Instagram is one of the most popular social media channels used by businesses and marketers to promote their marketing campaigns.

In fact, it is the preferred platform for brand collaborations and influencer marketing campaigns. 25 million businesses around the world trust Instagram to drive traffic and generate leads and sales.

And why not? Instagram has over 800 million monthly active users, while 51% of people on Instagram use it daily.

Being a highly visual platform, it has huge potential to generate high engagement rates for your product or business.

But do you know whether your Instagram marketing efforts are paying off?

In order to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and see whether they are able to meet your campaign goals and objectives, you need to analyze their performance:

Here are some of the most important Instagram metrics you need to know:

1. Interactions Per Post

Interactions on your posts show how much engagement you were able to create. Check the number of likes, shares, and comments for each post and track those posts with the highest number of interactions.

The most important interaction metric is number of comments you get. Track the average number of comments you get so you can see the change over a period of time.

If your average increases per post, it indicates you are successfully connecting better with your audience. And if this growth in interactions becomes a pattern, you can use it to create similar posts that will spark your audience’s interests and increase engagement.

2. Follower Growth Rate

A high follower count is always good for your brand’s credibility and brand image. However, it does not accurately indicate the success of your business or your marketing campaigns.

On the other hand, if you measure your follower growth rate, you can get a good idea of whether your business is getting increased exposure and reach with new followers.

This implies that the rate of your follower growth is more important than the actual number of followers at a time.

For example, if you get 100 new followers in a month, and you began with 500 followers, it means your growth rate was 20%, which is great.

Numbers like these clearly indicate the growth in your business’ reach. However, if you started with 10,000 followers, your follower growth rate would have been only 1% in this case, which is an indicator that your Instagram marketing efforts aren’t paying off that well.

  • Now let’s see how to measure your follower growth rate.
  • Check how many followers you have now.
  • After one month, check how many new followers you have.
  • Then divide that number by the number of followers you had at the beginning of the month.

Let’s say you started with 1000 followers at the beginning of the month. And you got 50 new followers by the end of the month. Then your follower growth rate would be 50/1000, which is 0.05 or 5%.

3. Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories – in the form of video or images – are a little different from the usual content as they are only visible for 24 hours.

This means you have room for more creativity and experimentation in your marketing tactics. But it becomes a little tricky to track this metric.

There are no platforms apart from Instagram that support analytics for this form of expiring content. So the only option to track this metric is through Insights, Instagram’s own analytics tool.

You will need to create a business account on Instagram to be able to use Insights.

It is a simple process. Just go to your Instagram account settings and click on the option to “Switch to Business Profile.” Enter your business information and you will be able to access Insights to measure the performance of your Stories.

Other key factors you need to check are: your Stories’ reach and exits. You need to see how many unique people viewed each Story.

The exits show the specific page people were viewing when they actually exited your Story. Exits are a good indicator of your followers’ interest. And they actually tell you what part of your Story was liked and what was not liked by your audience.

This way you will know which page or slide of your Story turned off your audience and made them exit. Then you can work to improve those specific pages and improve your Stories.

An important thing to be noted here is that this metric can be checked within the 24 hours that your Stories are live. After that, this data, along with your Story, expires and cannot be accessed.

4. Referral Traffic

Instagram is a powerful medium to drive referral traffic to your website. However, there are some limitations as it only allows you to add one clickable link in your bio.

So what can you do if you want to promote your new marketing piece on Instagram and measure its performance?

One way is to use UTM parameters. Not sure what UTM are? These are tags that can be added to a link to allow Google Analytics get more information on the link.

You can track your Instagram marketing campaigns and referral traffic coming from Instagram by simply adding UTM parameters to the URLs you share on Instagram.

5. Impressions Per Post

Impressions are the number of times your post was viewed by users. Many people often confuse impressions with reach, which are two different things.

While reach shows the number of people who saw your post, impressions tell you the number of times your post was seen.

Check for posts that have a higher number of impressions to see what type of content is liked most by your audience. Accordingly, create posts that gain more impressions and expand your reach and credibility.

Over to You
So now you know which metrics to check to measure and analyze your Instagram marketing performance. Focus on the increase in your follower count, impressions, and traffic to your website.
Most importantly, check how effective your posts were in terms of fostering real engagement. Keep an eye on the clicks, likes, comments, and shares garnered by your Instagram posts. Don’t forget to add UTM to analyze your posts’ performance from Google Analytics..

Have you tried checking Instagram Insights and other analytics features to track your performance? What were the results? Leave your comments below and I will get back to you with more tips and useful information.