How to check the impact that your content and campaigns have on your audience? Which Instagram metrics should you focus on while measuring your performance? Let’s find out.

Here are the top Instagram metrics that are worth tracking, and you can easily check them with Sotrender.

Introduction to Instagram Analytics

Instagram analytics is an essential resource for anyone looking to maximize their impact on the platform, whether you’re a brand, influencer, or individual creator. With Instagram Insights, you gain access to a wealth of data about your audience demographics, content performance, and engagement rate. These insights allow you to track key metrics such as follower count, reach, and interactions, helping you understand how your Instagram content resonates with your target audience. By regularly reviewing and analyzing this data, you can optimize your strategy, identify what’s working, and make informed decisions to boost your performance on Instagram. Ultimately, leveraging Instagram analytics empowers you to grow a more engaged and loyal audience, ensuring your efforts on the platform are both effective and measurable.

Setting Up Instagram Account Insights

To unlock the full potential of Instagram analytics, you’ll need to set up Instagram Insights by converting your profile to a business or creator account. This process is simple and can be completed directly in the Instagram app. Once your account is set up, you can access Insights by tapping the “Professional dashboard” on your profile or through the menu in the top right corner. Instagram Insights provides a user-friendly dashboard where you can view key metrics and dive deeper into your account’s performance. You can select preset or custom timeframes to track your progress and spot trends over days, weeks, or months. Thanks to the official Instagram API, the data you see is accurate and up-to-date, giving you a reliable foundation for making strategic decisions and optimizing your Instagram presence.

Best Metrics for Instagram Analytics

Here are the top Instagram metrics that are worth tracking, and you can easily check them with Sotrender.

1. Number of Followers

Total followers is a straightforward metric that you should be tracking when you check Instagram analytics. As the name suggests, this metric shows you the current total followers that you have on Instagram.

Your goal here is to observe the chart to figure out if there’s growth, decline, or stagnation in the total followers of your Instagram account.

Based on the insights from this metric, you can understand if your content is having a positive impact on your audience or not.

For instance, if the chart is a flat line that indicates that the brand isn’t doing enough to grow its following.

Measuring the number of followers in Sotrender

2. Follower Growth Rate

While you may have observed growth or decline in your number of followers, it’s also essential to understand how quickly they’re growing or reducing.

This is yet another point where Instagram analytics can help you. All you have to do is look for the “Follower growth rate” metric.

Analyzing the total growth rate in Sotrender

It indicates the percentage growth or decline in your number of followers and gives you an idea of the impact of individual posts that you’ve published on the platform. Comparing your follower count to the previous month is important for assessing growth trends and understanding whether your strategies are effective over time.

For instance, a controversial post might end up having a significant impact on your follower growth rate. It gives great social media feedback into your audience’s perception of the content you created.

3. Reach

Reach is yet another important metric that you need to measure when you’re going about Instagram analytics. It helps you determine how many people you’ve managed to reach by publishing your content on Instagram.

The greater the reach, the more people you’ve managed to reach through your content. A great way of boosting your reach on Instagram is through videos. They are typically shared twice as much as other content.

You can use Premiere Pro presets to quickly edit your videos and upload them to Instagram for the best results.

The goal here should be to grow your reach as much as possible to give a boost to your brand awareness. This, in turn, can also help you attract new followers as some people who see your content might be interested in seeing it regularly.

4. User Activities

Getting a huge reach isn’t enough to grow your business through Instagram. In fact, what matters even more than the reach is the actions that your audience takes after seeing your content.

This essentially accounts for the engagement that your content on Instagram generates from users, and you can identify this figure by checking your engagement rate or learning more about the number of engagements.

However, while engagement is important, what’s even more important is the form of engagement generated.

The engagement could be in the form of likes, shares, comments, replies, and even saves. Each activity here has a different value altogether. For instance, comments, replies, and shares are of great importance as they indicate a greater interest in the content than a simple like.

Analyzing user activities in Sotrender

This helps you understand how effective each post was for your business. Additionally, you can map out the user activities to different days to figure out the best day to publish your content.

What’s more?

You can see which form of user activity dominates all the user engagement for your Instagram account. This insight can help you determine if you need to change your current approach to Instagram marketing.

Sotrender also shows the content type that generated the best user activities so that you can decide on your content calendar based on it.

5. Profile Views/Clicks

The next important metric that you need to track is the analytics and performance of your Instagram business profiles, including profile views and clicks.

You need people – your prospective clients – to see your Instagram profile. If you get them there, they’re likely to make the next steps like becoming a follower, heading to your website, contacting you, etc.

It’s due to this reason that you need to track the daily profile views. This gives you an idea of the number of people visiting your profile to check it out.

But this metric only does half the job.

Getting people to visit your profile doesn’t mean that they’ll take action there. That’s why it’s crucial to also look at the profile clicks metric.

This metric helps you understand what actions your profile visitors are taking. These include website clicks, phone clicks, directions clicks, text message clicks, and email clicks.

As a result, you’ll know if your content and profile are driving your lead generation efforts.

Analyzing Instagram profile link clicks in Sotrender

6. Activity Index

The Activity Index gives you a brief look into the level of engagement that your audience has with your brand and its content on Instagram. It’s a weighted average of the user activities on your profile and helps you figure out if the overall engagement with your brand is increasing or decreasing. By using the Activity Index, you can manage your Instagram account’s engagement more effectively, ensuring you stay on top of your social media goals.

Analyzing Activity Index in Sotrender

Mapping this to various days of the week can also help you identify those days where your user engagement is maximum. It’s those days that you should target for publishing new content to start gaining traction and more Instagram followers.

7. Impressions

Impressions is among other important Instagram metrics that you should track. It’s a brand awareness metric like reach but is slightly different from it.

While reach shows you the number of unique people who’ve seen your posts, Reels, or Stories, impressions is the total number of times the particular content asset was seen.

Analyzing impressions in Sotrender

A greater number of impressions doesn’t necessarily mean that more people are seeing your content. It could also be that a few of your followers or audience are seeing your content multiple times. For example, you can check how your followers react to live shopping links in your posts.

Additionally, with Sotrender, you can see the impressions that each type of your post generates. This further gives you an insight into what content performs the best among your audience.

Analyzing impressions by media type in Sotrender

8. Follower Demographics

Another crucial Instagram metric that you should measure while going through your Instagram analytics is follower demographics.

You may have loads of followers, and your follower growth rate might be good too, but it’s essential to understand if your follower demographics match those of your target audience or not.

This is where the follower demographics comes into play. It shows you various characteristics of your followers such as:

• Language
• Location
• Age
• Gender

Checking and analyzing follower demographics in Sotrender

It further groups the followers into individual categories based on these demographics to give you a holistic view of your current follower base on the platform. Analyzing the distribution of followers by countries and top cities helps you understand your international reach and where your audience is most concentrated. You can then match this with your target audience to understand if your follower base has similar demographics.

What’s more?

Even when you’re planning some strategic partnerships with other brands in your industry, follower demographics will come into the picture. Using them, you’ll be able to figure out if there’s an intersection between your audience and theirs. This, in turn, would help you decide whether it’s worth partnering with them or not.

9. Online Followers

How do you identify the right time to publish your posts or Stories on Instagram?

Well, one way of going about it is by seeing the time when the activity index is maximum based on historical trends.

The other way, however, is pretty straightforward.

It involves follower activity analytics. It’s possible to find out when your followers are online during the day and week. This is where the online followers metric comes into play. It gives you insight into the number of followers online on an hourly basis.

Tracking online followers on Instagram, Sotrender

Additionally, you can see this data for each day of the week. As a result, you’d be able to find the exact day and time in a particular week when most of your followers are going to be online.

Using this information, you can schedule your posts to be published during those hours for maximum engagement and reach.

10. CPC & CPM

Sotrender’s Instagram metrics aren’t restricted to organic metrics. You can even track metrics related to paid ads using this platform. One of the most important ones among them are, of course, CPC and CPM.

You’d like to keep the CPC and CPM as low as possible to ensure optimal budget utilization and get maximum reach and clicks. With Sotrender Ads, you can easily see the CPC and CPM for different ads against various parameters like age, gender, and platform.

Analyzing CPC in Sotrender Ads

11. Audience Share

The audience share shows you which segments of your audience you’ve managed to reach, and where. 

Measuring Audience Share in Sotrender Ads

This helps you figure out if your ad campaign was effective and well-targeted.

Additionally, you can also understand what changes need to be made to ensure that you’re reaching the audience you want to reach.

Hashtag Performance

Tracking hashtag performance is a vital part of Instagram analytics, as hashtags play a major role in expanding your content’s reach and connecting with your target audience. With Instagram Insights and dedicated hashtag analytics tools, you can see how many impressions, accounts reached, and engagements each hashtag generates. This data helps you pinpoint which hashtags are driving the most visibility and interaction for your posts. By analyzing metrics such as unique accounts reached, accounts engaged, and top locations, you can refine your hashtag strategy to better align with your audience’s interests and locations. Optimizing your hashtag usage not only increases your content’s discoverability but also attracts new followers and boosts overall engagement on your Instagram account.

Content Performance

Understanding content performance is key to building a successful Instagram strategy. Instagram Insights provides detailed analytics on how each post, story, and video performs, including metrics like impressions, reach, engagement rate, and accounts engaged. By reviewing this data, you can identify which types of content—whether photos, videos, or stories—generate the most interest and interaction from your audience. Monitoring these metrics allows you to adjust your content mix, experiment with new formats, and focus on what resonates best with your followers. Additionally, tracking engagement rate and accounts engaged helps you measure how effectively your content drives meaningful interactions, supporting both follower growth and deeper audience relationships.

Reports Generation in a Jiffy

Reports are essential for understanding the progress of your campaigns. Reporting is crucial for tracking Instagram metrics and campaign performance, helping you analyze follower growth, impressions, and overall effectiveness. They’re even more important if you’re an agency as you’d need to provide reports to your customers regularly.

However, the process of preparing reports can be quite time-consuming and intensive.

With Sotrender, it becomes simple.

You can quickly generate reports by selecting the sections you want in the report and the time period.

Once you’ve selected the parameters for the report, Sotrender creates one within minutes. And there you have it – an extensive ready-to-share report.

Sotrender also offers free trials with free reporting features, allowing you to experience its capabilities without any initial cost.

Data Analysis

Effective data analysis is the backbone of any successful Instagram marketing strategy. By regularly reviewing Instagram Insights and other analytics tools, you can track important metrics such as follower count, engagement rate, and reach over time. Analyzing demographic information—including age ranges, gender, and top locations—gives you a clearer picture of who your audience is and how to tailor your content to their preferences. Spotting trends and patterns in your data helps you identify what’s working, where there’s room for improvement, and how you compare to competitors in your industry. By using these insights to optimize your content and posting strategy, you can drive sustained growth, keep your Instagram presence active, and ensure your brand remains relevant and engaging on the platform.

Instagram Metrics Explained

Instagram is a great platform for building and growing your brand online. It helps you boost your awareness, drive lead generation, and grow your revenue.

However, to make the most out of your marketing efforts, it’s essential to leverage Instagram analytics well. By tracking various metrics, you’ll be better placed to make important marketing decisions for the platform. You can create an effective Instagram content strategy by analyzing these metrics and tailoring your posts to match your audience’s preferences.

These Instagram metrics include follower metrics, reach (including both followers and non followers), profile views and clicks, impressions, user activities, and more. Be sure to analyze individual Instagram post performance, such as likes, comments, and engagement rates, as well as the overall performance of content you have posted, including stories, feed posts, videos, and Instagram Live sessions. Social networks like Instagram regularly update their metrics and features, so staying informed helps you optimize your strategy. To access insights and analytics, simply tap the menu or insights icon in the Instagram app. Note key metrics and observations as you review your analytics to inform future strategy adjustments.

Use these stats together to design your Instagram marketing strategy and grow your clout on the platform. Finally, keep track of your analytics regularly and modify your strategy accordingly to get the best results on Instagram.

Tips for improving Instagram analytics tracking and reporting:

• Tap through all analytics sections to explore available data.
• Note important trends and changes after each campaign.
• Track reach among non followers to expand your audience.
• Regularly review Instagram Live and post engagement metrics.
• Stay updated on new features and metrics added by social networks.