why they are so valuable. You will learn how to use them, what they mean, and how you can put analytics to work for yourself.
Keep reading to learn more!
Table of Contents:
The True Value of Instagram Analytics ➡️
Every year, the Instagram platform continues to grow. It may not yet be the biggest platform out there, but their rising levels of business accounts is certainly a great indicator. Instagram has more than two billion profiles on their app. Not all of those are daily users, but that’s certainly a huge market of access.
When it comes to business profiles, there are close to 200 million business profiles on Instagram. When you think about the two billion users and 200 million businesses, it’s still just a drop in the bucket. People look at business profiles and account pages every single day. Some of this traction comes from using advertising platforms within Instagram, but much of it comes from building followers, collaborations, and organically growing your audience.
You’re out there living your best business life on Instagram, but your time is valuable. When was the last time you checked out the data behind what you are doing and whether or not things you spend a lot of time on are effective?
This is where Instagram analytics come into play.
The value is finding out what is or is not working, like these things.
- Perhaps your audience isn’t who you think it is.
- Are you posting enough? Are you posting too much?
- Are those website visitors really relevant?
- Your posting times might not be optimal times.
- Partnership and collaboration possibilities.
- Engage, engage, engage – and don’t overlook the opportunities to do so!
Do you know what all of these things have in common? These are the types of things you can discover when you look at your analytics and data. If you could tweak just one thing and see a huge positive difference, why would you pass up that opportunity?
Really, this is just the beginning. But these are the most popular and most-used data source of your IG analytical information.
Put the data to work for YOU!
Profile Analytics
We might as well start at the beginning, and that’s with your profile. Your profile is the first thing that people see when they come to check you out. Is it set up to attract and impress? Or are people going to roll their eyes and click away?
Your IG profile analytics might help you answer these questions. You can see these analytics from the profile page, and they tell you quite a bit. Plan to check this once a week, because the page shows you a week at a glance type data.
You can see a wide variety of things. These are the basic terms and definitions.
- Impressions – How many times have posts been viewed this week?
- Interactions – Likes, shares, and other interactions that have occurred in the timeframe.
- Reach – Unique accounts seeing your posts.
- Profile Visits – How many people viewed your profile?
- Website Clicks – Clicks from the link you put in your profile.
- Call/Email Clicks – Use of the call/email button on your profile.
- Mentions – How many times have other profiles mentioned your handle or tagged you?
Remember that this data is on a weekly basis so when you look at it, you discover how much of this has occurred week by week. You will be able to dig into some of these numbers more and see historical data from your analytics as well. But this section is a really great place to get a snapshot of what it all means.
Audience Analytics 👁️
Who is your audience? Most businesses have a target audience, but the question is does your IG traffic match what you think your target audience is? Perhaps you think your product appeals to an 18-24 age range. But then you look at the analytics and discover it’s actually more popular to the 35-44 age range.
You might just be surprised what you find out when you look at your audience details. Your target audience is who you think your posts are created to appeal to. And that’s great, you should have a target audience. But you might need to break it down and consider revamping your target audience, or perhaps your content. Sometimes it’s a mixture of both.
Instagram analytics has a huge selection of data specifically designed to give you data on your audience. It includes a lot, but these are the things to focus on.
- Locations
- Age ranges
- Associated gender
The locations will tell you the top cities and/or countries that your followers are from. The age range is pretty obvious. It tells you the age ranges of your followers. It breaks it down into 7 different ranges, most of which have approximately 9 years on the range. Some of the younger ages are split into smaller categories.
Finally, Instagram associates a gender based on the profile of the followers and this is broken out into men and women. It gives you an idea of the gender category of your followers. At this time, for analytics purposes, this tracking tool remains men and women.
A couple other points that can be useful here are your followers hours and days. This provides you the average timeframes and days that your followers are most active and engaged on Instagram. That data might help you shape your optimal posting times.
Post and Reels Analytics
Next up, checking out the data on each post is just as important as getting to know your audience. How else will you know if a post is a flop or a success? This is where you will look to see how an individual post has gone over with your audience.
The post analytics might let you know when something simply isn’t working well, but it can also pinpoint when things are working really well. You get information on both sides of the coin. When a post doesn’t go over well, you know that you need to tweak that type of post to better appeal to your audience. In some cases, it might simply be tweaking the posting times.
A reel is a type of post that is in video format. The tracking for reels is going to be included in your posts, since it’s a similar type of content and the same data is tracked.
Post and reel analytics help you know what is or is not working and it includes these details.
- Interactions – Interactions based on this post, including profile visits, hyperlinks, hearts, shares, etc.
- Follows – Did this post get you new followers?
- Impressions – How many people viewed this post and how did they stumble across it?
- Comments – How many comments are on the post?
- Saves – Tracks the number of saves of this post.
- Reach – Tracks the number of unique accounts reached by the post.
- Discovery – How many people you reached that found you in their Discovery page?
Each of these details gives you a lot of great information and can help you shape posts as you move forward.
Stories Analytics 📖️
Your story analytics are going to be very similar to post analytics. Instagram stories and reels have become some of the most popular tools of Instagram. You want to make sure you are using these, and you want to know if what you are posting to them is working adequately enough.
Instagram’s algorithm looks gracefully upon business users that dip into all of the different tools. Stories and reels are similar, they just appear in different places. Both are video-based and can have varying animations. Stories typically just last for 24 hours, while a reel will be posted to a newsfeed and stay there unless removed.
You can track ongoing data from stories, which is different slightly from posts or reels. This includes things like your impressions and reach, just like posts or reels do. But there are a couple more as well.
- Replies – Monitors the number of replies to your posted story.
- Exits – Tracks those who exit your story in the middle of it.
- People – Provides details about the people that are seeing parts of your story.
Tracking Instagram Data 🔎️
Instagram has a high range of analytics that every business profile has access too. The above information is a high level overview, but you’re going to find the data that you feel best reflects what you need to make your account successful. Put it to use, figure out how to make the information work to your benefit.
Knowing that there is so much data is what becomes overwhelming to people. There is so much that some users simply shy away from it because they don’t know where to start. And that’s ok. Start with just looking at one type of data. Get to know that data set and start to tweak things or figure out what is working in that realm.
When you get comfortable or you start to feel curious about other data, you can try another piece of the puzzle. This is a great way to integrate slowly and make sure you’re utilizing those analytics to make improvements and understand your followers.
Set a goal and understand what you really want to accomplish. This can also help you use analytics in a beneficial way.
These are the top three reasons that people use their Instagram analytics data.
- Building brand awareness
- Generating sales or leads
- Building and engaging with community
Building Brand Awareness
The top reason people use analytical tools is to understand how they can make a bigger mark with their brand. They’ve got something great and they just want to share it with the world. When you’re new or still building up a following, it can be so hard because people look for established options.
You have to start somewhere and this is it! When you’re working on building brand awareness, you’re going to pay close attention to follower counts, impressions, and your reach. These will be the details that tell you what is working and how you can continue to build. It also tells you how you are building now so you can be proud of every forward movement.
Generating Sales or Leads
As a business, you want to be able to drum up business and make sales. We get it. While this shouldn’t be your driving focus of content, you still want to know how your content is making this happen.
You want to learn who your prospects are, come up with great leads, and make sales while you’re at it. And you CAN! Analytics allow you to evaluate your progress in this capacity and know how many sales or leads are coming directly from your Instagram content. Ads, posts, discount codes, and more are all trackable thanks to these analytics.
Metrics such as follower hours and days, call or email clicks, and website clicks are going to be helpful in this capacity.
Build and Engage with Community
Those analytics aren’t just a number. They are composed of real people who are there supporting you. Your followers are part of your community. Do you have any idea how much they are engaging with you? Do you engage in return? If you don’t, you should be.
It’s important to interact with your community via comments, replies, messages, and other means. It’s up to you to be responsive and engaging, rather than just ignoring it all. Your metrics can be useful here too.
The data provides detail on how much engagement you have, how many comments are made, and how many story replies you get. Be proud and engage with your community.
The Top 5 Tools with Awesome Instagram Analytics Data
Instagram provides these analytics and data for any user with a business profile and that’s a great place to start. As you grow or you get busy, it can be harder to track the smaller details and keep track of what is or is not working. There are several integrative apps that you can connect to that will help you track more and provide you with tons of great feedback and data for your content.
These are our top 5 picks for Instagram analytics apps.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a scheduler, but they provide a lot of great data to their users. This analytical tool has been around for a long time, back before Instagram even took off.
They offer scheduling capabilities, data, and more for your social platforms. You will need the paid service in order to take advantage of most of their tools.
It’s pretty robust, with analytics that give you optimal posting times, tracking tools, goals, metrics, and more. They even have reports you can check out for more data.
2. Keyhole
Keyhole is a great analytical tool if you like to see what your hashtags are doing for you. They can also help you find the best hashtags to try for your brand or your post.
Hashtags are a vital piece of Instagram, so getting to know the metrics behind them can be a huge resource.
You can look at details specific to any hashtags you have been using and find out if they are doing anything for you. This includes your branded hashtags. Of course, the app is capable of more than that and provides other tracking and analytics, as well as features that are pretty neat.
3. Squarelovin
Squarelovin was made specifically for Instagram businesses and it’s got a lot of great information.
Not only can you track all of the analytical data, but you can use Square loving to help build your content strategy and adjust it when needed as well.
When it comes to post promotions, the app will tell you who is most likely to engage, based on similar competitors or your past success. This helps you promote in the best way possible.
The other analytics here are simple and straightforward, but they still provide a lot of great information. From finding out who is engaging and when, you can learn a lot about your IG.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the more expensive platforms but it’s a really great option if you can swing it. They have so much data and their schedulers are pretty awesome too.
You can do everything from leaving notes and ideas to creating multiple posts to multiple platforms. It’s pretty great.
Sprout goes above and beyond with their analytics. You can see all the usual things, but you can also check out your top competitors in the industry and see what is working for them. This might give you some inspiration. You can even build custom reports to pull out exactly what you want to see.
5. Socialbakers - Emplifi
If you’re looking for free analytics, then Socialbakers through Emplifi might be a great tool. Emplifi has several paid options too, but you can get some free insights, which can be really useful.
People like this platform because rather than just reports and charts, they provide a lot of great visuals that might help navigate the data.
You can see recent data and also go back to look at a full year in review.
Make Instagram Work for You
Instagram has so much to offer in the business world, whether you choose to just use their analytics or integrate a social media management tool that also provide analytics and data.
This guide shares some of the best analytics out there and how you can put them to use. Play around a little bit and see what you might discover about your business profile and content practices.
Take the time to get to know the analytics and figure out who your content is appealing to, when is the best time to post, and how you can make adjustments to be that much better.
