Ever wondered what your audience really thinks about your Instagram content? Or which of your posts are truly driving engagement and interest? If you’re running an Instagram account for your business, the answers could be hugely valuable.
Luckily, Instagram provides a powerful analytics tool to give you those insights and more. By taking a deep dive into your Instagram analytics data (Instagram Insights), you can uncover key information about your followers, figure out what content resonates best, and make data-driven decisions to grow your account more effectively.
Pretty useful. But how exactly do you access and interpret all those analytics? Let’s walk through it step-by-step.
First Things First – Setting Up Instagram Analytics
Before we jump into analyzing data, you’ll need to ensure your Instagram account has access to the Instagram Insights tools. Don’t worry, it’s a quick process:
1) Convert to an Instagram Business or Creator account if you haven’t already. Personal accounts don’t get the full analytics capabilities.
2) In your Settings, connect your account to a Facebook page. This gives you access to Instagram’s built-in Insights.
3) If you use other analytics tools like Iconosquare, connect your Instagram account there as well.
And that’s it! With those quick steps out of the way, you’re all set to start mining those valuable Instagram metrics.
So what exactly can you learn from Instagram analytics? Let’s take a look at some of the most useful data points.
Your Followers – Who Are These People?
Understanding your audience is key for any effective marketing strategy. Instagram analytics lets you dive deep into the demographics, locations, and online behaviors of your current followers.
For example, you can see the age range, gender breakdown, and cities/countries where your followers are based. You’ll also get insight into which days and times your audience is most active on Instagram.
Why does this matter? Let’s say your followers are predominantly younger females located in Chicago. You can then tailor your content, hashtags, and posting schedule to better resonate with that specific audience.
Or if you see a lot of your followers are active at night, you may want to adjust your posting times to ensure your content hits the feed when they’re online.
You can even monitor shifts in these audience insights over time. Seeing a growing segment in a new demographic? That may signal an opportunity to expand your marketing approach.
So take some time diving into your followers data on Instagram analytics. Those nuggets of audience knowledge are pure marketing gold.
Your Top Performing Content
Of course, understanding your existing audience is just one piece of the analytics puzzle. You also need to know what type of content they actually engage with and enjoy. That’s where Instagram’s post metrics come into play.
For each individual post, you can analyze data on:
– Impressions (how many feeds it was viewed on)
– Reach (unique accounts that saw it)
– Engagement rate (percentage of people who interacted)
– Saved (number of times it was bookmarked)
– And plenty of other insightful metrics
This gives you a clear picture of your top performing posts and reveals what types of visuals, captions, filters, and hashtag strategies tend to work best.
You may find that posts featuring people get way more engagement than product shots. Or that adding location tags significantly boosts visibility. Or that certain filters and color schemes drive more saves.
By understanding these patterns, you can start replicating the elements of your most successful content while avoiding tactics that fall flat.
Let’s say your goal is to increase your reach and get your posts in front of more potential new followers. You could look at your top posts sorted by impressions data to see what seemed to attract more eyeballs. Was it a specific caption style or strategic hashtag use that gave that extra amplification boost?
Or if your main metric is engagement rate, you could analyze the outliers with super high engagement levels. What did those top-performers have in common that sparked so much interaction?
Beyond individual posts, you can also get a macro view across all your content. For example, Instagram’s analytics will show you your overall engagement rate so you can benchmark how you’re doing compared to your competitors.
Continuously monitoring your Instagram content metrics is crucial for understanding what moves the needle with your audience. That way, you can keep optimizing and refining your strategy based on what truly drives results.
Instagram Stories Analytics
Instagram Stories have become massively popular for businesses to share episodic, behind-the-scenes content in a more informal, conversational format. But you can still apply Instagram analytics here to maximize your Stories’ impact.
Very similar to regular posts, you can see Stories metrics like reach, impressions, exits, and unique viewers. You’ll also get completion rates to see what percentage watched the entire story sequence versus dropping off.
These analytics are a goldmine for fine-tuning your Stories strategy. Are certain stickers or Story types resulting in huge drop-off rates? Then you know to avoid those styles moving forward.
You can also monitor data around replies, shares, links clicked, and other indicators of active engagement. If you’re experimenting with different prompts to encourage more interactivity, the analytics will reveal what’s working best.
Our pro tip for analyzing Stories: Take advantage of the flexibility to quickly post/analyze/refine your content based on the data. The ephemeral nature of Stories makes them a perfect low-stakes testing ground to keep optimizing your approach.
So remember, while your permanent feed posts are still a priority, Stories analytics provide an important complementary data stream to enhance your entire Instagram content strategy.
Leveraging Paid Analytics
Up until now, we’ve focused on organic analytics around your own Instagram account, content, and audience behavior. But many businesses are also investing in paid promotion through Instagram advertising.
If you’re running any paid Instagram campaigns as part of your overall marketing mix, those analytics metrics open up an entirely new realm of audience targeting opportunities.
For example, you can monitor data around ad impressions, reach, website clicks, video engagement rates, and detailed demographic breakdowns of who is viewing or converting on your ads.
These paid analytics give you powerful insight into which audience segments are most interested in your offerings. You can then use those learnings to laser-focus your targeting for maximum ROI and efficiency from your paid spend.
Perhaps your ads resonated best with males in a certain age range. Or you noticed surprisingly high engagement rates from an unexpected geographic region. Analytics allows you to identify these nuanced patterns that can completely shift your paid strategy.
Viewing Organic Alongside Paid Analytics
For many brands, the real analytical “aha!” moments come from viewing paid and organic metrics in tandem. This combined picture reveals opportunities for synergy between channels.
For example, you may notice certain themes or visual styles that reliably drive high engagement organically also tend to perform strongly in your paid ads. Those are clear indications of content directions toDouble down on.
Or you may spot seams between the two channels, like demographics you reach well organically but struggle with via paid promotion. This gap could inspire new messaging approaches or even spark ideas for influencer collaborations to bridge that divide.
As you dive deeper into leveraging all of Instagram’s disparate data streams together, connections and insights will begin to emerge. Paying attention to these patterns illuminates the true path for amplifying your Instagram strategy.
Embracing Analytics as a Continual Cycle
Hopefully this gives you a good overview of how Instagram analytics can be powerfully transformative for your brand’s presence on the platform. But to get full long-term value, you’ll want to adopt an analytics mindset as a continual cycle:
Step 1: Use Instagram’s tools to gather all available data from your account, audience, and content performance.
Step 2: Look for key takeaways and insights by analyzing patterns, anomalies, and correlations within the data.
Step 3: Pivot your Instagram strategy and experiment with adjustments to leverage those analytics-driven insights.
Step 4: Assess performance impact from the changes by monitoring the updated data. Rinse and repeat.
As you embrace this cyclical approach of constant data analysis followed by strategic adjustments, your entire Instagram strategy will become an agile, iterative process continually improving over time.
And remember, analytics isn’t just a set-it-and-forget-it task. Instagram’s platform and capabilities are constantly evolving with new features, formats, and data streams emerging all the time.
So stay curious and keep adapting your analysis techniques too. An analytics mindset centered around infinite learning and optimization will ensure your Instagram account stays ahead of the curve.
Does mastering Instagram analytics still feel a little daunting? Don’t worry, you’ve got this! Just keep these three guiding principles in mind:
1) Start simple by getting familiar with the key metrics for your brand goals
2) Always analyze from the audience perspective – what are the numbers telling you about their needs and preferences?
3) View data not as static insights but guideposts for your next experiments
With that approach of patient learning, prioritizing your customers, and a mindset of curiosity over assumptions, you’ll be leveraging Instagram’s powerful analytics to drive serious growth for your business in no time! Contact our social media team at Relevant Audience if you would like any help.
