Understand your IG Analytics

Very few people like numbers and statistics but I promise that this article will give you the most useful information in the easiest way possible, giving you a headache isn’t the point!

Over the past year, social media has become a powerful tool to help brands and businesses to target their dream audience. The “insights” feature, offered by most of the social media platforms, among which Instagram, is the ultimate tool for you to reach your targeted audience.

Understanding those numbers matters to get to know your audience and their expectations. Once you have figured it out, you will be able to build a winning social media strategy.

Why are insights valuable for your strategy?

As a business owner, you might want to know what your target audience thinks, wants and how it reacts to the content you are posting. The insights provided by Instagram will answer all those questions and even further. When you get to understand your insights you will be able to know how your audience reacts to your content and adapt your future posts to what they like.

Posting content that your targeted audience likes will result in driving more traffic into your account and ultimately will help you drive more sales.

I hope that you are now convinced of the importance of your insights, let’s now see what stats IG show you and how to interpret those to develop your content creation strategy.

Account Statistics

When you go to your profile click on the three lines at the top right of your screen and select “Insights”. In this window, Instagram gives you the overall insights of your account that are divided into three categories: Content, Activity and Audience.

Content Insights

Instagram first shows you the total number of posts and stories you have created this week and compares it to the previous week. Try to get the same numbers from one week to another in order to optimise your consistency.

Under the overview section, you will find another insight called “Posts”, the posts that are being shown are the ones that you have posted during the week. If you click on “see all” you will be able to have access to all the content posted for the two previous years. This is a helpful analytic that allows you to classify your posts by reach, impression, likes, save, share and other interactions, which helps you understand what has been performing the most on your account over the previous week, month or year.

If you don’t know what type of content your audience is expecting, this is the insight you should open. This will help you adapt your content strategy to get the best engagement.

After the posts section, you have access to the insights of your stories, seeing on the main pages the stories that are still active and if you click on “see all” you will be able to see the stories you posted over the last 14 days, you can classify them just like for the post insights, which is is the perfect way to know what content your audience engages the most with.

If you have created promotion on several posts you will be able to have access to their insights in the last section of the content categories, working the same as the posts and stories, if you click on “See All” you will get to more analytics to help you improve the post you are promoting.

Activity Insights

This is an important insight that will help you see how your account has been performing on a daily basis. This insight is split into two categories “Discovery” and “Interaction”.

The section “Discoveries” is measuring how many people see your content. You can observe your daily reach that is represented by a graphic, and your weekly impressions. Reach is the number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts and Impression is the total number of times that all of your posts have been seen. They also give you a comparison with the previous week results so you can follow the evolution of your account’s activity.

Concerning the “reach” graphic, this gives you daily analytics on your account, thanks to this piece of insight you can compare and interpret your daily reach. Why is one day higher than another? Is that because you posted or interacted with targeted accounts? Each of your actions counts and will make a difference in your analytics.

The “Interactions” section measures the actions that people take when they engage with your account. The graphic shows you how many actions have been daily taken on your account. Under the graphic, you can see what type of actions people have taken on your account, such as website clicks, profile visits, emails, contacts or get directions.

This metric allows you to understand what helps you get more interactions. Do you get more profile visits when you post on your feed or on your stories or when you interact with your audience? It is essential to understand what influences the evolution of your interaction to increase it.

Audience Insights

This section gives you all the information you need on the audience following your account. You will first get to know your number of followers and a comparison with the previous week, so you can see the evolution of your account. After that, you also have access to a graphic named “growth” showing you how many followers you have gained and lost over the week. If your overall is negative, try to understand what went wrong during the week for you to lose more followers than you earned. Keep in mind that even though it’s a non-efficient strategy, a lot of accounts are still using the “follow-unfollow” technique, so do not focus too much on the number of people that unfollow you, but try to understand why you didn’t get more new followers.

Then you will find several statistics to help you understand who your audience is. You can see where your audience is located by country and by cities, so if you don’t know in which language you should communicate, this can be the stats you want to look at. Under, you will see the age range and the gender of your audience, so you can identify your audience and adapt your communication to it. You won’t write the same caption if you are talking to a teenager or to an adult.

Also, if you have already identified your dream followers, these metrics will help you understand if your online strategy has succeeded to reach them. If you are selling luxury handbags targeting adult women and you see that most of the people following you are men between 13 and 17, then you are doing it wrong and you need to readjust your strategy.

At the end of the “Audience” insights, you will find one of the most important information, the average time when your followers are on Instagram per days and hours. This graphic tells you what day and what time you should post to reach your followers in the most efficient way.

Post statistics

When you post on Instagram, you get statistics to analyse the performance of your post. To have access to your post insights, click on your post and then click on “View Insights”. The two first lines show you the overall result of your post, number of likes, comments, shares, saves, profile visits and the reach of your post (meaning the number of unique accounts that have seen your post). Then, the insight splits into two categories to give you further information on the performance of your post, “Interaction” and “Discovery”.

The “Interaction” section shows you the different actions taken from this post, you first see the total number of interactions and then what kind of interaction it was (profile visits, replies, website clicks, calls, emails... ). It helps you estimate the engagement your post has generated. If you get many profile visits you are increasing your reach and brand awareness.

The “Discovery” section gives you the following information: How many people started following you after seeing your post, the number of unique accounts your post reached and the number of impressions your post generated (meaning the total number of times your post has been seen). Regarding the impression statistics, Instagram tells you where your post was discovered by new users on Instagram (hashtags, home, explore, location…), reaching on hashtags and the explore page being the best solution to get your account discovered by a larger audience.

By analysing your post insights you can understand what type of content and caption generates the best results on your account and you can adapt your content strategy to improve your statistics.

Story statistics

On the same scheme as the post statistic, each story you are posting is generating statistics to help you evaluate its performance. Divided into the same sections “Interactions” and “Discoveries” you can evaluate what type of stories generate the best engagement.

Also, when posting a story you can add hashtags and a location and get the opportunity to be reposted on the story of the hashtag of the location: that can help you get more views and reach your targeted audience.

In order to create this trustworthy relationship, your best tool is the story! You will be able to create daily interactions, show the behind the scenes and share content that wouldn’t be worth a post. A great way to connect with your audience and create a call to action buttons.

If you have read this article until the end, CONGRATULATIONS, we hope that you will now understand your account’s insights better and that it will help you adapt your digital strategy.

If you don’t know where to start to improve your statistics please feel free to book a free consultation with us, we would love to hear about your business and help you get the attention it deserves.