Understanding Instagram Insights & How To Put Them To Work

If you have a Business account on Instagram, one of the most powerful features at your fingertips is access to Insights.

Instagram Insights help you learn more about your followers and the people interacting with your business on Instagram. For example, you’ll find insights such as gender, age range and location. You can also see which posts and stories your audience sees and engages with the most.

But if you don’t know what to look for or how to translate those insights into strategy, it can be overwhelming. So let’s break it down by looking at the insights that matter most and how you can use them to your advantage.

Where to find Insights

When you are in your profile, click the three lines in the top right corner, and click Insights.

What Insights to Track

When you are in Insights you will see three main categories: Content, Activity and Audience.

Audience

The first category to look at is Audience. This will give you information on your follower growth, where your followers are located, their age and gender as well as when they are most active on the app.

Depending on your product or service, these demographics will be more or less important. If you have a local brick and mortar store, location will be important. You want the vast majority of your followers to be local so you can get them in the door.

Audience stats that all businesses should look at, though:

• Follower count: this is a no brainer to track your follower growth. While this number doesn’t tell the whole story, it is still important to track. Insights will show you how many people followed and unfollowed you over the most recent week.
• Follower stats: At the bottom of the Audience tab, you will see a section titled Followers. This is important information you can use in your strategy. This section with show which days AND times each your current followers are most active on the app. Use this information to decide which days and times to post your content. For example, on Mondays the largest percentage of my followers are active from 9-12. But on Wednesdays, that shifts to 12-3.

Activity

The Activity tab will show you how many people see your content, where they are finding it, and how they are interacting with your profile.

You will see:

• Reach: the number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts or stories over the last 7 days.
• Impressions: the total number of times your posts and stories have been seen

These will be broken down by day as well as showing you the total numbers.

Interactions

This section is more important to track. The interactions sections will show you what actions were taken on your account. You will see how many times your profile was visited and how many times your website link was clicked.

How to use these: Track your website clicks to see how your calls to action are performing. If you see a jump during a certain week, analyze your posts from that week to see what content and CTAs were most successful.

Content

This is the really juicy section that you will want to dive into. The Content section will show you insights on your posts, stories and promotions. Where you want to deep dive is into the Posts section.

Posts

In this section you will be able to see how your posts are performing. You can look at different time periods from 7 days to the last 2 years. You can drill down by post type and engagement stat.

Which Engagement Stats Matter?

Instagram Insights let you look at the following interactions:

• Calls
• Comments
• Emails
• Engagement
• Follows
• Get Directions
• Impressions
• Likes
• Profile Visits
• Reach
• Saved
• Shares
• Texts
• Website Clicks

That is a lot! So which ones should you be monitoring? While different stats are going to be important to specific businesses, these are the ones you should be analyzing to track how well your content is performing.

• Comments: while likes are great and we all want those, comments show a deeper level of engagement. When followers take the time to comment on your post, it means more than them just double tapping on a photo. See which posts are getting the most comments. Are there trends you can replicate? Did you include a call to action to leave a comment?
• Saved: I LOVE when I see people saving my posts. That tells me that I am putting out content that is so good they want to make sure they can come back to it. I share a lot of educational/training posts on Instagram and when those are saved it tells me my audience appreciates them. Also, this helps with brand awareness because any time my followers go into their saved posts, they see my content and brand.
• Shares: strangers on the internet sharing your content and brand with their own followers? That is solid gold. It is also a vote of confidence and increases your know, like, and trust factor. When other people share your post in their stories or as a direct message, it increases your reach and brand awareness.
• Website clicks: this stat will show you which posts encouraged your followers to click to your profile and then click on your website link. Analyze these posts so you can create more of that type of content.
• Profile visits: similar to website clicks, this stat is good to track as an indicator of follower growth. If someone discovers you through a hashtag and likes your content enough to visit your profile, there is a better chance of them becoming a new follower. Make sure your bio is clear and give them a reason to click follow once they get there.

There you have it. I hope you found this “insightful”. LOL, see what I did there? Are you tracking your Instagram Insights? What stats mean the most to your business?