A Checklist to Help You Understand Your Instagram Insights
One of the major introductions to Instagram has been ‘Insights’, which allows users to view analytics measuring the performance of your content, in order to better understand your audience.
The following is a checklist of what you need to know about Instagram Insights, how to access them, what they mean, and how you can use them.
How to Access Instagram Insights
To access your Instagram Insights, take the following steps:
- First off, ensure your Instagram profile is set to Public Navigate to your Instagram Profile and tap on settings in the top right corner.
Navigate to your Instagram Profile and tap on settings in the top right corner.
Scroll down and tap on “Switch to Business Account” You’ll then be instructed to connect your account to a Facebook Page
(If you don’t have a Facebook Page you can create one during this step.)- In order to have an Instagram Business account you must have a connected Facebook Page. The Facebook page doesn’t have to be branded or have any content on there, it simply has to exist.
● Confirm all your details are correct then click ‘Done’
1. You have now converted to a Business Profile and will have access to Instagram Insights.
- In order to have an Instagram Business account you must have a connected Facebook Page. The Facebook page doesn’t have to be branded or have any content on there, it simply has to exist.
Instagram Insights Meaning
To access Instagram Insights, navigate to your profile page and tap at the top where it tells you your profile visits – equally, you can tap the menu button in the top right-hand corner and find ‘Insights’ as the first option.
Instagram Insights is split into the following three tabs, with each tab containing different
information:
- Activity
- Content
- Audience
Activity
Under the Activity tab, you’ll find two sets of Instagram insights, interactions and discovery.
Let’s delve into each subsection and find out what each statistic means:
Interactions:
In this subsection, you can see the total number of actions taken on your account in the past week, followed by a list of other metrics. Here’s what these Instagram insights mean:
- Profile Visits – The amount of users that have visited your Instagram profile
- Website Clicks – The number of users who have clicked on the website link in your bio
- Email – The number of times users have tapped on Email on your profile
- Call – The number of times users have tapped on Call on your profile
Using the graph, you can see which day of the week has the most interactions, as well as a comparison of the interactions from last week.
You will note this section of Instagram Insights is limited to the past 7 days, however, other Instagram insights tools such as Hopper HQ’s Analytics can show you up to 28 days.
Discoverability
The next subsection displays the overall performance and influence of your Instagram account using two key metrics: Reach & Impressions
- Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts
- Impressions – The total number of times that all your posts have been seen
So, what does this all mean?
This week-by-week information is highly valuable, as you can compare your reach depending on certain campaigns or social activity.
Tracking these metrics is important to know whether your efforts to promote your Instagram account are successful, and should be a key part of any social media marketing strategy.
The Activity tab in Instagram Insights therefore reveals the influence of your page, as well as details of how people have interacted with it.
However, it should be noted that this section of Instagram Insights is also limited to the past 7 days.
Content
Under the Content tab you will find Instagram insights relating to individual posts on your profile. This includes photo and video content, Stories, and even any promotional paid posts you may have published.
The Content tab is split into: Feed, Stories & Promotions…
Feed:
Here you’ll find all the important Instagram insights of the content on your feed from the past 2 years.
You can sort your insights by content type, metric and time period. These are the Instagram insights you can filter by and what they mean:
- Calls – The number of unique accounts that followed the CTA
- Comments – The number of comments on your post
- Emails – The number of unique accounts that followed the CTA to Email
- Engagement – The number of unique accounts that liked, commented or saved your post
- Follows – The number of accounts that started following you because of your post
- Get Directions – The number of users who tapped get directions because of your post
- *Impressions – The total number of times your post has been seen
- Likes – The total number of likes on your post
- Profile Visits – The number of times your profile was viewed
- Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts
- Saved – The number of unique accounts that saved your post
- Website Clicks – The number of times your website was clicked because of your post
You can also delve deeper into each post to get more information.
Clicking on each post then tapping ‘View Insights’ will open the in-depth analytics.
Under this section of Instagram Insights, you can see the total interactions from each post, the breakdown of the engagement, and also most interestingly, the breakdown of the discovery of your post.
This includes where all your impressions came from: be it hashtags, directly through your profile, home feed or other.
Stories:
Stories is another subsection under the Content tab where you can view the Instagram insights of your stories.
These metrics shed light on how users view and interact with your Stories, which can help you shape and plan Story content for the future.
The Instagram insights you can access for Stories include:
- Impressions – The number of times your Instagram Story has been seen
- Reach – The number of unique accounts that viewed the post on your Instagram Story
- Exited – The number of times a user swiped away from a specific story
- Replies – The number of replies to a particular photo or video in your story
- Viewers – The specific users that have seen a particular post on your story
- Forward – The number of users that skipped this Story post
- Backwards – The number of users that went back from this Story post
- Next Story – The number of taps to the next account’s story
Audience
The final tab in Instagram Insights is Audience. This is where you’re able to get a better understanding of who your followers are and where they live, as well as see how your follower number has varied from the previous week.
Within the Audience tab of Instagram Insights, you’ll find 4 key sets of information about your followers:
- Gender – The percentage split of your followers
- Age Range – The age brackets of your followers
- Top Locations – The locations of your followers based on City and Countries
- Followers – The most active times of your followers, by hour of the day and days of the week
As you can see, the Audience section reveals key Instagram insights about your followers which can help build and improve your Instagram marketing strategy. Not only can you get a better understanding of who follows you, but you can also decipher the time in which your followers are most active, helping you better plan and schedule your Instagram posts to reach as many people as possible.
Use this checklist whenever you decide to check up and find out how well your
Instagram postings are doing.