4 Ways to Use Instagram Insights to Improve Your Marketing

Do you have an Instagram business account?

Wondering how to analyze your Instagram activities?

In this article, you’ll discover how to use Instagram Insights to evaluate your followers, posts, stories, and promotions.

What Is Instagram Insights?

Instagram Insights is a native analytics tool that provides data on follower demographics and actions, as well as your content. This information makes it easy to compare content, measure campaigns, and see how individual posts are performing.

To access Instagram Insights, you need a business account. If you convert a personal account to a business account, you’ll see Insights for any content that’s posted after you make the switch. If at any point you switch your business account back to a personal one, you’ll lose all of your Insights data.

You can find Insights data in three different places in the Instagram app. To access Insights from your account page, tap the bar graph icon in the upper-right corner of the screen.

To see analytics for an individual post, navigate to the post and tap View Insights in the bottom-left corner.

To see data for a story, open the story and tap the names in the bottom-left corner.

The Insights homepage shows a summary of data for the content you’ve posted in the last 7 days. In the top section, find out how many total followers you have and how many you’ve gained in the past 7 days.

You can also view how many total posts you have on your account and how many you’ve added in the previous week.

Scroll down to see a series of bar graphs that reveal the total impressions, reach, and profile views for the past 7 days. Swipe to view website clicks and call-to-action button clicks (Call, Email, Directions).

Now that you know how to access Instagram Insights, here’s how to find the data that matters to your business.

#1: Explore Follower Demographics and Behavior

On the Insights homepage, scroll down to the Followers section to see a summary of follower demographics including gender, age group, and location. Note that you need at least 100 followers to see demographic data.

Tap See More to open a page with graphs that break down follower demographics in more detail. You can segment follower data by:

• Gender
• Age range
• Top locations (cities and countries)
• Online times (hours and days)

This information helps you better understand who your followers are and where they’re from so you can assess whether you’re reaching your target audience on the platform.

In addition, these insights can inform your Instagram ad targeting. For example, if you want to reach an audience similar to your followers, target the demographics of your current audience.

At the bottom of the Followers section, you’ll find two graphs that show when your followers are most active on the network. In the first graph, find out when your followers are online each day.

Scroll down to the second graph to discover which days your followers are most likely to be online.

Look for patterns in the times and days your followers are online so you can post content at times that will maximize reach and engagement. Additionally, create a posting schedule that best reflects when your audience is online.

#2: View Data for Posts

Instagram lets you view data for multiple posts at once or delve into metrics for an individual post.

Filter Post Data by Content Type, Metric, and Timeframe

The Posts section of the Insights homepage shows your three most recent posts. Tap See More to view additional posts.

By default, the Posts section shows the total number of impressions for all of your posts in the past year.

To segment this data, tap any of the blue links at the top of the page and choose from these filters:

• Content type (all, photos, videos, and carousel posts)
• Measurement (comments, engagement, impressions, likes, reach, and saved)
• Time (7 days, 30 days, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years)

The filters let you zero in on relevant data to measure goals, campaigns, and best-performing content.

Goals you can measure for a particular time period include:

• Engagement (comments and/or likes)
• Impressions and reach
• Ratio of engagement to reach
• Best- and worst-performing content types (photos, videos, or carousel posts)

To measure campaign goals, filter the data by timeframe and identify the type of content posted. This data can also help you identify successful and unsuccessful posts so you have an idea of what content your audience prefers. For example, you might discover your audience engages more with photos of products with people than simply products alone.

View Metrics for Individual Posts

If you want to see data for an individual post, open the post and then tap View Insights in the bottom-left corner.

Drag up to view a variety of metrics for that post. At the top, you find engagement stats (likes, comments, and saves).

In the Actions section, discover what actions users took on your profile after seeing this post. Instagram tracks these actions:

• Profile Visits – The number of times your profile was viewed
• Follows – The number of accounts that started following you
• Website Clicks – The number of clicks to links you’ve included in your business profile description

The first stat in the Discovery section is the percentage of people who found your post and weren’t following you.

Below that, you see reach and impressions for the post. You’ll also find a breakdown of where those impressions came from:

• Home – People who saw the post from their feed
• Search & Explore – People who searched for keywords or saw your post on an Explore feed
• Profile – People who found your post from your profile page
• Location – People who viewed your post from a location feed
• Hashtags – People who discovered your post via a hashtag search
• Other – Posts shared via direct message, posts that were saved, posts you’re tagged or mentioned in, post notifications where you were tagged or mentioned, and posts that show up on the Following tab in Notifications

#3: Evaluate Instagram Stories Data

You can access insights for your Instagram stories from the Insights homepage or directly from an individual story post.

View Insights for Multiple Stories

If you access stories data from the Insights homepage, you see all of your stories posts for the past 2 weeks. This view only shows data in the aggregate; you can’t click on individual posts.

By default, Instagram shows impressions data for your stories.

Tap one of the blue links at the top of the page to filter stories data by time (24 hours, 7 days, and 14 days) and action. The actions are:

• Taps forward
• Taps back
• Exits
• Replies
• Swipes away

Analyze this data to find out what stories content is resonating with your audience and what content is causing them to exit or swipe away. Use these insights to inform future stories content.

Note: Currently, Insights doesn’t provide data for Instagram Live content.

View Insights for an Individual Story

To see insights for an individual story, open the story and tap Seen By in the bottom-left corner.

From here, you’ll see which users saw the post, total impressions and reach, and what actions were taken on the post. The actions include replies, swipes away, and clicks on stickers and tagged accounts.

#4: Examine Paid Promotions Data

You’ll find the Promotions section at the bottom of the Insights homepage. Here you can create an Instagram promotion and view active promotions.

Click See More to view a list of previous promotions. Tap a promotion to see the following metrics:

• Visits to profile
• Number of people who viewed the promotion
• Number of impressions
• Number of engagements
• Audience demographics
• Amount of money spent

This data gives you a quick summary of impressions vs. engagement and clicks to profile on a promotion. You can also view a breakdown of the audience that viewed this promotion by gender, age range, and location.

Conclusion

Instagram Insights is a free tool for analyzing your content without ever leaving the app. The data you find helps you learn more about your audience, what content is engaging them, and how your ads are performing. Use this valuable information to guide the type of content you create for your audience and when you publish it.

What do you think? Do you use Instagram Insights to assess your marketing efforts? Which metrics do you find most valuable? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.