How To View your Instagram Analytics & Insights

Jamie Read more February 7, 2019

Social media marketing is all about the data. Analytics, metrics, measures and numbers. If you don’t like data, you’re in the wrong business as there is tons of it to manage on every account you handle. As Instagram is the rising star of social media right now, what data is available to measure success? Does Instagram even provide analytics?

How To View your Instagram Analytics & Insights

Instagram does provide analytics. Instagram Insights will show you what’s going on, your impressions, reach, clicks, views and followers. Enough to know whether your social media marketing campaign is working or not and where to refine or change your approach. Insights is useful for smaller businesses wanting to start on the road to data-driven marketing and works as an ideal introduction to the wonderful world of metrics.

Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights provides more basic metrics than some premium analytics tools but is free and included in Instagram. It is ideal for smaller businesses who want to get to grips with metrics and analytics and who want to progress from posting and hoping to a more measured approach.

To access Instagram Insights you will need to be using a business account. You can convert your personal account into a business account but the only data available will be after the conversion. You can access insights in three ways.

If you’re on your account page, you will see general analytics. To access Instagram Insights, select the graph icon in the top right of your screen while logged in.
If you’re on a post page, you can view the data from that post. To access Instagram Insights here, select the globe icon in the bottom right of your screen post page.
If you’re in a Story, you can see Story data by selecting the names icon in the bottom left of the screen.

Account Insights

Account Insights will show you general data such as how many followers you have and have gained in the past 7 days. How many posts you have and have posted in the past 7 days. You should also see a series of graphs showing impressions, reach, views, clicks and others. You can select each graph to access more detail on what it contains.

The main metrics to analyze are:

Impressions tells you how many times your posts or ads appeared to users.
Reach tells you how many unique users have seen your posts.
Website clicks tells you how many times a link to your website was used from your Instagram posts.
Profile visits shows you how many times your profile was viewed.
Followers counts the number of followers you have in total and have gained in the past 7 days.

Post Insights

Post Insights will show you the number of impression on your posts over the past year, comments, likes, engagement, best performing, worst performing and more. You can drill down to access even more information.

Here you will get the most usable data from:

Likes tells you how many people liked an individual post.
Comments tells you how many people left a comment on a post.
Saves tells you how many people saved your post or used the bookmark feature.
Actions show you what the person did after viewing your post.
Discovery tells you where your posts was viewed from, or how they got there.

Story Insights

Story Insights will show you how many stories you have posted in the past 14 days and how many impressions each acquired. Drill down by selecting a Story and then select Seen by in the bottom left. This shows you who viewed it and what actions were taken.

Pay attention to the following metrics:

Impressions shows you how many times your story was viewed.
Reach tells you how many unique viewers each story acquired.
Taps forward tells you how many times someone skipped your story and moved on.
Taps back tells you how many times someone skipped back.
Replies tells you how many times someone used the Send Message feature in your story.
Swipe away shows you how many times someone skipped your story for one from a different user.
Exits tells you now many times someone exited the Stories feature to do something else.

Knowing who likes what posts, which ones perform well and which posts perform badly is the very basics of successful marketing. Even with that little data you can begin refining your Instagram posting to produce more of the content that performs well and less of the posts that perform badly. From there you can drill down to see demographics and detailed data about your followers to further tune your approach. It’s a long and laborious task but it will pay for itself in the end!