As we all know, Instagram Stories disappear after 24 hours, but you can make sure they have a permanent impact on our audience.
How can you do this?
By understanding your Instagram Stories Analytics and learning how to measure the performance of your Stories.
Measuring key Instagram metrics is very important because it allows you to analyze Stories that drive the most engagement, tackle pain points, increase brand awareness, and segment your audience to deliver the right message to the right people. Social media analytics plays a crucial role here by offering deeper insights into how your Stories are performing and helping you optimize your strategy.
Are you ready to discover some helpful Instagram stories insights?
Let's start!
Understanding Instagram Stories analytics
1. What are Instagram Stories analytics?
Just because Stories are not a permanent part of your feed, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be tracking how they perform. That’s where Instagram Story analytics come in.
Instagram Stories analytics are a collection of metrics describing the performance of your Stories on Instagram. They tell you how people you reach with your Stories, what they click on, how fast they move on (aka tap forward or exit) and more.
Measuring your Instagram Stories performance is very important because it allows you to identify the Stories that drive the most engagement, tackle pain points, increase brand awareness, and segment your audience to deliver the right message to the right people.
2. Top Instagram Stories metrics you should track
When it comes to analyzing Instagram Stories performance, there are a few metrics you need to keep tabs on to check if your Stories strategy is on the right track or not.
They each fall into one of these three categories:
- Visibility
- Interaction
- Navigation
This metric will help you accurately assess how well your Stories perform in terms of interactions and engaging with your audience.
Visibility metrics
Visibility metrics are those that describe how many people see your Stories:
- Reach
- Impressions
Impressions represent the total number of times your story was viewed, while reach indicates the number of unique accounts that viewed your story (in other words, your Instagram Story views).
These social media metrics are essential because they will enable you to analyze the quality of your Instagram stories and adjust your posting frequency.
For instance, if you notice a sudden drop in reach, it may be because your Instagram stories are bouncy or blurry and need to upgrade to give your audience the quality stories they are looking for.
It will also help you develop a predetermined schedule of when to post your Instagram stories, for each day or week.
Interaction metrics
Interaction metrics are, for the most part, the same as Instagram Stories engagement metrics:
- Likes
- Reactions
- Replies
But they also include other kinds of interactions, such as sticker taps.
These metrics can help you understand if you’re succeeding at engaging with your audience.
Navigation metrics
Stories are far easier to navigate than regular Instagram posts, and your followers will definitely move one way or another if the content they’re seeing is not to their liking.
So you need to make sure what you share on Stories makes your audience watch until the end.
Instagram Stories navigation metrics include:
- Completion rate
- Taps forward
- Taps back
- Exits
Completion rate is calculated by divide the total number of viewers of your last Story by the number of people who saw the first Story.
Taps forward are the number of taps that your audience has made to see the next video or photos you posted in your story.
Taps back are the number of taps that your audience has made to see your previous video and photo in your story.
Exits tell you how many users exited before the Instagram story ended. Many scenarios can cause exits. Some of these situations include user closing their Instagram app while viewing your story. The user moved to another story by swiping left, users clicking on the X button to cancel your story, and users swiping down to go back to the main feed section.
3. Where can you see Instagram story analytics
With more and more brands relying on Instagram Stories as an important component of their social media strategy, tracking Stories performing has become a priority for marketers.
That being said, if you’re wondering how to see Instagram stories data, know you have a few options. Let’s explore them together:
Instagram native app analytics
Analyzing your Instagram Stories can be done very conveniently using the native app. All you need to do is head to the Account menu on the mobile app, tap Insights and you’re dropped into the Analytics dashboard.
To see Stories data exclusively, you must choose this option from the list at the bottom of the screen.
By default, the app displays top Stories (in your selected time range) by reach, but you have the option to sort them by any of the available metrics. You can see Stories insights dating back 2 years.
The app does provide important Stories data, covering visibility, interaction and navigation metrics.
One of the downsides to tracking Instagram Stories using the native app is that it only offers individual - not aggregate - performance data. In other words, the only way to see your analytics is by selecting a Story and scrolling through the data provided.
Meta Business Suite
Next up on the list of Instagram Stories analytics tools is Meta Business Suite. As you know, Meta offers centralized data for both Facebook and Instagram, and that of course includes Stories insights.
Your Instagram Stories data can be found in the Insights tab, by selecting Content and then Stories from the Posts Type menu at the top of the list. You can customize the metrics you want to track the ones that matters most to your brand.
Unfortunately, just like in the case of native analytics, here you can only see data per individual Story. You don’t have the option to aggregate data, or see any average values (such as average reach rate, retention rate, etc).
Socialinsider
Your third option - and by far, the most generous - is to enlist the help of a social media analytics tool like Socialinsider. Using a professional app to track your Stories is the safest way to avoid all reporting-related headaches.
Just consider this - you’re stuck doing the monthly social media reporting for days on end because you have to collect insights on Instagram stories manually. That’s no way to report efficiently!
Using Socialinsider, you can pull aggregate data and actionable insights on Instagram Stories. All you need to do to get there is connect your Instagram profile, authorize it, and you’re in!
Keep in mind that you can only access Instagram Stories data for the accounts you manage.
At a glance, you get a quick overview of your Stories in the selected timeframe - how many you shared, the level of visibility they generated and how much your audience responded to them.
To dig deeper into your brand’s Instagram Story performance, you need to look at more in-depth insights, such as posting frequency, retention rate and reach.
Or, if you know you’ve had a particularly heavy day of posting on Stories, you can check back and see how those Stories performed, using the Analytics by Day feature. That way, you can see aggregate data for all Stories shared, split by Story type.
You can also track the reach, impressions and completion rate evolution throughout the day, and how each story performed compared to the others.
Last but not least, with Socialinsider's Instagram analytics tool, you can identify your top-performing Stories, to get a better understanding of what kind of content resonates with your audience and what type of Stories would be worth replicating in the future.
By default, the Stories are sorted by Date, but you can change this setting to any of the following: reach, impressions, exists, replies, taps forward and taps back. What you choose depends on your Instagram content goals.
When you click on any Story, you get a quick performance overview, highlighting the main Instagram Stories metrics you need to keep an eye on.
4. How to improve your strategy based on Instagram stories analytics
If you’ve been tracking your Instagram Stories analytics for a while and you notice a drop in the numbers, it might be time to make some tweaks to your strategy in order to maximize your Stories impact.
Let’s have a look at a few tips on improving your Instagram Stories strategy so that your numbers only go up:
Leverage UGC (user-generated content)
In today’s social media landscape, UGC is a must. When it comes to Instagram Stories, the possibilities are nearly endless. You can share just about any type of content on Stories, starting with posts, Reels or Stories where your brand is tagged. Doing this will boost your visibility and make your audience feel more connected to you.
Sharing content from other accounts in your industry - anything from news to motivational quotes - will also do wonders for your Stories engagement.
Post at the right time
Because Stories have such a short shelf-life of only 24 hours (unless you save them to Highlights), posting them at the right time is key. Chances are, at the beginning, you will have to do a bit of experimenting with different posting times, until you find the right match for your audience.
If you’re trying to target multiple audiences across the world, you will need to find a time that works for most time zones.
Once you’ve been testing this for a while, you can come back to Socialinsider, see which posting time is generating the highest amount of reach, and you’ll have your answer.
Use Instagram’s many interactive features
One of the best Instagram story ideas is to take full advantage of the app’s many interactive elements. If your Stories interactions are low, then it’s time to activate your audience using Instagram’s built-in features.
Mentioning people from your audience or from your industry, using the questions sticker, adding a poll, quiz, fundraiser or countdown and turning your Stories into a template that people can use and promote further are some of the ways you can make your Stories more interactive.
Be consistent
Whatever your strategy is on Instagram Stories, be consistent with it. This applies just as much to Stories as it does for permanent posts.
Try to post at the same time each day, and keep your layout consistent. Make your Stories easily recognizable by your audience.
Final thoughts
Stories offer a unique opportunity to constantly learn from your audience, and Instagram Stories analytics gives you the tools to extract these insights and build upon them to create the perfect Instagram strategy.
So don’t overlook your Instagram analytics data when you’re doing your monthly reporting - there’s a goldmine of insights just waiting for you to discover them.
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