There are a number of ways to grow your audience with Instagram analytics. Getting to know your account’s insights is the place to begin!

Instagram is easily one of the largest social media platforms on offer right now. Owned by Meta, née Facebook, it’s one of TikTok‘s top competitors, and home to individuals, creators, and businesses alike. No longer used just for fun, Instagram has become a vital part in any business’ digital marketing strategy.

As a business, large or small, knowing your way around Instagram can be the difference between your new product range taking off or flopping. The social media platform allows you to connect to new audiences and tap into fresh marketplaces for free. Pre-Instagram, this is something that would have been incredibly costly and time-consuming, often relying on marketing professionals. Now, with just a little reading, you can manage your content marketing on Instagram without the help of others.

Why Does This Matter?

You might be wondering why you can’t just post content and hope for the best. You can absolutely do that, however it won’t yield the same results as more considered and informed content marketing.

Understanding Instagram analytics, or Insights, allows you to:

• Target audiences more precisely
• Know what content people respond well to
• Ensure engagement levels remain high, leading to no missed opportunities

Analytics also enables you to see who your audience is, when they’re most active, and where they are. This is all vital information to gather, whether you’re selling products or promoting content.

How to View Insights

In order to view your Insights on Instagram, you will need a business account. Switching from a personal account is a very simple process, so don’t fret. All you need to do is head to Settings, then Switch Account Type.

Once you have your business account set up, simply head to your profile. You will see the Insights button in the centre of your screen, beneath your bio. Clicking on this will take you to all your analytics.

What Can Be Analysed?

Understanding and tracking your Instagram analytics is starting to sound pretty appealing, right? First, though, you need to know what exactly you’re analysing. For a free platform, Instagram offers a decent amount of information when it comes to insights. These are the analytics on offer to you…

Audience Analytics/Insights Overview

The analytics that will help you to understand your overall audience is also known as your Insights overview. This is what will first appear after you hit the Insights button on your profile. Here you can discover more information on Accounts reached, Accounts engaged, and Total followers.

You can click on each of these to bring up relevant data and metrics.

Feed Post

You can access insights for feed posts by heading to them directly and hitting View Insights. Alternatively, you can access them via Insights Overview.

From here, you can view a range of metrics including impressions, reach, interactions (likes, comments, saves, and shares), as well as profile visits and follows.

Stories

From Insights Overview, you can gather data relating to the Stories you’ve shared over the time period you’ve chosen to inspect. This is really helpful for understanding what type of Stories work best for your business and brand.

By clicking Stories under Content You’ve Shared, you’ll be able to view previous Stories and how they performed relating to a dropdown menu of different metrics. These include:

• Back
• Call Button Taps
• Email Button Taps
• Exited
• Follows
• Next Story
• Get Directions Taps
• Impressions
• Link Clicks
• Forward
• Profile Visits
• Reach
• Text Buttons Taps
• Website Taps

Reels

A newer addition to the Insights tab, you can see how each of your Reels performed. Reels are incredibly effective in terms of boosting engagement, and making great Reels is something you definitely should be planning in order to bolster your brand.

Metrics you can view for Reels include plays, Reel interaction, reach, likes, comments, and saves.

Videos

You can view data for Videos under the Content You’ve Shared tab in your Insights Overview, just like with a feed post. This will let you know what sort of video content is popular with your audience, and what to avoid in future. The metrics available are:

• Average Percentage Watched
• Website Taps
• Call Button Taps
• Comments
• Email Button Taps
• Follows
• Business address taps
• Impressions
• Likes
• Profile visits
• Reach
• Saves

Lives

Also, available in the Insights Overview tab, data around Instagram Lives can help you connect with your audience in real time. Metrics available include Accounts Reached, Peak Concurrent Viewers, Comments, and Shares.

How to Track Instagram Analytics

You’ll find that there are a plethora of social media tools available to help you track your Instagram analytics. Some are available as part of a paid subscription, but there are some free options out there. We’ll go through some of the best of these a little later on.

For now, if you’re looking to keep a hand firmly on the purse strings, you can simply track Instagram Insights yourself. You can interpret metrics to track growth and following, as well as engagement, and much more. All you need to do is set your goal, and determine which metrics you need to keep an eye on.

For example, if you were looking to track brand awareness, you would make a note of the number of followers you have, your reach, and any shares or mentions. You can whip up a simple spreadsheet or table and input the data for these corresponding metrics at the end of each month (or however regularly you want an update). This will allow you to see any patterns or changes, and let you know whether your content marketing strategy is pushing you in the direction you were aiming for.

Implement Insights into Your Content Marketing

It’s all very well and good knowing where to find your Instagram analytics and how to track them. But, what do you do with all that information?

Paying attention to when your audience is most active on the platform is a solid way to improve your reach, as well as your overall engagement. Make sure you’re posting your content at these peak times, and you’ll ensure higher impressions and hopefully more engagement.

If you’re measuring your engagement, you’ll be keeping an eye on things such as likes, comments, shares, and link clicks. Seeing which of your posts has the highest numbers across these metrics will show you what kind of content you need to keep creating. Anything your audience has responded well to in the past is a safe bet – just be sure not to completely repeat yourself!

Best Instagram Analytics Tools

Rather than creating your own spreadsheets or tracking documents, you can get on board with a third party social media tracker. There are plenty of options available, ranging from free and basic, to advanced paid for services.

Signing up to a platform like Sprout Social or BuzzSumo can save you heaps of time when it comes to keeping on top of your social media performance. We recommend:

• Sprout Social
• Buffer Analyze
• Buzz Sumo
• Hootsuite

The majority of these platforms will offer the option to compile all your collected data into easy to read reports. This enables you to see trends and changes within your stats, letting you know if your social media plan is working out the way you’d hoped.