Instagram is the most used platform for marketers now to engage their customers and create better brand outreach. By launching interactive Instagram marketing campaigns, they connect with their users and promote their brand more effectively. However, monitoring and measuring these campaigns is also crucial since it’s the only way to understand how your Instagram campaign is performing.
Instagram analytics tools offer detailed insights into many key performance indicators that lead to campaign success. These tools let you understand more about the reach and engagement that the campaign achieved. They can also provide information on followers, likes, comments, and shares for each post. By utilizing this data, marketers can customize their content for better audience targeting.
What the Purpose Do the Instagram Analytics Tools Serve?
Instagram analytics tools help marketers to pull important data related to Instagram account performance and user engagement. By having accurate statistics, they can improve the effectiveness of Instagram content performance. These tools are very effective for Instagram account owners, businesses, and marketers as they can provide them with valuable information related to their audience and content.
How Do Analytics Tools Find The Insights?
Analytics tools get insights by analyzing different KPIs of a campaign such as user behavior, engagement rates, audience demographics, and conversion rates.
Following are the indicators that Instagram analytics tools look into to pull the important insights:
User Behavior Analysis
Analytics tools run a comprehensive analysis of user behavior on websites or social media platforms to obtain information about how users navigate through a website, what pages they visit, the duration of the visit, and actions taken by the user. Based on this analysis and fetched insights, businesses can find user preferences about the content.
Performance Measurement
Instagram analytics tools make it easier to evaluate website performance, social media posts, or marketing campaigns. This can be done using the monitoring of key Instagram metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, bounce rates, engagement rates, etc. Based on these metrics, businesses can measure their marketing efforts for making data-driven decisions.
Audience Segmentation
The effectiveness of an Instagram campaign relies on the level of audience segmentation throughout the campaign. You can use analytics tools to perform audience segmentation based on age, gender, location, interests, and behaviors. Once the segmentation is done, businesses can effortlessly target a specific set of audiences with tailored content and offerings. It will lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Conversion Tracking
These tools can effectively track user actions such as purchases, form submissions, resource downloads, or newsletter subscriptions. Conversion tracking enables businesses to find vulnerabilities affecting conversion and optimize their strategies to fix errors and increase conversion.
Trend Identification
Instagram analytics tools can also monitor trends and patterns. It helps businesses to stay updated with the latest industry trends and better understand consumer preferences. Once they are aligned with these trends, they can tailor their strategies accordingly.
Instagram Analytics: Key Metrics to Monitor
Instagram analytics enables marketers to get valuable insights into how the campaign is performing. Based on these insights, they can make data-driven decisions to boost their brand presence on this popular social media platform.
Following are some of the many key metrics that you can monitor using Instagram analytics:
Followers
The number of followers you have and to what extent are they engaged (engagement rate) with your content are two important metrics that tell a lot about your Instagram strategy. The growth of the followers indicates the increase in your audience base over a specific period. It gives you ideas about whether or not your content is resonating with your audience.
Engagement rates
Engagement rates indicate the level of interaction and interest your audience has with your content. The interaction is measured in terms of likes, comments, and shares. If the engagement curve grows upward, it shows that your content is successful in engaging your audience. Constant monitoring of engagement metrics will help marketers identify what resonates with their audience and what does not.
Reach and Impressions
These two metrics show the visibility and exposure of your content on Instagram. Reach indicates the number of unique users who have visited your content. Impressions, on the other hand, refer to the total number of times your content has been viewed. Impressions also include repeat views.
Both the metrics above indicate the effectiveness of your existing content strategy and give you an idea of whether your content is aligned with the audience you’re targeting. By monitoring the reach and impressions, you can evaluate the performance of different content formats ( posts, stories, and videos) being used on the platform.
Profile visits and website clicks
Profile visits and website clicks are two major metrics that help to evaluate your audience’s interest in your brand. Profile visits refer to the number of times users have visited your Instagram profile. Website clicks show the number of clicks you got on the links used in the content or profile.
These metrics tell you if your Instagram profile and content are enticing and compelling users to explore more about your brand or visit your website.
Top performing content
Analyzing your best and top-performing content will help you rework your existing Instagram content strategy. Go through your post likes, comments, and engagement to determine the content that is getting maximum engagement and resonating well with your audience. It will help you to produce more content that aligns with users’ needs and preferences.
Hashtags
By monitoring your post hashtags, you can get an idea about the content that drives maximum engagement. Based on the findings, you can optimize your hashtag usage to drive more relevant user traffic.
Types of Instagram Analytics Tools:
Based on the features and utilities they provide, we can segment Instagram analytics tools into two types:
Native Instagram Analytics:
Instagram comes packed with an in-built analytics tool. The features that the tool provides are accessible to Instagram and business accounts.
Native tools can offer basic to some advanced tracking features such as:
- Profile analytics: It offers a comprehensive overview of your Instagram profile performance. To fetch the insights, it looks into follower count, reach, impressions, and engagement metrics.
- Content analytics: The analytics can give deep insights into Instagram content performance in terms of likes, comments, saves, reach, impressions, and engagement rate.
- Audience demographics: It provides data about your audience's age range, gender distribution, location, and active hours, helping you understand your followers better.
- Instagram Stories insights: It’s specific to Instagram stories. Provides an overview of impressions, taps forward, taps backward, and exits.
Third-party analytics platforms:
Native analytics tools might offer some basic insights into different aspects of your Instagram campaigns. If you want to get into deep insights or want advanced reports, you can use a third-party Instagram analytics platform. Such platforms provide advanced analytics features and in-depth insights.
Some of the key features you might expect from a third-party platform are:
- Advanced Insights: You can choose a third-party Instagram analytics tool to conduct advanced data analysis and post-performance comparisons.
- Competitor analysis: With third-party analytics, you can compare your growth, engagement, and content strategies with your competitors to identify opportunities for improvement.
- Hashtag analysis: Such platforms can also offer you comprehensive details about a hashtag’s performance, popularity, reach, and engagement.
- Scheduling and content planning: Some third-party tools such as Hootsuite provides features for content planning, scheduling, and publishing.
- Customized reports: If you’re using third-party tools, you can also access customizable reports with visually appealing graphics and detailed data analysis.
Conclusion:
Instagram analytics tools come with a wide range of features and options to enable marketers to gain valuable insights into their Instagram marketing campaigns and enhance their overall Instagram marketing strategy. Before starting to use a tool, find out if its features align with your business goals. Some third-party analytics tools offer free trials as well. This is the best way to test a tool before buying its subscription.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.
