How to Understand Your Instagram Analytics

Staring at your social media stats and wondering what on earth any of the numbers mean? Don’t stress, we get it! 

With a list as long as your arm of performance figures you could be analysing on Instagram, it’s easy to get bogged down and frankly, overwhelmed by what you see. If you’re looking for a little guidance on what in the world the figures mean, and more importantly, what they mean for you, keep reading…

Finding Your Instagram Statistics

Before you can understand what your Instagram insights are telling you about your business and your social media presence, you have to know how and where to find them.

First, open up your Instagram and head to your profile. You’ll see three horizontal lines in the top right corner. You’ll then see a drop-down menu and you should tap “Insights.” You should now see an overview page of your stats for the last seven days.

Within this insights tab, you can find information on post engagement, account reach, post reach, follower growth, follower demographics, and so much more. Don’t worry, it’s less scary than it sounds!

There will be three primary pages to view each of these analytics from beyond the overview page. First, you’ll see the “Accounts Reached” page. Here you’ll be able to access figures around the reach of content shared, top-performing content, profile activity, and accounts reached. On the next page titled “Accounts Engaged” you’ll be able to access stats around your accounts engagement, top engaged with content, post interactions, REEL interactions, and audience demographics. On the final page “Total Followers”, as you might have guessed, you’ll be able to see your follower growth and follower demographics.

You can also choose from the drop-down menu on the left-hand side whether you’d like to view stats for the last 7 days, the last 14 days, the last 30 days, the previous month, the last 90 days, or a custom period. To view your profile analytics for the last full year, you can select a start date of January 1st 2023 and an end date of December 31st 2023.

So, now you know how to find your account analytics, but what do they actually mean for you and your business?

What Metrics Are Important for Your Business

As outlined above, the built-in Instagram analytics can offer insights into follower growth, post and REEL engagement, content reach, account interactions, content clicks, and more, but, if you don’t know what you’re looking for then these numbers are just that…numbers with no context. With that in mind, let’s give them some context. 

• Engaged Accounts

  • Your “accounts engaged” figure represents the number of unique accounts that interacted with your content in a given period. The key here is unique accounts. Meaning if the same account engaged with ten of your posts, they would only be counted once in your accounts engaged figure.

  • Instagram provides demographic information on these engaged accounts including top countries, cities, age ranges, and gender breakdown.

• Content Interactions

• Content interactions are different to engagement. Interactions include likes, comments, saves, shares, story interactions, and replies. Content interactions can also be broken down into interactions on posts and interactions on REELs so you can analyse the performance of different types of content. 

• Unlike engagement statistics, when the same account likes or comments on multiple posts, each of their interactions is counted separately within this metric.

• Follower Growth

• Follower growth is the easiest statistic to understand since it highlights the total number of new followers minus the number of accounts that unfollowed your account to find total follower growth for a given period.

• Follower Demographics

• Follower demographics showcase where your followers are primarily located (both countries and towns/cities), the age ranges of your followers, the gender demographics, and the gender demographic of certain ages.

• Reach

• Reach represents the number of unique accounts that have had your content appear on their screen at least once. Within your reach figures, you can again see a breakdown of the demographics you have reached.

• Impressions

• Impressions refer to the number of times your content was seen on Instagram. Impressions and reach differ in that impressions can include multiple views from the same account, while your reach figure references exclusively unique views.

• Reach and Impressions

  • To gain new followers and get great engagement on your content you have to do one thing first…reach people. Sounds obvious, but it’s worth tracking how many accounts you are reaching on Instagram, and if they are aligning with your target audience. Your reach and impressions stats will give you insight into who is seeing your content.

The more content you share on Instagram, likely the higher your reach and impressions figures will be - that makes sense. However, this does not mean just keep posting as much as possible to reach as many people as possible. If you just post without a strategy, you won’t reach the right audiences. Take a look at the demographics of the followers you have reached and understand if they align with your target audience. If they don’t, it might be worth taking a look at a new strategy for your social media accounts in 2024.

Engaged Accounts and Interactions

Reaching new audiences is great, but actually engaging with them is key. While engagement and interactions represent two different stats, Instagram insights group them on the same page, so they’re important to digest at the same time. As mentioned above, the key difference between your engagement figure and your interactions figure is the word “unique”. Engagement numbers represent the number of unique accounts that interact with your content, while interactions represent the number of actual interactions across your account. Essentially four likes from the same account would translate as one engaged account and four interactions. 

Your engaged account number is important to help you understand how many individuals your content is actually reaching. For most businesses, this number is one of the most important to analyse since it shows how well your content is performing across several accounts. As Later highlights, having a high reach rate may look impressive, but what’s more impressive is how engaging your posts are, so having a high-engaged accounts figure is a good reflection of the quality of your content. 

When looked at alongside your interactions figure, you have a real sense of the performance of your content. This understanding can help you to see how well your content is performing overall, whether it's reaching the right audience, and whether you are effectively engaging with your audience across multiple posts.

Understanding how your content is performing can then help you create a strategy for your future posts including content, captions, influencers, and the overall aesthetic of your account. When delving into these figures, looking at specific numbers is key. Take a look at what content had the highest engagement and interaction figures and try to identify what made this different. Is there a certain menu item featured that got a lot of attention? Did showcasing your staff resonate with your audience? Was the audio funny and engaging? Have you uniquely edited the image or REEL? Were you quick to jump on viral trends? Did you post relaxing content at the perfect time of day? The reasons behind a post’s success can vary depending on your business and audience, but understanding what worked for you can help you create even more engaging content in the future.

Follower Growth Vs. Follower Demographics

When looking at your Instagram analytics, it’s easy to get lost in your follower growth figure and worry that you are not growing quickly enough, or even that you are losing followers. While it is important to understand why these things may be happening, it’s equally as important not to get lost looking at your follower growth in isolation, but rather to look at your follower demographics. After all, increasing followers is great, but increasing with the right followers is what matters. 

Instagram offers insights into follower demographics including age demographics (broken down into male and female if needed), location demographics including both town/cities and country, and age demographics. If your followers are not aligning with your brand, you’ll likely end up with what is referred to as “ghost followers” i.e. those followers who never interact with your content, and have no intention of visiting your business.

Before you delve into these figures, you should first identify who your target audience is. Take the time to delve into your business demographics, and who you are trying to reach, are you exclusively based in one city or do you want to reach a global audience, are you primarily targeting men, women, or both, do you want to reach audiences of all ages? Each of these questions is important to understand before you can analyse your follower analytics on Instagram.

If your follower count is changing, but your follower demographics are also changing to align with your target audience then that’s great. On the flip side, if your follower count is going up, but your audience demographic is getting further from your target audience, this would be a time to reflect on the content you are sharing and how you can make changes to reach your desired market.

How Aperture Comms Can Help You Understand These Analytics

Instagram insights are a great starting point for businesses trying to understand the success of their social media strategy and the performance of the content they are sharing. However, these analytics have some minor limitations so utilising a secondary platform and/or social media agency to delve into the “nitty gritty” is a great strategy.

We use secondary scheduling platforms and analytical insights to delve deeper into the performance of your Instagram posts, carousels, REELs, and stories. These insights allow us to understand each element we have outlined above and see how well you are performing on Instagram. Not only do we help you understand your business performance, but we can also take things one step further and create a tailor-made strategy to help keep these figures increasing and keep your content engaging with new and existing audiences.

Increasing Your Following, Engagement, And Reach in 2024

So, now you understand what has worked and why it’s worked, we have outlined a few tips to get you started with increasing your interactions and engagement on Instagram.

If you are looking for guidance on how to understand your Instagram insights and create a plan for a 2024 filled with social media success, let our team of experts help you. Get in touch today.