Countless businesses have found themselves in the same hole. You decide to go all-in with Instagram marketing, so you spend the next month snapping pics, posting stories, and exploring fun hashtags. At the end of the month, you look up and realize your business hasn’t improved.
What did you miss?
Chances are that you weren’t paying enough attention to your data. You need to know who you’re reaching to know if you’re on the right track. It all starts with understanding Instagram insights at your disposal, and this is your fast guide.
Your Activity Insights
When you land on your insight page, you’ll see three tabs: content, activity, and audience. The activity tab will give you the most general snapshot of how well your profile is doing.
Discovery
The first analytic you’ll see is discovery. This includes the total number of Instagrammers who have been exposed to you in the past week. It includes those who have seen your content and those who have viewed your profile.
Instagram breaks down discovery into two statistics: reach and impressions. Your reach includes the number of people who have seen your posts. Your impressions show you the number of total times your posts have been seen.
Comparing these two numbers is an important step. If there is a large difference, it means the people you reach are seeing your posts often. They’re likely to be more engaged and purchase-ready than users who see one post from you.
Interactions
Below discovery, you’ll see interactions. This number includes all the times that someone took action on your profile. That includes views, clicks on the link in your bio, and requesting directions to your business.
You’ll see that Instagram breaks down your interactions into those three separate statistics. In this case, you want the website clicks and directions requests to be as close to your number of visits as possible. If they aren’t, it means your profile isn’t compelling enough to get users to take the next step toward becoming a customer.
Your Audience Insights
When you go to your “audience” tab, the first number you see is the one many brands want to see: your number of followers. As crucial as this number is, it shouldn’t be the only way you gauge your success.
Below your total number of followers, you’ll see a graph of your recent growth. Rather than the total followers alone, this shows you how many new followers you have and how many have unfollowed you.
This is crucial to guiding your strategy. If you see that your follower numbers are staying the same, you may assume you aren’t attracting new followers. In truth, it may be that you’re pulling in plenty of new followers but you’re losing many as well.
That could tell you that you’re posting too often or too little to keep followers’ attention, or making other mistakes.
Top Locations
It might look great to have hundreds of thousands of followers. If your business is a local one and most of those followers are overseas, though, chances are they won’t become paying customers.
Your graph of top locations shows where your followers are located. You can toggle between cities and countries, depending on how specific you want the data to be.
Age Range
One of the most vital steps in branding your business is defining your target audience. That includes knowing the age groups who are most likely to become customers.
In your Instagram insights, you can see the breakdown of what percentage of your followers are in which age groups. If it doesn’t match with your target audience, you’ll know you need to tailor your posts toward a particular age more strongly.
Gender
In many cases, your target audience will be more skewed toward one gender than another. The language and imagery in your posts should reflect the gender you’re trying to reach.
The gender breakdown in your Instagram insights tells you if you’re hitting your mark
Followers
The label for this graph isn’t very descriptive, but in a nutshell, it shows you the days and times when your followers tend to be online.
This helps you in multiple ways. You can make educated guesses about your followers’ life habits based on when they’re online. If you have a lot of night owls on your hands, for instance, they may be more into the party scene.
Knowing the most popular times also helps you decide when to post content. If you’re already reaching the right type of people, post during the times your followers are online. If you aren’t, try mixing it up to reach some of the audience you’re missing.
Your Content Insights
The content tab of your Instagram insights is a quick way to see your recent content at a glance. It starts with a simple number: how many times you’ve posted in the past week.
Knowing if you’re on the right track here is trickier than having a clear number to aim for.
There is no singular number for how often to post on Instagram. Instead, you’ll want to experiment. For a few weeks, post once per day and measure your
profile performance. Then post two or three times per day for several weeks and see if the performance improves or declines. Do the same experiment while posting once every few days.
Understand Instagram Insights to Make the Most of Your Marketing
Without a doubt, Instagram is one of the top marketing platforms brands are using in 2020. Intasuccess takes more than posting on the right platform, though. It requires you to watch your analytics and make careful, strategic choices.
Understanding Instagram insights is the first step toward knowing how to optimize your Instagram marketing strategy. Of course, you could also leave it up to the pros. Start the road toward your new marketing campaign today.