Now, let's take a tour through insights on Instagram; their native analytics tool that will help you discover who's seeing what posts and when, who's interacting with your posts, who your audience is, and more. Open up your Instagram app and navigate to your business profile Home. You'll find an Insights button here on the page, or you can navigate to Insights by tapping the "Menu" icon here. While not as robust as Facebook's Insights, there's still a lot to discover that will be helpful to your marketing strategy. Insights breaks metrics down into three areas: content, activity, and audience. Each section is broken down into further metrics. Let's start with content, which is going to focus around what you've posted. First, it gives you an overview of how much content you posted in the past week and what a Delta is from the week prior. Note that these insights only cover the past week. While they do show the change from the week before, there's not a way to pull up customized dates. If you do want to track your metrics over time, you may want to revisit Insights weekly to record the data you need. Next, the post section shows what you posted this past week, along with its reach, which is the number shown next to the eyeball icon, which is the number of times a post was seen by an individual account. Instagram is going to order these by largest reach first, not chronologically. Tap "See All" to see all of your posts, which is the only place in Insights where you can go back further than a week. This screen is going to be incredibly helpful to you as it's going to give you the ability to filter on post format, dates, and your metric of choice. It defaults to ranking your posts by reach for the past year. Change the filters at the top to look at only photo or video posts. Change your dates from the past week to two years ago and change what metrics you want to look at. Maybe you want to see how many likes or comments your posts got, or which posts prompted people to follow you, or click the link in your profile. This section is going to be your most helpful to surface what content your audience engages with the most, and how. The next section is Stories, which we'll show you the same data for the Instagram stories that you post. Tap on "See All" to view all of your stories in the past 14 days, and filter by whatever metric you'd like; Reach, Link Clicks or anyone who exited in the middle of viewing a story. The final section of content is Promotions, where you'll find data on the posts that you've turned into ads to target specific users. You can also tap "See All" to view different metrics for each of your promotions as well. How can this data help you? By knowing the stats on your individual posts, you can see what posts your audience engaged with most, track your KPIs, and make a plan for future content. Which posts had the most profile clicks? Did those posts contain a call to action? Maybe the posts with the highest reach were posted at a certain time of day when more of your followers were on the app. The goal is to uncover insights into your content performance and make adjustments to better serve your audience. The next section of our Insights dashboard is Activity, which uncovers how people are finding your content and interacting with it. The first section is Discovery, which starts with Reach or the number of unique users who have viewed any of your posts. This is like unique visitors in our web metrics. Even though a user may have looked at your post multiple times, they're counted as one user. You can see the change in your reach over last week as well. This dashboard also shows you impressions, which is the number of times your posts have been seen. Since impressions focuses on the number of times seen, you may have single users being double or triple counted in this number as they may have scrolled by your post a few times. You'll also see your impressions' week over week changes. These numbers are going to show you how far and wide your posts are going, which can help you track awareness and impact of your brand. The next section on the Activity is Interactions, which is simply a measure of an action taken by a follower. Here, Instagram measures profile visits, which is times a follower visited your profile to look at your older posts or to find out more information about you. It also measures website clicks or the times a follower clicked the link in your bio. If these numbers are below what you want them to be, especially your website clicks, take a look into how you're phrasing your call to action. The third section on Insights is going to tell you all about your audience. You can see who's following you. Most importantly, you can see whether they align with your target audience or whether they're entirely new segments. It's going to tell you how many followers you have right at the top of the dashboard and the change from the previous week so you can see how many followers you gained. Next is Top Locations, which simply shows where your followers live, defaulting to city first. You can toggle to countries as well for a global perspective. Again, you'll probably see what you expect to see here in regards to your target audience, but this section may uncover a regional or global audience you didn't know you had. Next is Age Range, which shows the age of your followers segmented into demographics. It defaults to all but toggle back and forth between men and women to see if there are any differences to uncover in age ranges by gender. The next portion is Gender, which shows you the breakdown of your followers. Again, use this data to see if you are engaging with your target audience or if you have new audiences that you need to be aware of. Finally, Instagram shows an incredibly helpful chart when your followers are on the app by day of the week and by time broken into three hour segments. This takes the guesswork out of when to post. Simply post when you followers are there. While gives you a bit of data on individual posts in that first content section, there are times when you may want to drill down further into specific post. Go back to your Profile and click on a post. Once there, click "View Insights". What first pops up is an at-a-glance look at the insights for your post. The heart is how many likes it got, the speech bubble is the number of comments, the paper airplane is how many times it was shared to a story or shared with another user, and the bookmark is who favored it. Beneath the at-a-glance header, you'll find a bunch of helpful information, the number of profile visits it encouraged, which is restated in the Interactions section right below it. It also shows your posts reach. In the Discovery section, it will also tell you how many accounts it reached who don't follow you. That could be someone finding it shared on a story or through a hashtag. The discover section will tell you if someone found your post through a hashtag. If you promoted your post, it will also give you details on your posts impact there as well. As you can see, Insights is going to give you a lot to work with. But if you want more expansive analytics, like having the ability to view customized timeframes, track audience changes over time, and run reports, you might want to look into using a third party app. Third-party apps can also fold in creation and scheduling tools as well. As you look to engage more with your audience, drive traffic to your site, track your KPIs, and grow your brand awareness, make sure to use all the tools you have at your disposal, including Instagram Insights.
