Instagram should not be considered just another photo-sharing application. It’s a platform that businesses can exploit to increase their digital footprint. Mastering Instagram analytics is sure to help a business capitalise on the platform. This is an attempt to place everything you measure and analyse in one place to try and give an all-encompassing idea of how you’re doing and, more importantly, make an informed choice.

1. Reach and Impressions

For business accounts, reach and impressions are fundamental metrics. Reach indicates the number of unique viewers of your content, whilst impressions show the total views, including repeated views by the same users.

Interpretation: Track these metrics to assess your content’s visibility. A higher number of impressions per reach can suggest that your audience finds your content worth revisiting, signalling strong engagement.

1. Profile Views and Website Clicks of Instagram Business Accounts

A profile view and a website click in an Instagram business account are two pretty basic statistics. Profile views are the number of people who have tapped on your profile to view it, while website clicks are the number of total website clicks that link to your bio.

Interpretation: The analysis of profile views helps in understanding the visibility of your account. To better understand, you might notice a good number of website clicks but very low profile views. In such a scenario, it might mean your Instagram presence is weak.

2. Engagement Metrics

These are the various forms of engagement which include likes, comments, shares, and saves. Given like is a measure of your popularity, comments show how much your audience is engaged, shares show that your content appeals to audiences other than those viewing it first-hand, and saves show your content is good enough to be saved.

Interpretation: High metrics for engagement, shares, and tags will help content to strike all the right chords and hopefully give organic growth through visibility.

3. Follower Growth

Follower growth is one of those statistics that you monitor in a business account to be able to view how a brand is appealing with time and how—or at what rate—content has been performing.

Interpretation: These follower growth trends can help you arrive at the content that works most, and when to pivot strategy—probably—when follower growth is on a decremented path.

4. Stories Analytics and Post Analytics

Stories are the proof of one of the most excellent digital technologies of our time. Some of these metrics that can be monitored include:

  • Views
  • Exits
  • Replies

Explanation: High views and replies, combined with low exits, would suggest you have captured their attention very well. This is something important for the purpose of sustained engagement.

5. Click-Through and Conversion Rates

These are two very important statistics that help to measure the ability of Instagram to actually move their audience to action:

  • Click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of how often people were actually clicking on a linked call-to-action.
  • Conversion rate: This measures the success of these interactions in relation to business objectives or activities, such as sales or sign-ups.

Explanation: Both of these would give a good idea about your return on investment from Instagram activities. A great CTA and a high conversion rate will mean that your content has been successful in moving the business needle.

6. Audience Demographics

In case you know who your followers are, you will have an idea of who you are supposed to tailor your content to and when to post.

Explanation: If you know the demographics and behaviour of your audience, you will be aware of what makes them tick. This adds relevance to the content strategy and makes marketing more functional with its engaging features as well as extended reach.

How to Integrate These Statistics

Content Engagement and Follower Growth: High engagement should correlate with an increase in the number of followers. If the engagement is high and the followers are not increasing, then there might be issues with visibility and reach of the content.

Reach/ Impressions and Conversion Rates: It might also mean that, even if the reach and impression are high, the actual conversion rates are very low, meaning that the content is not really driving that action well. It may need a revision in the call-to-action or in the content of the message.

Stories Metrics and Overall Engagement: Use the stories to drive overall engagement higher. High exit rates on stories might mean your content isn’t engaging enough or is too long, which could contribute to negative brand perception.

Conclusion

When Instagram analytics are put into proper application, it becomes an eye-opener for a business profile. All these metrics will only be efficient when added up into one functioning unit to give a holistic analysis of the behaviour of the audience and content optimisation, and thus culminate into more elevated results. All these metrics bring you a piece of the jigsaw, and together they give an overall view of your performance on Instagram.