“Why is it so difficult to convert followers into sales? Why is my Instagram stagnant and not growing as fast as I want?
If you want to grow your business on Instagram, there is no better way than to understand Instagram insights. Having a solid understanding of this tool can greatly benefit your business by increasing sales, growing your audience, and improving your content strategy.
At first, you may find all of these metrics quite daunting and difficult to understand, but in this article, I will explain the most important metrics and what they mean and help you use this knowledge to be successful in your business.
Welcome to Instagram Analytics: How to use insights to grow your business and create content that sells.
Why are Instagram Insights important?
Sales are the engines of business and if you want to sell successfully on Instagram you must understand the three pillars of audience research and how to apply them to your content strategy.
The Three W Pillars
Who: Who is the audience you are trying to reach
When: When is the best time to reach them
What: What type of content do they engage with to the most
These are the three fundamental questions you must answer when creating your content strategy. Filling in the blanks will give you an idea of who your audience is, when to reach them, and with what type of content.
How to access Instagram Analytics
Something very important to mention is that the insight tool is only available for business profiles or creators. If you haven’t made the switch from a personal account to a business profile, we recommend you doing it because of this tool and many others features available only for businesses.
To access the tool you have to click on the insights tabs that will take you to Insights Overview where you can see the overall numbers and data from your audience and content.
Reach
Reach will give you data relating to the accounts you were able to reach in a set amount of time. I will list the most important information in the reach tab down below.
- Followers vs Non-Follower
- Impressions
- Profile activity: Profile visits / Website clicks/ Email button taps
- Content-type
- Top Post
- Top Stories
- Top Reels
- Top IGTV videos
- Top Live videos
With the previous information, you will be able to understand what type of content is performing the best and how many users are being driven to your Instagram account.
Content Interaction
This tab is all about engagement with your audience. This tool is truly the heart of Instagram analytics and if used properly when planning out your content strategy this data will prove very important to your success.
Here you will see how many likes, comments, saves, reshares, and replies your content gets and how engaged your audience is over time. There is no need to reinvent the wheel with this, when planning your content strategy do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. This tool will give you the audience sentiment about your content and this is very valuable information.
Audience
This tab is one of the most important without a doubt. This data tells you crucial information that you can use to run ads, create an audience profile, establish best times for publications, and many more actions.
This data will offer information about your audience like:
- Audience location
- Age range
- Gender
- Most active times: Hours/Days
Post Insights
This important tool can be accessed by clicking on the “View Insights” tab located on the left bottom corner of each post. A page will slide up with information about that individual post. This tool will show you the total:
- Likes
- Comments
- Messages
- Saves
It also features interactions with the post which basically means the actions taken on the post.
Actions can be:
- Profile visits
- Website taps
- Email button taps
This tool also offers a very important feature called Discovery in which you can see the accounts reached by the post and from which IG feature they came. In the discovery stats, you will see that impressions can come from places like:
- Profile
- Home
- Explorer
- Hashtags
- Others
Using this data to increase sales
This information will provide the guidelines from which you can design your content strategy. Without it, you will be driving blind trying to get somewhere. Is important to know who your audience is, when to reach them, and with what type of content. These tools provide you that information and much more.
It’s important that you understand these analytics and that you get in-depth with the information that’s given. For example, if you see that one of your posts had a significantly better performance than others, you may want to evaluate the following:
- What day of the week did I post it?
- What type of colors was I using? (warm or cold colors?)
- Is it a product shot or a lifestyle shot?
- What did the caption say? Did you include price, call-to-action? Did you tell a story, or just named the qualities of the product?
Also, you might want to evaluate each post according to your business goals.
If your business goals are the following: increase brand awareness, generate more leads, boost engagement, increase sales; then some of the metrics you can use to measure your goals are:
Brand awareness – what was the post with the most reach?
Boost engagement – what was the post with the most shares?
Generate more leads – what was the post with the most website clicks? Or if you don’t have a website, then what was the post with the most follows?
Increase sales – what was the post with the most website clicks?
When evaluating your best performing Instagram Stories these are some key points you might want to identify:
- What were you sharing? (behind-the-scenes, how-to, telling a story?)
- Was there human interaction?
- Was there a call to action?
- Were there any stickers to encourage engagement? (ex. polls, questions, emoji slider)
Conclusion:
We believe that equipped with this information you can begin to make strides towards a more successful and scalable business. We want to thank you for reading this article and we invite you to read our other blog posts and follow us on Instagram for more business tips and education.