Instagram Insights: What Do They Mean?

Everyone’s favourite social media app Instagram has gone through many a change over the last few years. Algorithm improvements, feed changes and more updates have changed the way content is received and interacted with. 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. In this all-in-one guide, we’ll outline everything you need to know about Instagram Insights: how to access them, what they mean, and how you can use them to improve your Instagram strategy and your engagement rates.

Find the best time to post, track your follower growth, and understand what content works best with post and account analytics.

Contents

1. Setting Up Insights
2. Instagram Insights Meaning

How To Access Instagram Insights

If you’ve already activated Instagram Insights you can skip to the next part of our guide here. If not, to access your Instagram Insights you’ll have to take the following steps:

1. Firstly ensure your Instagram profile is set to Public

(If you don’t have a Facebook Page you can create one during this step.)

In order to have an Instagram Business account, you must have a connected Facebook Page. The Facebook page doesn’t have to be branded or have any content on there, it simply has to exist.

Instagram Insights will now be available to you via your profile page. So let’s move on to finding out what these Instagram Insights actually mean and how you can use them to improve your Instagram marketing strategy…

Video Tutorial: How To Access Instagram Insights

Clip from Everything Instagram: The Ultimate Instagram Marketing Course

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Instagram Insights Meaning

When exploring Instagram Insights, you’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 you can extract valuable and practical information from them!

To access Instagram Insights, navigate to your profile page and tap at the top where it tells you your profile visits – equally, you 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

Under the Activity tab, you’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, you can see the total number of actions taken on your 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 your Instagram profile
Website Clicks – The number of users who have clicked on the website link in your bio
Email – The number of times users have tapped on Email on your profile
Call – The number of times users have tapped on Call on your profile

Using the graph you 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, however, other Instagram insights tools such as Hopper HQ’s Analytics can show you up to 28 days.

Discoverability:

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

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

This week-by-week information is highly valuable, as you can compare your reach depending on certain campaigns or social activity. Tracking these metrics is important to know whether your efforts to promote your 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 your 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, you will find Instagram insights relating to individual posts on your profile. This includes photo and video content, Stories, and even any promotional paid posts you may have published. The Content tab is split into Feed, Stories & Promotions…

Feed:

Here you’ll find all the important Instagram insights of the content on your feed from the past 2 years! You can sort your insights by content type, metric and time period. These are the Instagram insights you 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 your post
Emails – The number of unique accounts that followed the CTA to Email
Engagement – The number of unique accounts that Liked, Commented or Saved your post
Follows – The number of accounts that started following you because of your post
Get Directions – The number of users who tapped Get Directions because of your post
Impressions – The total number of times your post has been seen
Likes – The total number of likes on your post
Profile Visits – The number of times your profile was viewed
Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts
Saved – The number of unique accounts that saved your post
Website Clicks – The number of times your website was clicked because of your post

💡 Check out our Social Media Marketing Glossary for a full list of definitions 💡

You can filter and order all your posts based on these Instagram insights to see which posts performed the best and worst:

You 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, you can see the total interactions from each post, the breakdown of the engagement, and also most interestingly, the breakdown of the discovery of your post. This includes where all your impressions came from: be it hashtags, directly through your profile, home feed or other.

Discover better hashtags to reach the more people, grow your follower count and get more engagement on your posts.

The Feed section of Instagram Insights is the easiest way to see what type of content is performing best with your audience, and also track how your engagement rate varies over time! In the Discovery section, you can see if your 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 you can view the Instagram insights of your Stories. These metrics shed light on how users view and interact with your Stories, which can help you shape and plan Story content for the future…

The Instagram insights you can access for Stories include:

Impressions – The number of times your Instagram Story has been seen
Reach – The number of unique accounts that viewed the post on your 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 your story
Viewers – The specific users that have seen a particular post on your 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 you can gauge your audience’s interest in your Stories.

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