In today's digital age, Instagram stands out as a leading platform for visual content and dynamic storytelling. For businesses and influencers, understanding Instagram metrics is essential for maximizing the platform's potential.
Instagram analytics provide valuable insights into user engagement, content performance, and audience demographics, helping to shape an effective Instagram marketing plan.
This article explores the key aspects of social media analytics and metrics and how they fit into a broader social media strategy.
Whether you're an experienced marketer or new to the field, this guide on the top Instagram metrics you should track will help you boost your presence on the platform to achieve your goals.
The most important Instagram metrics for marketers
What are Instagram metrics?
Why are Instagram analytics metrics important to track?
How to see Instagram metrics?
Top Instagram metrics to track
Tips for tracking your Instagram performance metrics
FAQs about Instagram metrics
What are Instagram metrics?
Instagram reporting metrics represent performance indicators that marketers use to evaluate their content strategy's effectiveness in achieving the goals established for their brand's Instagram marketing efforts.
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Why are Instagram analytics metrics important to track?
When trying to increase brand awareness on Instagram, you need to keep tabs on how your content is performing, which means regularly checking your Instagram KPIs.
While tracking your Instagram data can help you in a variety of ways, we'll just briefly name the most important benefits of a performance analysis down below.
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Instagram metrics monitoring enables performance evaluation
With the help of Instagram analytics, you can identify if and how how your audience responds to your brand's messages. If your followers are interacting with your posts, it means they find value in the content you're sharing, which is great.
By overseeing your metrics, you can also understand what are their habits when interacting with your brand. For example, do they share your posts? More then they comment? Do they watch your videos? What percentage of them?
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Monitoring your metrics on Instagram helps you better understand your audience
Instagram audience data is imperative to track in order to discover if your social media strategy is effective in attracting your target audience.
Once you understand what followers you attract the most in terms of gender, age, and location, you'll be able to evaluate your current content approach and - if necessary - change it.
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Instagram metrics tracking is valuable for strategy consolidation
When you look at important Instagram metrics, such as your top posts, to see how they’ve performed, you figure out what type of content attracts most of your audience.
This is what will determine you to consolidate your social media strategy, focusing on certain aspects that have already been proven effective.
You will be able to create engaging content based on what you know works best for your brand and increase brand awareness, leads and ultimately, sales.
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Instagram data is a starting point for trend identification
By keeping an eye on your metrics on Instagram, you manage to learn more about the latest content trends and optimize your strategy on the go.
Adapting to what's trending will keep your followers engaged, your brand awareness growing, and probably your sales as well.
How to see Instagram metrics?
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how to check your Instagram KPIs, you should remember that performance metrics and data are available only for business and creator's accounts.
To measure Instagram metrics, you have two options - you can either track your data within Instagram Insights, which is the native analytics platform, or by leveraging third-party social media analytics tools.
The main differences between these two options are the following: while Instagram's native KPIs platform is free, it is a bit more restrictive in terms of the data offered.
Within Instagram Insights you can gain access to page-level metrics, including accounts reached, accounts engaged and total followers, and also to post-level data. For this case you monitor your metrics at a post, reels, stories, videos, or live videos level.
On the other hand, an external data solution, such as Socialinsider offers more KPIs to help you uncover more in-depth insights about your account's performance.
Additionally, you can also track competitor's metrics and run a cross-channel performance analysis.
Top Instagram metrics to track
#1. Engagement rate by followers
When it comes to creating comprehensive performance reports, Instagram engagement metrics are an absolute must. We're talking here about both the raw engagement numbers and also about the engagement rate.
While engagement represents the total number of likes and comments you’ve earned, the Instagram engagement rate shows what percentage of your followers resonate with your messages, and have taken an action to show it.
The engagement rate is a helpful Instagram metric to analyze because it’s correlated with your follower count, helping you to evaluate your performance more accurately and realistically.
Do keep a steady eye on your Instagram engagement rate per post by followers, as it indicates what type of content is closest to your followers' hearts, and what they most often resonate with.
#2. Engagement rate by reach
When tracking your metrics for Instagram, it's important to focus on the particular data that is most helpful in making you understand if your current strategy is effective in achieving the goals you've set for social media marketing. Otherwise, you can easily lost in the big sea of data available.
The reason why social media managers usually track engagement by followers is that the engagement rate by reach is an Instagram metric available only for owned accounts, making benchmarking against competitors unavailable.
But, if you want a more in-depth look into your performance, you can always take a look at your engagement rate by reach.
Here’s how you can calculate it:
👉 Socialinsider is an Instagram metrics tracker that enables access to a variety of engagement data for the Instagram profiles you manage. You can find all the social media insights in the Engagement section:
#3. Reach
In a nutshell, this Instagram metric tells you how many people have seen your content, counting only the unique views.
Furthermore, rather than counting every person that your content was delivered to, you can check your average reach rate, which will display a percentage that will be much easier to analyze in correlation with your fan count.
To calculate your average reach rate, you'll have to divide the total reach of a post by the total number of followers and multiplying the result by 100.
This KPI is among the most important Instagram post metrics you should keep an eye on - particularly for those campaigns whose main objective is to generate brand awareness.
Also, if you’re looking for ways of getting your content viral, constantly monitoring your social media reach and adjusting your strategy accordingly is a must-do.
👉 In Socialinsider, you can find all the reach data you need, including organic and paid reach, reach evolution, reach rate, Stories reach and more, in the Reach section.
#4. Impressions
Impressions stand for that Instagram metric showing the total number of views a piece of content has had. Which means, impressions include repeated views of a single user.
If you're looking for ways to increase both your reach and impressions, trending hashtags can be of great help. That's because they can increase your visibility potential when people search for particular hashtags.
Tracking impressions is easy in Socialinsider. Just navigate to the Impressions section in the app to discover all the insights you need.
#5. Followers growth
Since it's often considered a vanity metric, follower growth should not be your number one priority when creating your marketing strategy.
Of course, every business’s dream is that its audience shows interest in its brand. But you should always focus on quality over quantity.
In the end, a massive following is not so valuable if users don’t actually engage with the brand’s posts.
Sometimes, business accounts with smaller audiences are the ones that can benefit the most out of their social media efforts.
For the times when you need to create a social media report with noteworthy Instagram metrics to showcase different results, you can check the native app for helpful insights.
👉 For a more in-depth analysis of your account, you can rely on a social media analytics tool like Socialinsider to track your follower growth. You can find follower count and growth data in the Audience section of your Instagram analytics dashboard.
#6. Audience demographics
Tracking the growth of your Instagram audience is useful, but it doesn't tell you the whole story. In order to create the best kind of content for your followers, you need to find out more about them.
This is where more in-depth Instagram follower metrics come in. Through audience demographics, you can tap into useful insights such as geographics distribution, language, age and gender to figure out exact who you're sharing content for.
👉 In Socialinsider, you can find in-depth audience demographics data in the Audience section.
#7. Instagram Saves
Most referred to by marketers as being “the new like”, this is the hottest, newest Instagram metric that brands are setting their sights on.
Through the pressing of the save button, people show you they really appreciate what you have to say, that they find your information useful, which is a win-win situation.
When you measure Instagram metrics, by including this data in your top KPIs list you’ll get a hint on the type of content that your audience resonates to, and adjust your content planning accordingly.
An important thing you need to know is that when calculating engagement, besides likes and comments, some platforms also include saves. However, this is an Instagram metric publicly available only for owned accounts.
#8. Comments
Given that social media users' attention spans continue to decrease, when people comment on your Instagram posts, it's a clear indication that your content is truly valuable for your audience.
That is why when you're evaluating your content's performance and capacity to generate interest within your brand, comments represent a KPI that you should track.
#9. Profile interactions
Profile interactions, another key Instagram metric, account for the number of views on your profile.
When a user reaches your profile for the first time after searching a certain hashtag, chances are this user can become your follower if they think the content and aesthetics are appealing enough.
Quality content that aligns with your brand's story can enhance brand recognition.
The number of visits on your profile will increase if they sense consistency and posts that reflect a well-built strategy.
#10. Traffic
Marketing may have a lot of goals, but ultimately, every brand’s main objective is to get conversions, which makes traffic one of the Instagram metrics to track that should not be overlooked.
And since you want to know which ways can help get more leads, which channels are the most powerful to use so that you increase your revenue and what it’s worth investing into, you have to always monitor your traffic.
For Instagram there are not so many options of including your website’s links, except for the link in bio and those in stories.
By injecting some code pieces, which are called UTM parameters, you can link your Google Analytics account to your Instagram and track how many people land on your page from it.
#11. Story link clicks
Instagram Stories are often the first type of content with which your audience interacts, which means Instagram Story analytics and metrics are also important to monitor.
While there are a number of KPIs that you can track to understand how this particular type of content performs, among the most insightful Instagram Stories metrics available are the link clicks generated.
Including clickable links in your Instagram Stories can increase your traffic – which is awesome.
By clicking the links in your Instagram Stories, users will reach your website, where they can find out more about your products.
Once users get to your website, the chances of them completing a purchase are significantly higher.
#12. Instagram Reels views
Instagram Reels can be considered a fun type of content because they are reliable in building brand awareness.
Since Reels are Instagram's newest feature, they have a greater chance of becoming viral, being favored by the platform's algorithm. Not to mention, nowadays' users preference for video content, thanks to its dynamism.
That is why, with this post type in the game, marketers need to be aware there are some specific Instagram Reels metrics that matter in particular, such as views.
The total number of views on your Reels shows how many Instagram users have looked at the video, irrespective of whether they are your followers or have simply seen your post in their newsfeed.
To make your Instagram Reels viral, there are a few tricks you could use to increase the number of views. Using targeted hashtags can really change the game for your brand.
And speaking of Instagram Reel metrics, another important KPI is the watch time, which shows for how long users look at your content.
Since no one has much time to watch long Reels, you need to make sure you build suspense to determine users to stay on your Reel until the end.
#13. Instagram Reels shares
Extended shares contribute to a wider reach.
Since Reels are the most popular content type on Instagram, it's important to keep an eye on your Reels analytics to understand what the Reels that generated the most shares look like, since creating similar content can help you increase brand awareness.
If you pay attention to what’s popular on TikTok, you will manage to have viral Reels by integrating what’s trending.
Tips for tracking your Instagram performance metrics
When reporting on your Instagram marketing metrics, there are a couple of best practices that you can leverage to give a better context to your KPIs for Instagram.
As your clients give you specific indications about how they want their reports to look, you will be able to tailor your analytics presentations based on those specific criteria. But for starters, here's what we recommend you to do:
- monitor your Instagram metrics over a longer period of time;
- run a month-over-month evolution analysis;
- mix native analytics data with third-party insights (given there are specific metrics in each dashboard - for example, engagement evolution is available only through a tool, while other metrics that might be relevant to you, such as email button taps, are only available in the native analytics platform)
- keep a close eye on Instagram benchmarks data to understand how you compare to your competitors and whether your results are on par with the industry average
Final thoughts
The use of Instagram metrics when crafting or adjusting your marketing strategy is a blessing since you can roll out a better strategy.
By checking analytics, you will learn what changes are needed in order to increase brand awareness and attract a wider audience.
Hopefully this list of crucial Instagram metrics helps you understand what to look at when developing your social media report and what your focus should be.
FAQs about Instagram metrics
1. Can you download Instagram metrics?
You can download a report covering key Instagram performance metrics that are relevant for your brand's strategy. As your Instagram reporting tool, you can use a social media analytics app like Socialinsider.
2. How do you see Instagram metrics for Stories?
You can see some data for your Stories in the native app (such as reach, engagement and navigation analytics) but for more in-depth, aggregate insights you should use a professional tool like Socialinsider.
Analyze your social media performance and benchmark competitors!
