Top 8 Important Instagram Performance Metrics

It is essential to monitor the performance of your various initiatives, particularly on Instagram, for a successful social media marketing strategy. This lets you know when a new strategy or approach is working.

However, it may not always be obvious where to begin when looking into your Instagram metrics.

You'll learn about Instagram insights, why it's so important to measure them, and the top eight Instagram metrics to keep an eye on in this article.

What are Instagram metrics?

Instagram metrics are performance measurements that let you know how well your Instagram content is doing and how well it is received by your audience. You can learn things like how many people viewed or commented on your content using Instagram metrics.

We'll talk about specific metrics later, but impressions, reach, and follower growth are some of the most important Instagram metrics you should be tracking.

Why you should keep track of your Instagram metrics?

If you manage your Instagram account but never look at your analytics, you won't know what your efforts have accomplished.

It is likely that these efforts align with the objectives of your company, department, or even just your own Instagram KPIs, which will naturally assist in determining which Instagram metrics you ought to report on.

As a result, when you answer "why," you will also reveal the most important IG metrics on which to report. There are three good reasons to keep an eye on your Instagram metrics.

• Check your post metrics:

If you're testing various types of content, you should check your post metrics to see which ones are getting the most attention just like Instagram metrics. With this knowledge, you can develop an Instagram content strategy that appeals to your audience by posting the kinds of content they enjoy most frequently.

• Instagram metrics keep your strategy in line with your company's goals:

If one of your current objectives is to increase your company's number of followers, you should make sure that you are actually accomplishing that goal. The same applies if you want more people to see your story or engage with your posts. To determine whether you are meeting your key performance indicators (KPIs), you need to be able to check the growth metrics.

• How well the campaign is performing:

If you are running a major Instagram campaign, such as one for a product launch, holiday sale, or important partnership, you will want to know how well the campaign is performing. You can see this in your Instagram metrics to determine whether or not you need to alter your messaging.

How to view insights on Instagram:

You need an Instagram business or creator account in order to view insights and metrics. The Instagram app lets you access your senses in a few different ways. Keep in mind that these cannot be accessed on a desktop computer.)

To begin, navigate to your profile and tap the button labeled "Professional dashboard."Your account insights are the first option. To access your Instagram metrics, tap See all.

Second, you can directly access your insights by tapping the hamburger menu icon in the top right corner of your profile.

All of the following metrics can be found in your Instagram Insights, or you can use a third-party analytics tool to get even more in-depth information.

We've outlined a few key Instagram metrics to help you get a sense of what to look for and where to find it if you still feel a little lost. The top 8 Instagram metrics you need to track your performance

What this metric reveals about impressions:

How many times people have seen your content. You can see how often a piece of content has been viewed individually by looking at its impressions.

This is helpful because a lot of impressions can indicate that a particular piece of content was liked and that people wanted to return to it. However, too many impressions of Instagram ads can result in ad fatigue and lower conversion rates.

What this metric tells you about reach:

How many individuals are viewing your content? You are not alone in thinking that reach sounds a lot like impressions.

Reach vs. Impressions and Instagram Impressions (if you're interested in learning more) go into great detail on these two metrics, which are similar but sufficiently confusing.

To be brief, all you need to know is that your Instagram reach is the number of people who have seen your content,

While impressions are the number of people who have seen it but haven't clicked or engaged in any other way.

Per follower engagements What this metric reveals:

Relationship between the number of people who follow you and your content. You shouldn't compare your Instagram performance to that of big-name brands like Nike, Starbucks, Oreo, and so on unless your audience size is roughly the same.

Why?

Due to the fact that brands with millions of followers ought to accumulate thousands of likes. But just because you only have a few thousand followers doesn't mean you'll get the same amount of success, which doesn't mean you shouldn't still be doing well.

And this is where engagement rate—also known as engagements per follower—comes into play. It can assist you in ensuring that your account is being evaluated fairly.

How the Instagram engagement rate is calculated:

If you report on this metric over time, you can get a sense of trends in overall performance. However, you can also calculate it for specific posts to get an idea of the kinds of content that resonates with your audience.

Growth in followers What this metric reveals:

Whether your number of followers is steadily rising or falling. Context is critical when determining whether or not your Instagram follower count is increasing or decreasing, particularly if you are experiencing sporadic increases or decreases as a result of a one-time promotion or paid social ads.

Keep in mind the context examples provided above when measuring your follower count over time to precisely determine what factors have contributed to the increase. In an ideal world, you would see steady, gradual growth over time, indicating that people are enjoying your content and want to see more of it.

In addition, in the context of your overall Instagram marketing strategy, it is essential to comprehend what is or is not working. You need to be aware of which kinds of content you should keep creating and which ones might need to be changed.

Although the total number of followers may be viewed as a vanity metric by some, it ultimately reflects the content's potential reach. Because this has an effect on the performance of other IG metrics like engagement, it's still important to keep focusing on organically growing your audience.

Comments received:

This metric reveals the following:

How much of an impact your content has. When looking at Instagram performance metrics, likes and comments are very different.

It's not hard to get likes, but you can't always be sure that your followers actually saw a post. Comments make it crystal clear. Comments on your posts, whether positive or negative, are a sign that your content had some kind of impact, or at least enough to entice the individual to leave feedback.

When it's positive, this kind of engagement is a big part of building a community and getting devoted fans. Anyone can easily double-tap, but those who take the time to comment are the ones to watch.

The most popular hashtags What this metric reveals:

Performance of hashtags. Hashtags have proven to be one of the most reliable methods for maintaining momentum, despite the fact that the erratic Instagram algorithm may occasionally wreak havoc on your content strategy.

You can help control reach and engagement by using hashtags that are related to your industry or what your audience is looking for.

Instagram users are allowed to use up to 30 hashtags in a single post; however, it is important to use that number wisely by conducting research and gaining experience from previous posts. When it comes to hashtags, sometimes less is more, which might surprise you.

Traffic from referrals What this metric tells you:

impact of Instagram on website traffic. Referral traffic is the number of people who visit your domain from other websites without searching for you.

Google Analytics classifies a visitor as a referral whenever they visit your site via a social media or website link. UTM codes can also be used to precisely track where these visits come from.

Linking to a specific landing page, product page, or even just the home page of a website is a common strategy for social media posts. This depends on the kind of action you want your followers to take after seeing your post.

On Instagram, however, you can only display a clickable link in your bio, so this can be a little more difficult. You can also include URLs in your captions, but tracking Instagram referral traffic can be difficult in either case.

How to Monitor Referral Traffic

As previously mentioned, since Instagram does not permit clickable links in your posts, UTM parameters are an excellent method for Monitoring Referral Traffic from a Specific Campaign. UTM boundaries are labels you can tack onto a URL that lets Google Investigation (or different instruments) know precisely where the client alluded from.

To ensure that your landing pages will function properly, you should learn how to set up your own UTM parameters if you are creating them specifically for an Instagram campaign.

In addition, you can distinguish between Instagram (clicks on your bio link) and Instagram Stories (swipe-ups on your stories) by checking your social network referral traffic in Google Analytics.

Metrics for Instagram Stories What this metric tells you:

How many people are interested in and use your Instagram Stories. The use of Stories is probably one of the most critical aspects of the current Instagram marketing strategies.

These are beneficial in a number of ways, most notably because they provide your audience with an additional dimension of content. You get even more freedom and flexibility than your feed does because the photos and videos disappear.

Story Replies, Story Taps Back and Forward, Story Exits, and Impressions are a few useful metrics to monitor when it comes to Instagram Stories.

Now that you have access to all of the essential Instagram metrics, you can begin reporting on progress. Start tracking your metrics today. Utilize our full Instagram Analytics monitoring services to gain additional insight into your performance.