If you are a new professional or aspiring one, you need to know the metrics to grow your business on Instagram. Today we analyze them in detail so you can quickly learn how to read them for you.
Your goal is to grow your business on Instagram?
The trick to goal is to learn how to use your Instagram metrics.
Here are the 6 metrics that will help you grow your account (and your business)!
#Metrica 1: measure your engagement rate and find out how your content is performing right away.
First thing you got to do? You need to switch to a company profile to view Instagram metrics and analysis, so you can access Insights within the App.
Start by tracking your engagement rate right away:
- The engagement rate is the percentage of Like and Comment that your Instagram posts receive.
- It immediately tells you how many of your followers are actively interacting with your brand on Instagram.
- It gives you your coverage and the total likes / comments / posts saved (go to your posts in the Instagram App and click on “view statistics”).
- Calculate your average engagement rate according to the formula “Like + comments / Follower”; divide the total number of Like + comments by the number of followers, the percentage you will get is your average engagement rate.
- If you want to be even more precise, you can divide the total number of “likes + comments” by the number of the coverage (reach), instead of the followers. You will get a more real percentage, in my opinion, because you divide by the real number of people who have seen your post.
- The Engagement rate is a good metric to monitor to find out if your content really speaks to your audience: it tells you how much your audience relates to the content you are creating and if it willingly shares because it feels involved.
- If you want to improve your Engagement percentage, try to write more incisive captions to your posts or check in Insight what is the best time to publish your posts.
#Metrica 2: optimize your Hashtag strategy by monitoring your tracking metrics
Instagram Insights’ Suggested section is a gold mine to find out where your audience comes from and how they found your post.
You can find them by going to your profile page and tapping on the image you want to view the metrics for. From here, tap the “View statistics” button: just below the image and a small information bar, you will see it at the bottom of the screen.
Then, if you scroll up from the toolbar, you’ll find even more analytics already divided into two categories: Interactions and Suggestions.
Let’s focus on the Suggested metrics, which will tell you how many people have viewed your post and how they found it.
Let’s take a little step back. Do you know the difference between Reach and Impressions?
Impressions: is the total number of times your post has been seen. This number includes users who scrolling through their feed, click on your activity profile to view a photo or view content directly via an Instagram Direct message.
Coverage: Like Impressions, Reach refers to the number of views received from your posts. The difference is in the calculation that is not overall, but reduced to unique views, then to accounts that have viewed the content. For example, if one of your followers opens your profile and looks at your posts several times on the same day, that follower will only be counted once in your coverage results.
Under Impression, you can see the total number of views broken down by how the user found your post.
In my opinion, the best Instagram metrics to focus on are “From hashtag” and “Explore”. This number tells you if your hashtag strategy works and if people are discovering your post through the Explore page!
Not sure which hashtag strategy is right for you? Try to create a strategy that helps you achieve your goals by experimenting with different hashtags and then monitoring them through your metrics: Suggested can give you a real insight into which hashtags work best for your profile.
Defining your hashtag strategy well is still one of the ways I recommend to reach your target audience.
#Metric 3: knowing when people stop looking at your stories
At the risk of appearing boring, I will never tire of repeating that, if you have an activity on Instagram, you have to use the Stories to make it happen!
There’s nothing like the Stories to show the personality of your brand and all the work you do in your backstage: a fantastic way to reach your audience on a personal and fun level!
Use all the additional functions (Stickers, Questions and Surveys, etc.) to stimulate engagement and conversation. If you’re a Story Snapper, listen to me and start taking a look at your Story metrics, especially the Next Story metric.
The Next Story metric indicates the number of people who have looked in the past or taped “Next Instagram Account Stories”: look at it carefully because it can tell you a lot about your audience’s interest (or lack thereof) in your stories.
How to
Let’s start with the search for metrics related to the Next Stories. From your Instagram profile, tap on your profile photo to see your stories live. Then scroll up for all the information about your story and you’ll see the numbers produced, including “Next Story”.
Or, go to analytics, click on Stories and then filter by “Next History”.
At this point, you should see the data. What do they tell you?
Many people “touch quickly” about stories, in particular:
- if the posts are still images,
- if they have little time and want to get to the end of our story updates.
- The Next Story metric tells you when people are passing quickly, leaving your story right away to go on to the next account history.
It requires broad shoulders, I know. We’ve all been there and it’s a bit frustrating but it teaches us a lot if we don’t give up.
How to read
If you have high metrics Next Story in the middle or at the beginning of your Stories means that viewers have not felt involved by those contents and have jumped them to go and look for others.
Sometimes it was useful for me to use the metrics of the Next Story to evaluate how much my followers were interested in the contents of my Stories, but above all to understand what kind of contents they adored or hated.
If you want to capture the attention of your audience to your Stories, try to:
- explore different types of content,
- add polls,
- experiment with stickers for direct questions,
- to try other models of storytelling.
#Metric 4: Knowing how many new people you’re reaching
Reach indicates the number of unique accounts that have seen your post, while Impressions is the total number of times your post has been seen.
Coverage analytics are one of the best Instagram metrics to monitor if you want to grow your account, because they tell you if you are reaching new audience segments outside of your existing followers.
Choose whether to track your overall coverage per week or per day in Instagram Insights within your App, you will find it in the “Suggested” tab:
A good way to increase your coverage on Instagram is to use an Influencer: Influencer
Marketing is going great! It offers at least 3 advantages:
- can help you reach new people in your target demographic,
- can provide you with an excellent UGC (User Generated Content),
- can increase your brand’s overall presence or sales.
Tagging relevant companies or users in your posts:
- helps your post to increase engagement,
- increases the chances of your post being shared by a larger account.
#Metric 5: Use the average of the observation percentages to create IGTV videos.
Have you used IGTV videos before? The Complete Guide is here.
If you want to know if your audience watches your IGTV videos from start to finish, check your observed average frequency percentage. You will get the average figure (in percentage) of how many people have watched your videos.
In this example, you see that 31% of the video was watched, not necessarily the first 31% of the video, as users can browse the video to jump forward or backward or watch the fragments of the video.
Looking at the graph below (average metric observed in percentage), we can see exactly which part of the video involved most of our followers/viewers.
Don’t be discouraged if you read un comforting data: it’s completely normal! Almost no one is able to get 100% of the viewers to watch their own video completely, from start to finish. It only happens in dreams!
Why do followers/viewers skip our IGTV video?
There are many reasons for this:
- may not be interested in the topic of the video,
- they might be running out of time,
- may have decided to exit the app,
- they might have gotten the information they wanted at the start of the video.
Don’t be discouraged: a certain dropout rate is physiological, but there are a couple of things you can do to encourage your readers to stay longer and improve your observed average frequency percentage:
- Try including an introduction to let your viewers know from the start what your video will be talking about;
- Try experimenting with different video lengths, so you can better understand where your audience’s weak spot is and start building your new strategy around that.
#Metrica 6: Tracking Open Rates Links to know what products to show in the Stories
If you have a company, you will want to share the link to your website to show your products and services.
Instagram limits the way you connect to external websites, only allows you to do so via the link in your Bio profile and via the “swipe up” function of Instagram Stories (and only for company accounts with more than 10,000 followers).
Companies can also use tools such as Later’s Linkin.bio function, which allows you to link your Instagram posts to specific product pages, blog posts or websites.
Compared to IG Stories, your Open Rate links tell you whether you are showing the right products to your audience, at the right time or in the right format. Let’s say it’s an indicator of which products or services are most attractive to your audience.
If you want to find the Open Rate links, do so:
- From your profile page, tap the “Bar Graph” icon in the top right corner. Then go to the Content tab on the Statistics page.
- Here, scroll down to the Stories section. In this box you will see your stories live, indicating the number of views received each.
- If you want to see more than one Instagram Story, all you have to do is tap “See All” in the top right corner of this box.
- Using the filter, you can toggle the display of metrics according to the link’s Open Rate.
- Here you can keep track of how many people have used the “Scroll Up” feature if you connect to your website or product pages.
Not satisfied with your rate? Don’t worry, you can easily improve it:
- Try to draw attention to your Swipe Up link by using bright, colourful and animated GIFs in your Stories.
- GIFs liven up your posts and help attract your audience with CTAs like “Link in bio” and “Scroll up”.
Are you tired?
I, too, explaining everything by wire and by sign is challenging, but it was worth it.
I’m sure that by better monitoring these key Instagram metrics and changing your strategy accordingly, over time you’ll profess your target audience, increase their involvement and profits will increase.
