Instagram Analytics: Your Ultimate Guide
Instagram Insights: Your Guide to all things Posts, Reels, IGTV, Stories + More and how to use them for your overall Instagram strategy.
Posted 6 months ago
Written by
Mackenzie TaylorPosted 6 months ago
When it comes to growing your Instagram account, knowing your analytics and where you stand currently is the perfect place to begin.
Not only will your analytics help you figure out who your audience is, but it’ll give you ideas on the best time to post, what kind of content your audience engages the most with and a lot more to help you improve your content strategy and potentially reach a wider audience.
We know going through analytics reports can be a bit … overwhelming especially when you’ve never really done it before. But that’s where we come to the rescue (we should really be wearing a cape!) by bringing you our guide on all things Instagram Analytics to help walk you through what each metric means and how to improve upon each to boost your Instagram strategy.
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What are Instagram analytics?
Instagram Analytics are a set of metrics used to measure and analyze the performance of all aspects of your Instagram account—from your Posts, Stories, and Reels to your followers, comments, and engagement rate.
By analyzing these metrics, you can determine what’s working and what’s not working on your account, gain insights into your followers, and find ways to improve the reach of your content.
First things first, why do your Instagram analytics actually matter?
If you’re just getting started on Instagram (and social media in general), you might not know why Instagram analytics are so incredibly important to finding success on the platform—and that’s okay!
To put it simply—Instagram analytics are the best (and often only) way to answer questions like:
- Who makes up my audience?
- When are they online?
- What kind of content are they looking for?
How does Instagram analytics answer these questions? Well, when you know exactly how different Instagram metrics impact your account’s reach, engagement, and overall health, you start finding ways to improve your overall performance.
With Instagram analytics, you can also track your progress and keep an eye out on how successful (or not) your content is, which can help you adjust your strategy and come up with more efficient tactics moving forward.
Now, before we dive deeeeeep into the analytics, let’s start with a couple of related questions:
- What’s your main goal for your business? What do you want to drive traffic and attention to? Is it a link in your bio? Is it to get more engagement on a photo?
Once you have a clear and defined answer on what you want to get out of your account, you’ll be able to better monitor your analytics and figure out what you need to change (or maintain!) when it comes to your content.
Instagram Insights: the foundation of Instagram analytics
Instagram Insights is the platform’s built-in analytics tool that provides you with all of your account’s data—from demographic information and follower growth to post engagements.
Instagram Insights is broken into tabs:
- Overview: This tab allows you to view all the details about your account, including post engagements, reach, impressions, profile visits and more.
- Content: This tab helps you keep track of which posts are performing the best and learn more about what your audience is engaging with.
- Audience: This tab gives you an overview of your followers, such as their age, location and gender.
- Activity: This tab allows you to view when your followers are most active on Instagram.
By taking a look at each tab and the information it provides, you can quickly get a feel for which content is working, when to post, who your followers are and what kind of content they respond best to.
How do you access Instagram Insights tool?
How to get to Instagram Insights tool for all posts
Currently, Instagram analytics are only available to those with a business or creator account on Instagram, so if you don’t have one of those accounts, we highly recommend switching. Like, now.
Now that you have a business or creator profile, you can easily access your analytics on your Instagram app through the Insights tab on your profile page. You can either click the three lines at the top of your profile page and click “insights” or the big ol’ button that says “insights” on your main page.
From there, you’ll be able to find metrics and analytics on your posts, stories, Reels, audience demographics, and more.
If you’re still having trouble switching to a business or creator account, you can follow this tutorial.
How to use Flick’s Instagram Analytics Tool
Instagram Insights is a great, free tool. It isn’t perfect, though—not even close!
If you’re looking for metrics and insights that Instagram Insights can’t provide, Flick’s Instagram Analytics tool is the perfect supplement. It provides a detailed snapshot of how your account is performing from a user-friendly platform that includes tons of extras, like:
Whilst Instagram Insights is great for low-level metrics like follower counts and post engagements, Flick’s Instagram Analytics tool helps turn them into actionable insights. You can easily see your follower growth rate, the best times to post on Instagram each day, reach, impressions, and so much more.
You’ll also be able to see how your most recent post performed through reach, impressions, likes, comments, and even hashtag performance! The analytics will break down if you’re ranked on any of your hashtags and, if so, in what position.
If you want to go even deeper into your account, you can now click the “similar accounts” feature next to “Compared to” and view how your account compares to other accounts similar to yours.
Plus, you can track up to 12 months’ worth of Instagram feed posts to see what worked well based on the hero metrics that matter the most to you.
How to See Instagram Audience Insights
Figuring out who your audience is and understanding the content they want is going to play a huge part in your overall Instagram strategy. Knowing your Instagram Audience analytics will help you tailor your content to their interest and help you figure out the perfect time to post.
Open the Insights tab in Instagram, scroll down to “Your Audience” and click “see all.”
In this section, you’ll be able to gather loads of data about your audience.
- How many people followed/unfollowed
- Top cities and countries of your audience
- Age and gender
- Most active times (hours and days)
Now what do these actually mean and how can it help your overall strategy?
How to use your growth metrics on Instagram
Instagram’s growth metrics are important to track because they can help you identify what content resonates with your audience and how they’re responding to it.
Using the Content tab on Flick’s Instagram Analytics tool, you can track key growth metrics like:
- Engagement
- Engagement Rate
- Follower Growth Rate
- Profile Views
If you notice any trends in the data, you can use that info to determine which types of posts your followers respond to and make sure you’re creating content they love. For example, if you notice that your unfollow rate spikes when you post storytime content, you may want to make these kinds of posts a special occasion kind of thing!
By constantly tracking your growth metrics, you’ll be able to figure out which content works best and determine your overall Instagram strategy.
How to demographic metrics on Instagram
On Instagram, it’s important to understand your audience demographics. Knowing who your followers are and how they interact with your content will give you a better understanding of what kind of content works and how you can tailor it for maximum impact.
Open the Insights tab on Instagram, scroll down to “Your Audience” and click “see all.” There, you’ll be able to see demographic data like:
- Age & Gender
- Top Locations
- Followers by Country/City
- Language Spoken
- Device Used
By tracking this information over time, you’ll be able to get a good picture of who your main audience is and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you notice that the audience for your food review account is mostly from a specific city or country, you could start introducing more local content like restaurant guides and recommendations.
By being aware of your audience demographics and optimizing your strategies for them, you’ll be able to make sure that your content is reaching the right people at the right time.
How to use most active times Instagram metrics
Timing (and time zones) are a major concern for content creators—and they’re often overlooked. You need to know when your followers are online so that you can post at the most optimal times.
By looking at the Feed Posts Insights in the Instagram Insights section, you’ll be able to see how many people saw your posts and what time corresponded with their peak engagement. Additionally, we break down average impressions by timezone—so you can see when your followers are most active in their own area.
You’re not going to want to post an image or Reel at 10AM if most of your audience is active at 7PM. And the more engagement your post initially receives, the better it’ll perform with Instagram’s algorithm.
Top Tip: You can see exactly what time your audience is online and when they’re most engaged over on Flick’s analytics page. We break it down for you based on the day and exact time you had the most amount of followers online.
How to use Instagram’s content-specific analytics tools
In addition to Instagram’s general insights, there are specific analytics tools you can use to obtain even more accurate data about each type of content you create. These tools include:
- Feed Post Insights: Provides insights about your regular post types, such as photos and videos.
- Stories Insights: Provides insights about organic stories you’ve shared.
- Reels Insights: Provides insights about Reels you’ve shared.
- IGTV Insights: Provides insights about IGTV videos you’ve shared.
- Live Insights: Provides insights about any live streams you’ve hosted.
- Shopping Insights: Provides insights about checkouts and sales.
By tracking the data from each type of content, you’ll be able to get a good idea of which type is resonating with your audience and tailor your strategy accordingly.
For example, if you’re a fitness influencer and notice that your Reels are getting more engagement than your regular posts, you should focus more on creating content for Reels. Or if you’re a fashion brand and see that your checkouts increase when you post a product video to your Story, you should focus more on creating content for that format.
Now, let’s take a more in-depth look at each type of content.
How to use Instagram feed post insights
From the Insights tab on Instagram. scroll down to “content you shared” and click the arrow beside the posts you’ve made recently.
You can now sort through up to 2 years worth of feed posts based on a number of metrics:
- Call Button Taps
- Comments
- Email Button Taps
- Follows
- Get Directions Taps
- Impressions
- Likes
- Post Interactions
- Profile Visits
- Reach
- Saves
- Text Button Taps
- Video Views
- Website Taps
From here, you’ll be able to capture a better idea of the exact amount of people engaging with your content, clicking on your website, the number of saves, etc. This will give you a good overall impression about what content your audience likes and what is driving them to content, CTAs, and more!
Want even more details per post? Head to the post you want to learn more about and click “view insights” underneath the post. You’ll be able to see more detailed metrics about this post, like:
- Interactions: The actions that are taken from your post, like visiting your profile, clicking the link in your bio, or using the call or email button.
- Discovery: This is the place that tracks those who aren’t currently following you and your post reached their eyeballs.
- Follows: How many new followers you received from a post.
- Reach: How many unique accounts the post reached.
- Impressions: The total number of times your post was viewed. Instagram breaks this down by category to see where on the platform the post was viewed from, like home, hashtags, from profile, or from other (i.e. Explore Tab).
- Saves: The number of unique accounts that saved your post to their personal saved folder.
- Comments: The number of comments on your post.
Top tip: If you’re trying to get more impressions with your hashtags, be sure to check out Flick’s Smart Collections feature. We give you suggested hashtags that will help you get better reach and engagement.
How to use Instagram Stories Insights
Similar to how you find the insights for your Instagram feed posts, you’ll be able to view your Story insights through the Insights tab on your profile page or by swiping up on a Story that is still live.
On your Insights page, scroll down to “Content You Shared” and tap the arrow by your recent stories.
In this section, you’ll find metrics over the past 30 days of stories including:
- Back
- Call Button Taps
- Email Button Taps
- Exited
- Follows
- Next Story
- Get Directions Taps
- Impressions
- Link Clicks
- Forward
- Profile Visits
- Reach
- Text Buttons Taps
- Website Taps
So how do these metrics help you? By reviewing your stories’ performance regularly, it’ll help with knowing what kind of stories your brand should continue creating. Do people like knowing what you do daily? Do they want to engage in polls? See BTS content? Figuring out which stories people actually watch all the way through and interact with is a great way to reconfigure your content strategy that resonates with your audience.
For an even more detailed performance overview of your story, it’s best to view the analytics while the story is still live. Swipe up on one of your stories and click the “insights” button in the top left corner next to the eye.
From here, you will see:
- Impressions: The number of times your story has been viewed.
- Reach: The number of unique accounts that viewed your story.
- Exits: The number of times someone exited your story mid-way through (how dare they!)
- Replies: The total number of replies to a video or picture on your story.
- People insights: This will list the accounts that have seen a particular component of your story.
How to use Instagram Reels Analytics
The newest feature in the Instagram insights tab is the Reels analytics! You can find the analytics either in the Instagram Insights menu (like the rest) or open a specific Reel you’re interested in knowing more about by tapping the three-dot icon on that Reel.
The metrics you see from Reels are:
- Accounts Reached
- Plays
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Saves
Again with these metrics, you’ll be able to identify which video content your audience enjoys and how they interact with it. Are they liking it? Sharing it with friends? Saving it for later? You’ll find all of that information and more under the Insights tab.
How to use IGTV Analytics
*Instagram has since transitioned all IGTV video content into Reels on the platform.
How to use Instagram Live Insights
Do you go Live on your platform a lot? You can track the analytics of your Lives from the Insights tab on your profile page.
Image from Instagram
The metrics you’ll be able to pull are:
- Accounts reached
- Peak Concurrent viewers
- Comments
- Shares
When it comes to lives, they can be pretty hit or miss based on a number of things. Did you talk about going live in advance? Did you have a guest on? Did you have a specific subject you went live about? Did you let people interact and ask questions in advance or during?
You’ll be able to get a better idea of why certain lives went well and others … not so well by recognizing what was different between each of the videos.
​​How to use Instagram Shopping Insights
Do you or your business tag products in your posts? Well, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you’re tracking and keeping an eye on what items people are clicking and wanting!
You’ll be able to find the insights for shopping much like other insights. Head to your Insights tab and click the arrow alongside your recent posts or stories. On this page, you’ll be able to pull a few product-specific metrics (Product Page Views and Product Button Clicks) depending on whether your account has Instagram Checkout enabled or not.
Image from Facebook
If you’re curious how a specific post is performing, click on that post and tap “view insights” to dive even deeper into the shopping-specific metrics. Here, you’ll find:
- Product page views
- Product button clicks
What does this mean to your overall strategy as someone who sells directly on Instagram? Well, by seeing if a product page had a high number of page views but not a lot of clicks to buy, you can rethink how that product looks and is described. Are the photos clear enough? Is the description enticing enough? These metrics are good to know if your shopping page is converting your followers.
Building your Instagram analytics strategy (4 steps)
Now that you know the basics of how to access your Instagram analytics, it’s time to build an entire strategy around them.
The process isn’t too difficult when you know the steps. So, let’s quickly go over them!
Step 1: Define your goal
To get the most out of your metrics and analytics, you need to have a clear goal in mind.
Do you want to increase engagement, followers, or leads? Each of these goals may require different insights and analytics to monitor, so it’s important to define your objective before diving in.
It’s okay to have more than one goal—in fact, it’s encouraged! Just be sure to prioritize them in order of importance. And if you’re just starting out, pick one goal to focus on initially and work your way up as your Instagram account grows.
Step 2: Determine which Instagram metrics are most important
Once you have a goal, it’s time to match it with the corresponding metrics.
When it comes to figuring out which metrics are most important, it all comes down to you and the overall goal of your business or brand. Are you wanting to get the most people engaged? Then, make sure to keep an eye on what content is performing well when it comes to likes, comments and shares, and make other content that is similar!
Are you wanting to build overall awareness around your brand? Focus on making sure your content is reaching the most people possible. Pay special attention to posts that have a higher reach rate and focus on creating similar content. Need help boosting your content? Why not try some fun Instagram polls to engage your audience, or learn more about how to grow on Instagram with an expert.
The best approach is to always experiment and see what type of things your audience wants to engage with. We won’t lie, it’s not always easy, but it is always fun when you finally have that breakthrough.
Step 3: Set up tracking
Now that you have identified the most important metrics for your Instagram strategy, it’s time to track them.
The best way to do this is by using an analytics tool like Flick, which can track all of your metrics in a central location. With Flick, you can view all of your post-performance data in one place, so you know exactly how each piece of content is performing and how it is impacting the overall performance of your account.
Additionally, Flick allows you to create beautiful reports that make it easy to present your Instagram insights to your team, stakeholders, and clients.
By tracking the metrics that matter most to you, you can gain a better understanding of what is and isn’t working for your Instagram strategy. This will enable you to make any necessary changes and continue to improve your results.
Step 4: Analyze the results
To optimize your Instagram analytics, the final step is to analyze the results you’ve gathered. After tracking your metrics and identifying which are most important to your goals, you can interpret the data to gain valuable insights into your Instagram performance.
Here’s an overview of the process:
- Do you notice any unexpected trends in your content? Did a particular post or type of content perform better than others? If so, try to understand why and figure out how to capitalize on this trend in the future. For example, if you notice that your followers engage more with posts that include a certain type of content or a specific hashtag, incorporate more of those into your Instagram strategy.
- What worked? What didn’t? Review your metrics and data to identify posts or types of content that didn’t perform as well as you hoped. Reasons for poor performance may include poor timing, low-quality content, or a disconnect between your brand and your followers. Once you identify the weak spots, create better content that resonates with your audience.
- Use the data to inform future decisions about your Instagram strategy. Tracking your metrics and analyzing your results can help you understand what works and what doesn’t for your brand. Use this data to make informed decisions about what types of content to create, when to post, and how to engage with your followers in the future.
It’s time to get serious about Instagram analytics
And there you have it—a quick guide to understanding how to access and use Instagram analytics! By taking advantage of all the insights available, you can start making smarter decisions for a successful Instagram strategy.
If you’re looking for more tips on Instagram analytics and how to get the most out of your data, check out our blog. And if you’re looking for an advanced analytics tool to get even more insights about your Instagram performance, give Flick a try!
You can get started with a free account today and see first-hand how Flick can help you better understand your Instagram performance!
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