Alexis Kestler
If you use Instagram for your business, then you know what Metrics are. You might even glance at it sometimes. But it's normal if you feel overwhelmed.
But it’s not unusual if you feel overwhelmed by all of the options, and unsure of which ones do you actually need. Let’s see how we can help you.
Reach
Reach is one of the most essential Instagram Metrics. It will serve you well to monitor your brand’s performance. Reach shows how many different users have seen your post. Simply said – how much brand awareness you are obtaining.
So, if you want to improve brand awareness (and who doesn’t?) and reach as many people as you can, this is the number you should focus on. To check it out, you need to open the exact post you want to see and tap on the insights.
As you can see, the data for one post is pretty detailed. You can see exactly which actions are taken, how many times, and how did users found you. The last one can be useful if you want to track your hashtags efficiency. If some of your posts have higher or lower reach than others, you will easily understand which kind of content works with your audience. (And which doesn’t.) And you can use those results for future posts, of course.
Things you can change to improve your reach:
- Change hashtags you use, if they don’t work
- Add or improve your call-to-actions
- Publish at the right times – when your audience is mostly using Instagram
- Change the type of your content or your design
- Take notes of any change you do, and my impact on growing or falling of your reach
It is easy to get lost in your metrics, so don’t confuse reach with impressions. Reach shows the number of unique views on one post, while impressions show the total number of views (even if the same person looked at it a few times).
Saves
At first, you might think that “saves” is not among the most useful metrics. But after the testing of hiding likes in the USA and disabling certain features in European Union countries after the change in privacy rules, “saves” have suddenly become a very popular and accurate statistic.
With Instagram saves, users can store a post for later. They can also arrange them into collections, to easily find them later. It is a very simple action, by taping the “save” icon in the right corner:
Those saves are the strongest pointers of interest to Instagram’s algorithms. More than likes and comments, yes. The more saves you get, the more your reach will grow and you will be more visible to people.
By watching the number of saves for individual posts, you may better understand what your followers will be more likely to save. That means, what they like more and find it useful and engaging. You can use these findings in your future strategy.
Interactions
Your Instagram engagement data will show you how well is your audience responding to your content. If people leave comments, like, share, and save your posts, the “interactions” will show it. If you go to your metrics and choose to see interactions with your content, you can check this for the last 7 or 30 days. If you use Business Suite, there is some more freedom about choosing the period you want to look at.
Also, the more info you add to your profile, the more statistics you will see. (And the more ways for users to get to you!) You can add your website URL, email address, phone number, etc. You can also see these metrics.
Some marketers like to count engagement rates in percentages. There are different tools that you can use to help you get the number, such as Tanke. But with it, you will just get the number of total engagement for one profile. If you want to get the number for each post, you will have to reach for a more sophisticated tool that supervises your account, or to do it by hand: Divide your total number of likes and comments by your follower count, and then multiply by 100 to give you a percentage.
Stories Metrics
Instagram stories are one of the best ways to build a stronger relationship with your audience. This is why it’s important to keep track of your views, taps forward and back, and other actions.
You can look at the individual story metrics while it’s published. It shows you detailed info on what was happening with that same story, and in which ways people engaged.
If you have more than one story, you can watch it through your stories metrics. Under “interactions” you will find the percentage of people who interacted with your stories compared to the week before. You can also see the number of people who saw your stories and how many people were reached for all your stories, and that way you can compare them.
Best Times
Although you can find a lot of advice on which is the best time to post on Instagram, that may or may not be useful. The best time to publish your post is depending on your location and your audience. What you need is to find your best time.
Why is this important? You don’t want your content to appear out there when your audience is sleeping or busy with something else. You want them to engage the most they can.
You can find “the most active periods” data under your audience metrics:
You can see when your followers are the most active by hours, and by days. If you list through the days, you will see that there is not much change in the hours’ activity, maybe only a weekend will be slightly different. So, you don’t have to change a different time every day if it’s too complicated for you. Just pick the hour that is most accurate to be the highest activity hour.
Growth
Keeping eye on your growth metrics is also very important, and with time it becomes a habit to look at it. To know how many people followed and unfollowed you is the basics. Having this insight is helpful, but don’t worry about it excessively. Many people on Instagram use bots and follow/unfollow techniques to build a followers list, so, normally, some of your followers will drop off in the next few days after following you.
Watching your growth metrics will help you understand which actions and which kind of content helps you to grow your follower list, or to lose some of them. Try to keep in mind how much did you engaged during the time you are tracking your data. Did you commented and liked more/less than usual? Have you sent DMs? Have you boosted your posts? That can affect the changes a lot. And, of course, the type of your content.
If you understand what drives your followers to do certain things, you will do great on Instagram. All of these metrics will help you to understand that. Then you can put together or update your social media marketing plan.
Hope we could help you with this post and you will reach a new audience and grow your followers’ list. Good luck!
