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Instagram is an influential platform for businesses of all sizes, offering immense potential for both customer engagement and influencer marketing.

The rise of social commerce and shoppable posts has positioned Instagram as a key driver of leads and revenue for many brands, making it the second most popular social network for shopping in the U.S., according to Statista.

With its extensive reach, advanced targeting options, and engaging video formats, Instagram presents a valuable opportunity to connect with your audience. Understanding how to effectively reach and engage them is essential.

But how can you tell if your Instagram marketing strategy is yielding results? That’s where analytics come in.

Instagram Insights provide the data you need to make informed business decisions, optimize your content, and drive both engagement and conversions.

In this blog, we’ll dive into Instagram analytics and explore how you can maximize the platform’s potential.

To effectively monitor and analyze your Instagram account and content, it’s important to understand the various available metrics and determine which ones are most relevant to your business.

All insights are viewable by date range, so you can adjust the timeframe based on the data you’re interested in.

Under the ‘Overview’ menu, you’ll find several key metrics:

Views
In this section, you’ll see various breakdowns of views, including:

• Source of Views: Instagram differentiates between views from followers and non-followers, allowing you to assess if your content is reaching new audiences.

• Accounts Reached: Displays the number of accounts your content has reached and shows percentage changes over time.

• Content Type: You can filter views by content type (posts, stories, reels) and by followers or non-followers. It also includes a breakdown of views by region (continent, country, city).

• Audience Breakdown: Provides demographic insights, such as the top cities and countries of your audience, as well as top age ranges and gender.

Profile Activity
This section offers valuable data on how users interact with your profile:

• Profile Visits: Tracks the number of visits to your profile, helping you gauge changes in interest following high-performing posts or campaigns.

• External Link Taps: For businesses, this tracks how many users click the link in your bio to visit your website or other destinations.

• Business Address Taps: Unique to business accounts, this measures how often users tap to view your location details.

Interactions
Engagements, now labeled as “interactions,” can be found in the ‘Interactions’ tab, where you can see:

• Engagement by Content Type: View interaction data broken down by content type (posts, stories, reels).

• Top Posts by Interaction: Displays your posts with the most interactions.

• Follows to Non-Followers Interaction: Shows the interaction of followers versus non-followers.

• Demographics: See interactions broken down by location, gender, and other demographic factors.

Total Followers
This metric shows the total number of followers you have, along with data on whether you’ve gained or lost followers over time. It also includes an “Active Times” section, helping you see when your followers are most active, which is useful for optimizing post timing. You can also view gender and location demographics.

Content You Shared
This section displays all the content you’ve shared, sortable by different metrics like views, accounts engaged, or accounts reached. You can filter by content type (posts, reels, stories, videos, live videos) and see a ranking from highest to lowest.

The View tab shows additional insights:

• Source of Views: A breakdown of views from followers versus non-followers, offering a deeper understanding of your reach.

• Content Type: Insights into the performance of different content types, helping you see what resonates most with your audience.

• Profile Activity: Includes detailed data on how users interact with your profile, such as profile visits, external link taps, and business address taps.

For individual posts, you can access the following metrics:

• Accounts Reached: Displays the unique number of accounts that have seen your content, along with demographic details like countries, cities, age ranges, and gender.

• Accounts Engaged: Shows the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content, along with demographic breakdowns.

• Content Interactions: Tracks the actions people take, including likes, comments, shares, saves, and replies.

• Ad Insights: Provides additional data if your post is part of a paid campaign, such as cost per goal, impressions, and reach.

These metrics give you a comprehensive understanding of how your content performs, helping you optimize your Instagram strategy for greater business impact.

Having data is valuable, but gaining insights from it is what truly drives marketing success.

To maximize performance and growth on Instagram, it’s essential to focus on key metrics that provide clear, actionable insights. Let’s explore the most effective ones.

Views have become Instagram’s primary metric across all formats—posts, stories, and especially Reels. While impressions are still available in scheduling tools like Buffer, views now take center stage.

This shift highlights Instagram’s focus on video content and prioritizes repeated viewing over likes or comments. Views now significantly influence how the algorithm promotes content to both followers and non-followers.

Reach is a crucial metric because it shows how many people are actually seeing your content. Though often confused with impressions, the two are not the same.

Instagram reach represents the number of unique viewers, while impressions count how many times your content was displayed—whether or not anyone engaged with it, such as by clicking.

This metric is valuable because it tracks your follower count and helps you connect spikes or dips to specific campaigns or timeframes.

If you notice a surge in followers, review the content posted during that period. Was it a Reel or a video on a specific topic?

Identifying what attracts new followers provides insight into what your audience is interested in—and what they’re not. Follower growth also helps gauge whether your audience is expanding or shrinking, making it a key indicator of your Instagram performance.

Engagement rate is a key metric that reveals how your audience is interacting with your content. It can be measured based on both followers and impressions.

Understanding your engagement rate helps assess the performance of your posts and overall account while providing a benchmark for growth.

Engagement rate by followers:
(Total engagement: Likes + Comments + Shares + Saves) ÷ Number of followers × 100

Engagement rate by impressions:
(Total engagement: Likes + Comments + Shares + Saves) ÷ Impressions × 100

What do you really know about your followers? With Instagram analytics, you can uncover key insights like their location, age, and gender.

This data helps you determine if your audience aligns with your buyer personas. If not, why? Is a new audience emerging, or is there unexpected interest from a specific city that you can tap into?

It also guides your posting strategy. For example, if many of your followers are in Western Canada, schedule posts when they’re most likely to be online and engaged.

Tapping on individual Instagram posts reveals a wealth of data beyond just likes, comments, and saves. You can also access insights on interactions, discovery, and impressions. Let’s break down the key metrics available for each.

Reels

When you tap on a Reel, you can view key engagement metrics like likes, comments, shares, and saves.

In the Overview tab, you’ll find:

• Views

• Watch Time (total and average)

• Interactions

• Profile Activity (follows gained from the Reel)

You can also see engagement from both followers and non-followers, with accounts engaged broken down by likes, saves, shares, and comments.

Posts

For Instagram posts, you can track:

• Likes, comments, shares, and saves

• In the Overview tab:

  • Views

  • Interactions

  • Profile Activity (follows gained from the post)

Additionally, you can see where your views came from—whether from followers, non-followers, home feed, profile visits, or hashtags. Engagement metrics are also categorized by likes, saves, shares, and comments.

Stories

Instagram Stories provide two types of insights:

1. Who viewed your story – With the option to boost it as a paid ad.

2. Overview metrics, including:

   • Views

   • Interactions (likes, comments, replies, shares)

   • Profile Activity (follows from the story)

   • Accounts reached (followers vs. non-followers)

   • Profile Visits (how many people visited your profile after seeing the story)

Navigation insights show how users interacted with your story:

• Forwards – They skipped ahead before finishing.

• Next Story – They swiped to another account, indicating disengagement.

• Back – They rewatched, showing interest.

• Exited – They left your story or the story feed altogether.

By analyzing these metrics, you can refine your content strategy, focusing on what truly resonates with your audience—rather than relying on guesswork.

Shopping on Instagram has become the norm, making it essential to understand what people are buying and why.

For example, beauty brand Glossier utilizes shoppable videos to showcase and sell their products seamlessly.

Instagram insights for shoppable posts provide a wealth of data. You can track engagement metrics like comments, likes, and reach, as well as product-specific details such as page views and button clicks.

These insights allow you to analyze what’s driving user interactions. For example, are the images with people performing better, or is it just the product? Which call-to-action is more effective—‘Find out more’ or ‘Buy now’? Are hashtags helping people discover your products?

By understanding these metrics, you can create more impactful posts that encourage visitors to explore your site or make a purchase.

To stay updated on Instagram’s latest features, follow these key accounts:

• @mosseri – Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s CEO

• @creators – Instagram’s creator account

• @instagramforbusiness – Instagram’s business account

While it’s great to see engagement through comments and likes on your Instagram posts, there’s another key metric to consider: saves.

A “save” means that a user has bookmarked your post because they find it valuable and relevant. This makes saves a crucial metric, as they reflect the long-term appeal and usefulness of your content.

You can view the number of saves in the ‘engagement’ section of Instagram Insights. The more saves your post receives, the more it indicates that your content resonates with your audience. If you notice certain types of posts (like tutorials or tips) getting more saves, it might be worth repeating that format or theme in future content.

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