How To Use Instagram Analytics To Improve Your Content Strategy
Want a stronger social media presence? It’s time to start paying attention to Instagram analytics tools! These measure and track how your content is performing and how your audience responds to it. Analytics are invaluable for keeping track of your successes, knowing your audience, and creating a targeted social media strategy.
What are Instagram Analytics and why do they matter?
Analytics are an easy and effective way to get to know your audience – who they are, what they want, and what resonates with them. It allows you to track trends (growth, engagement, downturns) and see which content is performing well. This can help you not only grow your Instagram but reach the right people who will engage with your content.
This information can also help you create more effective, data-driven decisions, rather than tossing content out blindly and hoping something works. Guessing what will interest your audience is not a good use of your time or effort. To optimize your social media marketing efforts, you need to know of what’s working and when it’s time to switch up your approach.
Instagram insights also help you evaluate the success of your content strategy. It is concrete evidence to share with your boss, team, investors, or potential clients to show how well your socials are performing.
How to Check Instagram Analytics
Instagram has a free social media insights tool right in the app; all you need is a creator or business account to access Instagram analytics. When you’re on your business profile, click the menu in the top right corner and select “insights”. From there you’ll find the different metrics and options outlined below. In the top left corner of this page, you can change the time frame that you’re tracking.
Key Instagram Metrics to Track
Accounts reached: the number of unique accounts that have seen your content. This is different from impressions, which is the total number of times it was seen, including if the same account viewed it multiple times.
Accounts Engaged: the number of your followers who have interacted with your content. Does your content resonate with people and inspire action (likes, comments, clicks, shares, saves)? You can also see specific engagement for each Instagram post, story, or reel by clicking on that content and see things like average watch time (reels) or Instagram hashtag analytics (posts).
Total followers: you can see how many followers you’ve gained or lost to track your growth.
Profile Activity: How many visitors click on your profile, CTAs, link in bio, links in stories etc. This is a great metric for determining return on investment (ROI) and seeing how many people are visiting your website.
How to track Instagram analytics
Looking at all these numbers can be overwhelming, so how do you decide what to track? Tracking everything probably isn’t the best use of your time, so it's important to have a clear Instagram marketing strategy and track the metrics that align with your goals. For example, if your objective is to drive more people to your website, then “profile activity” is the metric you want to focus on. If you want to increase brand awareness, then tracking "reach" would be helpful.
To keep this data organized, you'll want to create a regular social media report (weekly, monthly etc.) using an Excel spreadsheet or one of the many templates available online. There are also plenty of paid social media tools to help you track analytics and get even more detailed metrics such as Later, Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
Using Instagram Insights to Reach your business goals
So now that you have all your data, how do you interpret and use it? By looking for trends! Obviously, you want to see increases over time, but you need to look deeper for why your content is (or is not performing). Did you get a boost of reach or profile activity after launching a paid ad or using influencer marketing? Did your rise in followers happen when you started posting stories more regularly? What performs well and what do the posts have in common (hashtags, time of posting, type of content, tone/sentiment, topic etc.)?
If you're a business owner, analytics are one of the simplest tools for effective social media management. They allow you to take out all the guesswork, see what content is performing, make informed decisions to re-create that success, and fine-tune your digital marketing strategy.