Instagram Analytics: What Metrics You Need to Track
We have dived deep into which metrics of your analytics to monitor to make sure your Instagram account grows and grows and grows.
Posted 3 years ago
Written by
Mackenzie TaylorPosted 3 years ago
Tracking your Instagram performance is the key thing to having a successful Instagram strategy. Because how else are you going to know if the photo of your cat is what your audience wants without monitoring how well the content has done? By keeping a close eye on your Instagram analytics, you’ll learn new ways to improve your strategy and what kind of photos and videos your audience is most engaged in. At Flick, we’re going to deep dive into which Instagram metrics of your analytics to monitor to make sure your Instagram account grows and grows and grows.
Instagram Account Metrics
We’re going to start this list off by looking at some of the metrics you need to be tracking if you want to get a sense of how well your Instagram account is performing as a whole.
1. Follower Growth Rate
While you shouldn’t rely fully on the number of Instagram followers you have to determine if you’re doing a good job on Instagram, you should be keeping an eye on the rate at which people follow your account. Why? Well, because this usually tells you if the content you’re putting out there is what people want to see or not…
Either through Instagram Insights or your Flick account, you can start tracking how many followers you increase or decrease based on how often you post. Are you increasing in followers after posting? Are you decreasing? Once you start tracking which content is causing an increase vs. decrease, you can create a more defined strategy for your Instagram account.
Flick’s Open Benchmarks also has publicly-available data on the average follower growth rate of over 40,000 accounts connected to our tool.
2) Audience Activity
Knowing when your audience is online and active is essential to growing your Instagram and structuring your Instagram strategy. If you post when a large portion of your audience is active, you’ll see more engagement. It’s pretty simple!
When you’re trying to figure out the best time to post, looking into audience behavior data is essential. You need to know when people are most likely to engage with your content.
As a general rule, the best time to post on Instagram (if your goal is engagement) is Tuesday between 11 AM—2 PM CDT. However, this recommendation is based on global data. We can get more specific by looking at Flick’s Audience Activity chart.
The chart visually displays the days and times when your audience is most likely to engage with your content. By examining the chart, you can begin to work out a posting schedule that highlights the times when your most active audience segments are online.
3) People Reached
People Reached (or Average Reach) is a handy metric that tells you exactly how many unique accounts have seen your content within a certain period of time. The benefits of tracking this metric are probably obvious to marketers attempting to grow their following, but I’ll run through them anyway!
- It is a great way to see how your strategy is impacting your reach. Whenever you make a change to your content or posting strategies, there’s a chance that it will be reflected in People Reached. Actions that result in positive changes should be repeated, while those that result in negative changes should be avoided.
- It is an incredibly simple way to get a sense of your Instagram account’s health. If the trajectory of your People Reached chart is upward, you’re likely doing just fine.
- It is a great metric to use when benchmarking yourself against similar accounts. If you’re curious to see how you stack up against accounts of a similar size, check out Flick’s free open benchmark database on people reached.
4) Click-Through Rate
Click-Through Rate (or CTR) tracks how many people click onto your website or email through your Instagram profile over a certain period of time and divides that number by Profile Views. If your account is a key part of a larger sales funnel that extends beyond Instagram, this is a crucial metric to track. Getting people to visit your Instagram profile is relatively easy. Intriguing them enough to visit your website is another thing entirely.
Here’s an example:
- @Alex: 500 Profile Views and a CTR of 1%.
- @Betty: 100 Profile Views and a CTR of 7%.
In the example above, @Betty is actually in far better health than @Alex (even though @Alex gets 5X the Profile Views). @Betty is leading 7 potential customers to her website every month, while @Alex is only attracting 5.
5) Follower Conversion
Follower Conversion is an incredibly powerful metric that you won’t find on Instagram itself. To access it, you’ll need to pick up a third-party tool like Flick.
What this metric gives you is the rate at which your Instagram profile converts visitors into followers. Since the primary aim of Instagram growth is increasing the number of active followers you have, it will come as no surprise that Follower Conversion is a crucial metric to be tracking.
If your conversion rate is below the benchmark for accounts like yours, you might need to take corrective action. If it’s above the benchmark, you can rest easy knowing that what you’re doing is working well.
Instagram Feed Metrics
Now, it’s time to look at a few of the most important Instagram feed metrics you should be tracking. Keeping tabs on your Instagram feed is incredibly important because … well, Instagram is a feed. People are primarily interacting with your content when it pops up in their personal feeds. It’s important for you to track their reactions when that happens.
1) Engagement Rate
The one metric most people keep track of when it comes to knowing if your content is doing well on Instagram. If your followers are commenting, liking, saving, sharing, and reacting to your content in any way, your Engagement Rate will indicate it!
How should you calculate your engagement rate? The engagement rate is the total number of interactions your content receives divided by your total number of followers, multiplied by 100%. You can also get a report on your engagement rate with a Flick account.
If your engagement rate is high, many of your followers are actively going out of their way to like, comment, share, and save your content. In other words … you’re killing it. However, if your engagement rate is low, you need to rework your content. Maybe you’re posting at the wrong time. Perhaps the content you’re sharing isn’t for your audience.
Keeping an eye on your engagement rate and knowing if it’s high or low and why it’s high or low is extremely important to track.
2) Average Engagement Per Post
In addition to your Engagement Rate, you’ll also want to track Average Engagement Per Post. This metrics tells you the average number of likes, comments, and saves your posts got over a certain period of time.
The key difference here is that this metric isn’t dependent on the number of people who saw your content on average over time, only on their actual behavior. This means it’s a great metric for baseline analyses due to the lack of confounding variables.
3) Reach Rate
Want to know how well your account is performing on Instagram? Take a peek at your reach. The reason reach is so essential is that it shows you how many unique accounts have seen your post, indicating how much awareness your content is gaining. Are you wanting your content to be seen by the most amount of people possible? Then you should be focusing on reach.
You can check out your reach through the individual posts on Instagram, or by going through your Flick account to get more insights into the post. If a post has got higher engagement than usual, what kind of post was it? Video? Photo? What hashtags did you use? Did you have a call to action to help with engagement? What time did you post?
Each one of those things will affect your reach, and tracking that metric across each of your posts will help you fine-tune your strategy on Instagram.
4) Average Reach Per Post
Again, Average Reach Per Post is similar to Reach Rate, but differs in that it doesn’t depend on individual post viewership in its calculation. The metric simply reports the average number of accounts that saw your posts over a certain period of time.
Generally, you want your Average Reach Per Post to be increasing as you continue to develop and fine-tune your Instagram strategy. Reaching more people with every post means giving yourself more opportunities to attract followers or convert visitors into customers.
You can use Flick’s Open Benchmarks to see the average reach per post of over 40,000 Instagram accounts.
5) Saves
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around saves being a huge component in the algorithm on Instagram. Some say it doesn’t matter if you have those saves, while others are saying the biggest thing you want right now is saves. However, when it comes to metrics to track, saves should be up there.
Instagram saves is when a user can click the bookmark icon on the bottom of an Instagram post, so they can go back to it later. This is why knowing what posts of yours are making people want to save for later will majorly help your Instagram strategy.
Instagram Hashtag Metrics
Hashtags on Instagram function as an organizational system that connects users to content that appeals to them. If you’re someone who works with Instagram regularly, understanding and tracking hashtag performance is crucial. Let’s run through a couple of metrics provided by Flick that will help you understand and improve your hashtag performance:
Rank Ratio
Rank Ratio is a cool hashtag performance metric that tells you the rate at which you’re able to rank within the top 100 posts for a certain hashtag or group of hashtags.
A high Rank Ratio means that you’re frequently able to rank highly with the set of hashtags you use. That means great things for your ability to reach interested users and attract motivated followers. However, if your Rank Ratio is low, it might indicate a problem with your hashtag strategy.
Average Rank
Average Rank is another metric that’s unique to Flick. It records the top rank you’ve been able to achieve for a certain hashtag and averages it across all your posts to give you an overview of your ranking history.
As you improve your hashtag strategy, this number will begin to shrink. That makes it an amazing metric to track if you’re looking for an easy way to gain insights into the health of your hashtag strategy.
Instagram Story Metrics
Instagram Stories are an integral part of digital marketing strategies, and it’s not hard to see why. Over 500 million people view stories daily, and 25% of these viewers report regularly finding products, services, and accounts through a story ad. With that in mind, let’s look at some metrics you can use to track the efficacy of your Instagram stories:
1) Instagram Stories Views
One of the easiest and best ways to connect with your audience currently is through Instagram Stories. And by tracking how much your audience engages and interacts with your stories can help dictate what kind of content they want from you.
Tracking your view count, taps forward, taps back, and exits will help tell you what they like and enjoy from you.
When you go on your Instagram, you can pull up the metric from each individual Instagram story and see what the metrics were like, including replies, impressions, and navigations.
So how can you tell if your story was actually successful or not? By figuring out the rates of each of these things:
2) Watch-Through Rate
Watch-Through Rate is the final number of story views divided by the first story number of views as a percentage. In other words, it’s a rough estimate of the number of people who watched your story all the way to the end.
Unfortunately, this is the best you’ll get from Instagram’s built-in analytics system. It will suffice in most cases, but if you’re looking for a little more accuracy, you’ll need to look at third-party tools like Flick.
3) Drop-Off Rate
Drop-Off Rate is the first story number of views divided by the final story number of views as a percentage. This will help you understand how many people are exiting out of your story. If this number is high after one story, you know that your Story isn’t as engaging as it should be. This is often a sign that you need to rethink your posting and content strategies.
4) Completion Rate
Completion Rate is a metric that shows you how many people watched your story all the way through. Instagram Insights won’t give you the full details of the completion rate, but fortunately, Flick’s Instagram Story analytics will tell you exactly what you need.
You can find Completion Rate by clicking Analytics Suite > Stories. Using this metric (and its historical data) you can start to craft more engaging Instagram stories that encourage people to view them to the end.
5) Slides Per Viewer
Slides Per Viewer tells you the average number of Stories slides a user flipped through before bouncing from your story entirely. Like many of the Instagram metrics we’ve covered in the story section, this one helps you understand how engaged your viewers are with your story content. The more engaged they are, the longer they’ll stick around (at least in theory).
A big part of your story content strategy should be devoted to increasing the Slides Per Viewer and Completion Rate metrics. If you’re not sure how to do that, here are a few tips:
- Polls: People love interaction. Adding polls to your stories will keep people engaged all the way through.
- AMAs: Multi-slide AMAs are a great way to keep people’s attention over longer periods of time.
- Contiguous Elements: Using design elements that spill over from one slide to the next will help keep your audience’s attention.
- Stickers: Stickers and GIFs are great ways to add splashes of color and motion to your stories. If you keep people interested by offering up appealing visuals they’re more likely to stick around to the end.
- Prompts: Adding prompts to your story slides (e.g., “Tap for more!”) is a great way to directly influence your viewers’ behavior.
- Screenshots: Adding a fun, fillable screenshot is a great way to make your story content more engaging. As an added bonus, reposts are a free boost to your reach!
FAQ
What’s the difference between Reach and Impressions?
- Reach: the total number of people who have seen your ad or content. If 100 total people have seen your ad, that means your ad’s reach is 100.
- Impressions: the number of times your ad or content has been displayed on a screen.
How do you calculate engagement rate?
Engagement rate is the total number of interactions your content receives divided by your total number of followers as a percentage.
The equation is:
- Interactions / followers x 100
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