Understanding Instagram Analytics

If you have an Instagram business or creator account, you’ll get access to certain analytics you can use to better understand your audience and post performance. These metrics are key for refining your social media strategy and determining when, and most importantly, what you should post. On the Instagram mobile app, you’ll be able to access account insights on the main page of your Instagram profile.

One of the most basic ways to use Instagram analytics is to better understand your current followers. You’ll be able to gauge follower growth, top locations, age range, gender and most active times of day. You can even break it down by reach and engagement. This should give you a good idea of who finds your content most engaging. But let’s back up a moment – what are reach and engagement?

When it comes to understanding and analyzing the performance of your posts (which includes static images, videos, Stories and Reels), there are a few key data points you’ll want to look at to determine their success. Across all types of content, three of the most important analytics to look at are reach, impressions and engagement.

Reach refers to how many individual people saw your post. A high reach means more visibility and better brand awareness.

Now, the cousin of reach is impressions – that’s how many times the post was seen. This number will always be higher than the reach. Why? Because one person may see the same post multiple times in their feed.

While reach and impressions are good for determining your brand awareness, engagement is the key data point for determining a post’s ultimate performance, and furthermore, the success of your Instagram account in general.

Engagement is basically a way of measuring how entertaining your content is – and entertaining content usually equals more followers! Engagement is not just one metric, but includes any actions a user may take upon seeing your post. This includes likes, comments, saves and shares. While it can be insightful to look at each of those actions, you can generally get a good gauge on your posts' performance based on likes alone.

So if you’re looking to grow your audience – a key initiative for most brands on Instagram, take a look at your engagement to see what types of posts get the most likes. This will tell you what types of content to post more of (and on the flip side, what you can do without).

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