How the heck do I use and interpret Instagram analytics?

Instagram has really spoilt us with the amount of analytics we have access to these days. But, all these Instagram metrics don’t mean a whole lot if you can’t interpret them. This episode, I’m giving you a brief overview of the key Instagram metrics you need to know, how to interpret Instagram analytics, what they mean for your business and how you can improve them.

 

 

 

How to interpret Instagram analytics

In this blog post, I'm going to briefly run through some of the key Instagram reporting metrics, what they mean and how you can improve them or use them to your advantage.

Most of these metrics are only available to people with an Instagram business profile. So, if you've been thinking about making the switch but you've been worried that Instagram will throttle your reach, you don't need to worry anymore. Instagram recently confirmed that it doesn't penalise business accounts by limiting their reach.

How do I access Instagram reporting?

Once you've got a business profile you can access your Instagram analytics via your profile page. In the top bar, you'll see an icon that looks like a bar graph. Click on this and that's your analytics screen.

Instagram reporting metric #1: Website clicks

If you sell a product, this is a super important metric as it tells you how many people have clicked through to your website from Instagram. This might not be ALL the people from Instagram have visited your website, as I've found that people often search your business name or type the URL directly into their browser, rather than going to your profile and clicking on the link in your bio.

There is no set number that your website clicks should be, as this depends on a lot of things. But, if you can get an idea of what your own benchmark website clicks are, then you can work on improving that number.

There are a couple ways that you can increase website clicks from Instagram. The simplest way is to add a call to action to your posts. For example, you could end a post with “shop now at the link in my bio”. I also recommend adding a call to action to your bio. For example, it might be “click below to shop now” or “download my free e-book at the link below” to encourage them to click the link.

Instagram reporting metrics #2 & #3: Impressions and Reach

I've bundle these two together as they're similar but different. They often get used interchangeably and people often confuse the two. Reach is the number of unique accounts that have seen your post and impressions is the total number of times your posts have been seen. Confusing, right?

Impressions will always be higher than, or the same as, reach, because some people will see the same post twice.

How can you increase your Instagram impressions and reach? There's not a whole lot you can do other than posting when your audience is most active and using strategically selected hashtags. You might want to tag some feature accounts or just pay attention to what your audience interacts with most and post more content like that.

Interpreting Instagram post insights

When you click into a post, you'll notice that underneath it, it says “view insights”. This has some great insight into how each post performed.

Instagram reporting metric #4: Saved

You can see how many times each post was saved by viewers, which gives you an insight into what your audience finds most valuable because they're saving it for later. So, it might be something they want to read later. Or maybe they think the image is really nice and they want to reshare it later. Regardless, it's worth going into the content section of Instagram analytics and sorting by “most saved” just so you can see which posts were most saved by your audience and which content they find most valuable.

Instagram reporting metric #5: Profile visits

This Instagram reporting metric shows how many people visited your profile from this particular post. This is a good metric to keep your eye on as it could indicate how interested people are in your brand or what you're selling, and how interested they are in visiting your website.

You might want to test whether including a call to action increases the number of profiles visits here.

Instagram reporting metrics #6 & #7: Impressions and reach per post

I know we already looked at impressions and reach but this was at a profile level, which is how many people saw ALL your posts. This is at a post level now, so how many people saw this particular post and how many times this particular post was seen.

Instagram also breaks down your impressions so you can see where people saw your posts most – whether it was from their news feed, from your profile, from a hashtag or from another source.

These two metrics give you a really good insight into which posts Instagram algorithm thinks your audience will like best. So, once a month or so, go back and look at your posts and see which ones have had the biggest reach.

Instagram reporting metrics #8 & #9: Comments and likes

These are arguably the most important Instagram reporting metrics because it's all well and good sharing content, but if nobody's engaging with your content, it stops being a social network – you might as well be posting to crickets.

It's worth keeping an eye on this metric to see what types of content your audience finds most engaging. Maybe if you asked a question in your post that would increase the amount of engagement. Test it and see what the result is. Maybe including a short story about yourself will get more engagement. You don't know what will work best until you test.

Interpreting Instagram audience insights

Lastly, back in the main profile analytics tab, we have Instagram audience insights. This gives you an idea of who your followers are in terms of demographics. You can see the male / female breakdown, age range, which cities and countries they're based in, and what times of day they're most active.

This is useful to check every now and then, as your followers should be aligned with the demographics of your target audience. So, if your followers are mainly males aged over 55 and your target audience is females aged 25 to 44, then you need to look up what content you are posting and how you're growing your following because those aren't the right people for you.

Knowing when your audience is most active also helps you work out when your ideal posting times are, so keep an eye on this one too.

(Psst! You might be interested in my blog post rounding up the best Instagram templates of 2018).

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