Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights Meaning

One of the major introductions to Instagram has been ‘Insights’, allowing
users to view analytics measuring the performance of their content, and
better understand their audience. When exploring Instagram Insights, we’ll
come across many different terms, graphs and numbers which all indicate
important metrics. We’ll now delve into Instagram Insights, defining the
meaning of each of these figures and how we can extract valuable and
practical information from them!

To access Instagram Insights, navigate to our profile page and tap at the
top where it tells we our profile visits – equally, we can tap the menu button
in the top right-hand corner and find ‘Insights’ as the first option.
Instagram Insights is split into the following three tabs, with each tab
containing different information:

 Activity
 Content
 Audience

Activity
Under the Activity tab, we’ll find two sets of Instagram
insights: Interactions and Discovery. Let’s delve into each subsection and
find out what each statistic means…

Interactions:

In this subsection, we can see the total number of actions taken on our
account in the past week, followed by a list of other metrics. Here’s what
these Instagram insights mean:

Profile Visits – The number of users that have visited our Instagram profile
Website Clicks – The number of users who have clicked on the website
link in our bio
Email – The number of times users have tapped on Email on our profile
Call – The number of times users have tapped on Call on our profile

Using the graph, we can see which day of the week has the most
interactions, as well as a comparison of the interactions from last week. It
should be noted that this section of Instagram Insights is limited to the past
7 days

Discoverability:

The next subsection displays the overall performance and influence of our
Instagram account using two key metrics: Reach & Impressions

Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen any of our posts
Impressions – The total number of times that all our posts have been seen

This week-by-week information is highly valuable, as we can compare our

reach depending on certain campaigns or social activity. Tracking these
metrics is important to know whether our efforts to promote our Instagram
account are successful, and should be a key part of any social media
marketing strategy.

The Activity tab in Instagram Insights therefore reveals the influence of our

page, as well as details of how people have interacted with it. However, it
should be noted that this section of Instagram Insights is also limited to the
past 7 days.

Content
Under the Content tab, we will find Instagram insights relating to individual
posts on our profile. This includes photo and video content, Stories, and
even any promotional paid posts we may have published. The Content tab
is split into Feed, Stories & Promotions…

Feed:

Here we’ll find all the important Instagram insights of the content on our
feed from the past 2 years! We can sort our insights by content type, metric
and time period. These are the Instagram insights we can filter by and what
they mean:

Calls – The number of unique accounts that followed the CTA to Call
Comments – The number of comments on our post
Emails – The number of unique accounts that followed the CTA to Email
Engagement – The number of unique accounts that Liked, Commented or
Saved our post
Follows – The number of accounts that started following us because of our
post
Get Directions – The number of users who tapped Get Directions because
of our post
Impressions – The total number of times our post has been seen
Likes – The total number of likes on our post
Profile Visits – The number of times our profile was viewed
Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen our posts
Saved – The number of unique accounts that saved our post
Website Clicks – The number of times our website was clicked because of
our post

We can also delve deeper into each post to get more information. Clicking
on each post then tapping ‘View Insights’ will open the in-depth analytics.

Under this section of Instagram Insights, we can see the total interactions
from each post, the breakdown of the engagement, and also most
interestingly, the breakdown of the discovery of our post. This includes
where all our impressions came from: be it hashtags, directly through our
profile, home feed or other.

The Feed section of Instagram Insights is the easiest way to see what type
of content is performing best with our audience, and also track how our
engagement rate varies over time! In the Discovery section, we can see if
our hashtag strategy is having a positive impact on reach, an equally
valuable metric in Instagram Insights!

Stories:

Stories is another subsection under the Content tab where we can view the
Instagram insights of our Stories. These metrics shed light on how users
view and interact with our Stories, which can help we shape and plan Story
content for the future…

The Instagram insights we can access for Stories include:

Impressions – The number of times our Instagram Story has been seen

Reach – The number of unique accounts that viewed the post on our
Instagram Story
Exited – The number of times a user swiped away from a specific story
Replies – The number of replies to a particular photo or video in our story
Viewers – The specific users that have seen a particular post on our story
Forward – The number of users that skipped this Story post
Backwards – The number of users that went back from this Story post
Next Story – The number of taps to the next account’s story

Using Instagram Insights for Stories can derive conclusions on the type of
content that works best. The Navigation section offers key performance
indicators such as Forward, Back and Next Story we can gauge our
audience’s interest in our Stories.

For example, from a large proportion of Forward clicks, we could derive

the Story wasn’t captivating enough. Equally, Back clicks would indicate
the previous Story was highly relevant to our audience as they re-watched
it. Next Story could imply our Story went on too long or became
repetitive/uninteresting. We can also learn which Stories help promote the
most follower interaction with the Replies insights! These are really
enlightening metrics and can help us cater our Instagram Story marketing
according to our audience preferences. 

Promotions:

Also in the Content tab of Instagram Insights, we can also find the metrics
relating to any promotions and paid ads we’ve published or have running
on our account. We can view:

 The number of Profile Visits from our promotional posts

 The number of Impressions, Reach and Engagement on the post

 The Gender, Age and Location of the audience who viewed the

post

Using these Instagram insights we can evaluate our paid promotional

campaigns, and view which posts were most effective in reaching the
business objectives we set. Paid ads can be something we run internally or
leverage the support of an agency who often build expertise in our industry
or niche such as this SaaS PPC agency.

Audience
The final tab in Instagram Insights is Audience. This is where we’re able to
get a better understanding of who our followers are and where they live, as
well as see how our follower number has varied from the previous week. 

Within the Audience tab of Instagram Insights, we’ll find 4 key sets of
information about our followers:

Gender – The percentage split of our followers

Age Range – The age brackets of our followers
Top Locations – The locations of our followers based on City and
Countries
Followers – The most active times of our followers, by hour of the day and
days of the week
As we can see, the Audience section reveals key Instagram insights about
our followers which can help build and improve our Instagram Marketing
Strategy. Not only can we get a better understanding of who follows we, but
we can also decipher the time in which our followers are most active,
helping we better plan and schedule our Instagram posts to reach the most
possible people.