Let’s talk about Instagram analytics. Working for an eCommerce brand, you’re well aware of the importance of social media. You, along with 25 million other businesses, have your Instagram account set-up and ready to go to market to the 800 million active users who are out there, hungry for content.

But, as you quickly learn, there’s more to Instagram than just posting pictures. The second you begin strategizing, you’re hit with a wave of considerations to make. Posting rate, captions, filters, hashtags, and more. How can you be sure that you’re reaching the right audience? And how do you really know if your content is working?

“What gets measured, gets managed.” – Peter Drucker

Instagram, just like any other marketing channel, needs analytics to make sense. Marketing on Instagram without analyzing the data would be like writing a book with only half of the words. Readers are destined to spend their time maniacally flipping through pages looking for a cohesive narrative. And that just doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Instead, use your brand’s Instagram analytics right. Don’t waste your time staring at your data, hoping it turns into actionable strategy. Make it happen for yourself!

If you’re using Instagram as a marketing channel, then make sure you’re taking full advantage of Instagram analytics and everything you gain from tracking your data. In this blog post, we’ll go through what you should be measuring, then we’ll delve into these best Instagram analytics tools that will help you achieve your goals:

Instagram Insights: Built-in Instagram Analytics that are perfect for businesses Iconosquare: Robust Instagram analytics platform Sprout Social: Advanced Instagram analytics Later: Marketing Platform for Instagram Traacker: Influnecer Marketing Platform Photoslurp: User Generated Content Platform with advanced performance analytics

Let’s get started with the different data you should keep track of when it comes to marketing your products on Instagram.

When it comes to Instagram analytics, what do I need to measure?

While Instagram may feel straightforward, there’s a lot of groundwork that brands leverage in order to perform better on the platform. All of this is achieved by using Instagram analytics to measure the brand’s personal performance. If you hope to compete with other brands on Instagram, then you to have to keep up on your Instagram analytics.

To make it easy for you, here’s a complete list of all of the metrics to get a handle on every month. With this, you can continue to adapt your Instagram strategy around your insights…

Demographics: You can’t give the people what they want if you don’t know who those people are!

Follower Evolution: Going hand-in-hand with demographics, follower evolutions enables you to see how your follower base has changed over time. That way you can continue to follow the trends of your followership.

Engagement rate: This is debatably the most important part of Instagram analytics, as it helps you understand how well your content is performing.

Reach: See how far your content goes with this powerful Instagram analytics metric.

Impression History: See how many eyes you get on your content every time.

Hashtag use/Brand tags and mentions: Is your audience inspired to interact with your brand on their own accord?

Now that you know which metrics to track, let’s take a deep dive into how you can track them with an Instagram analytics tool! Starting with demographics and follower evolution.

Tracking demographics and follower evolution with Instagram analytics

Firs things first, you have to understand your audience in order to provide them with the most interesting content. Use Instagram analytics to learn everything you can about the people who follow your brand so you can find more of those people and market to them!

Instagram Insights, the built-in analytics that come with an Instagram for business account, is great for learning about the demography of your follower base.

Even basic information like age ranges, locations, and gender can help you to develop a more interesting and specific strategy for the kind of people that are interested in your brand. All of this will become the basis of improving brand engagement rates, which is one of the most important parts of your Instagram presence to analyze.

Take it to the next level with Follower Evolution. This is an advanced Instagram analytics metric that platforms like Iconosquare can provide you. By keeping track of the historic data about your follower base, you can also have a more complete picture of how your brand has evolved.

This kind of information can be useful when it comes to decisions about what languages to include in your marketing and which cultures your brand content will speak to.

Once you know who is into your content, it’s time to see how they’re interacting with your brand by tracking engagement rate.

Looking to increase engagement in your eCommerce store? Request a demo of the Photoslurp platform to learn how you can fuse your Instagram strategy with your online store in order to increase revenue.

How Instagram analytics can help you track brand engagement rates

There’s a reason why brands are so obsessed with engagement. Engagement rates tell you if people are interested in your products, image, message, and, ultimately, your brand as a whole. If they aren’t liking or commenting, then they are not as interested as they could be. So this is something that you absolutely need to track!

What content catches their eye? When are they most likely to ask you a question in the comments or even tag their friends? If you don’t know which activations are stirring interest, you can’t recreate them. So get a tool that helps you to understand your content and how well it’s performing. Then, create content that you know your followers want to engage with.

To measure engagement rate, it’s useful to look at a few different metrics…

Likes

Comments

Clicks

Brand Tags/Mentions

You can definitely keep track of all of these metrics on your own, but working with an Instagram analytics tool helps to provide you the information in a more comprehensive way. Plus, it means that you’re not going back and counting each metric manually. With a tool like Sprout Social, you can have all of this information in one place, giving you a big picture of your Instagram analytics.

From there, it’s about reading between the numbers and drawing the lines between what worked and what did not! Speaking of, let’s review a few ways to put your best foot forward on Instagram to help increase your engagement rate.

Define your brand’s style – then be consistent

Most brands have a distinct image, a consistent recognizable style. And, of course, the Instagram account of your brand should reflect this style. Brands should look to define their personal identity on Instagram and stick to it. This can be achieved with the use of colour themes, image filtering, image context. It could be minimal, colourful, monotone, black and white, natural, still life, etc.

The point is that your brand should not project the random look of a personal account where someone documents their life. This doesn’t mean impersonal, but it does mean consistent and considered.

BUT that doesn’t meant that the style can’t change. In fact, it should! Your audience wants to see the brand evolve, otherwise what’s the point in scrolling all the way down to the bottom of your feed. Give them something new that also follows the personality of your brand. Keep them on their toes, but don’t stray too far from what you do!

Be active because the conversation works both ways

This point brings us back to the ‘social’ component of social media. The ongoing conversation with your audience should work both ways. Where possible, the brand should be an active part of conversations by encouraging positive comments and replying to questions quickly. And when your audience sees that comments are acknowledged by the brand, they are more likely to engage in conversations themselves.

Plus, they’re more likely to @ your brand if they think you’re actually going to respond.

What’s more, the evidence that we have suggests that Instagram’s algorithm is designed to encourage this type of positive interaction. So, the more active you are, the more likely you are to appear higher on people’s Instagram feed. It’s a win-win for being socially active and taking part in the conversation.

To get a better understanding of how the Instagram algorithm works, this audio is worth a listen.

Posting regularly

It can be tricky to know exactly how much to post as there is no defined best practice. However, our data does indicate that it doesn’t negatively affect your reach to post frequently throughout the day (up to 5 times is a good cut-off). It’s all about finding a formula that works for your brand and sticking to it (you can use an Instagram analytics tool like Later for that).

But remember, when all is said and done, only post if you have something worth posting. There is no value in posting junk content, so get organised. To be truly professional in this space, it’s important to build a library of quality content that is suitable for your account. Then you can choose to post it exactly when you want.

Host a contest

Hosting a contest on Instagram might just be the most effective way of gaining the most followers in the shortest time possible. If humans ever need an excuse to do something, a bit of healthy competition never hurt! So if you want a whole array of people posting on your hashtag or following your brand, try starting a competition. This will drive the creation of high quality content, and really engage your audience. Of course, running the best possible competitions with real long term benefits for your brand requires careful planning, so here is a helpful guide we wrote to get you well on your way!

Golden rule – don’t use bots!

There are a ton of services offering bot systems that claim to increase your followership and engagement, without any effort on your part. However employing this lazy approach is not wise.

Many bots designed to increase your followership will do so by automatically following, and unfollowing specific types of accounts. The problem here is that the type of followers you gain from this strategy tend to be largely disinterested in your account, and as such not engaged with your content. As a result, they in fact lower your engagement rate by increasing your follower count with users who are not engaging with your content.

Plus, Instagram is constantly updating its algorithm, improving its ability to detect the activity of bots. And there could be consequences. So, it’s simple, don’t do it.

If you follow these rules, you will be well on your way to cultivating a profile that can garner much more engagement. And as you track your Instagram analytics, you’ll be thrilled to see your number of likes, comments, and tags going up!

But now it’s time to look at a few metrics that walk hand-in-hand with engagement…impressions and reach.

Using Instagram analytics to understand impressions and reach

So we’ve talked about Instagram engagement, but what about impressions and reach? And, more importantly, what is the difference between the three?

Here is a quick break down so you can clearly understand the difference…

Impressions – The total number of times all your posts have been seen.

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

– The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts Engagement – The total number of likes, comments, and clicks your posts have gotten. As well as brand tags/mentions.

Each of these metrics plays an important part in building a winning Instagram strategy. But it’s basically a science! One that takes careful tracking and measuring to see what needs to be improved.

Luckily, tracking impressions and reach is super easy directly within the Instagram app with Instagram for Business.

A lot of the information that you’re looking for can be found there – that is if you have an Instagram for business account. If you don’t have one yet, grab your phone immediately and make the switch. This is only an advantage to your brand. Especially when it comes to the amazing Instagram analytics that come along with it!

These in-platform Instagram analytics kill it when it comes to demographical information, as we mentioned before. But it’s also where you can see your impressions and reach – for Instagram Stories too! For more historical data for metrics like impressions, it’s best to use an in-depth tool like Iconosquare for tracking information.

Whatever you decide to do, keep in mind that these Instagram analytics are the keys to understanding how well you’re doing on the platform. Don’t get lazy – keep track of them!

Let’s take a look at the final metric that it’s important to keep in mind to understand your performance on Instagram.

Why Hashtag Use/Brand Tags and Mentions are important to your Instagram analytics

While your customer base may be liking and commenting on your content, you hit the next level when your audience is excited enough about your brand to interact on their own accord. And that’s where metrics like Hashtag Use and Brand Tags/Mentions really show you how well you’re performing.

The points to keep in mind are…

How many people post with your hashtag

If people like the posts that are tagged with your hashtag

When people are tagging or mentioning your brand in their own posts

When a user takes a picture or a video and then tags, mentions your brand, or includes your brand hashtag, you now have authentic User Generated Content that you can use to improve your entire online presence. This is gold and should absolutely be tracked in order to understand what gets your audience posting about your brand, so that you can replicate it.

Once you do have content created by customers featuring your brand, you can actually use this content to increase your online sales. This is the beauty of a User Generated Content strategy. With a platform, like Photoslurp, you can collect this content, manage it based on your brand image, and then integrate into various points along the online buying journey. Brands across industries have seen on average a 15% increase of eCommerce conversion rates thanks to this strategy.

And that’s why it’s so important to keep track of your Instagram analytics. So that you can understand, in a real and data-backed manner, how excited people are about your brand.

We just have one more topic that we’d like to explore, which is how the quality of your users can help improve your performance. This is also something that can – you guessed it – be tracked with Instagram analytics.

How to track user quality

Though this aspect of your performance can no longer be tracked in the same way as before the deprecation of the Instagram API back in April 2018 (RIP), this is still an important consideration. Attracting customers who can help you reach more people with their large and actively engaged followerships is a worthwhile venture. It’s also known as influencer marketing.

First of all, we need to explain what we mean by ‘quality’ in the context of Instagram Users. Whenever we look at an Instagram account we are given a whole array of information and, when organised properly, this information can be used to infer the ‘quality’ of the user. In other words, we want to know what their overall level of likability and influence is over their audience. Then by associating with your brand, do these users have a positive effect on your overall image. If the answer is yes, that’s great! And of course, the more high quality users you have posting for your brand the better.

In short, a high quality user will have very positive follower/followee ratio, and a comparatively high engagement rate. Plus, in the interest of your brand, they will post frequently using your hashtag or mentioning the brand, making them a type of evangelist.

As a rule, if you have lots of engaged users posting for you, then you’re doing something right. If you have lots of inactive, disengaged users, then perhaps you have some work to do.

To have low quality users posting your brand’s hashtag is not overtly detrimental. However, they do not provide much added value through your association with them. By contrast high quality users can reflect well on your brand, and actively improve your brand’s image and boost growth. Therefore, you want to employ a strategy that actively encourages high quality users to engage with your brand on Instagram.

The most important points to keep in mind when finding high-quality users, or influencers, to work with are…

Number of followers

The influencer’s engagement rates

Whether their audience is right for your brand

But you don’t have to go stabbing in the dark trying to find random accounts to work with. Nor do you have to be on your own trying to figure out if their partnership is right for you!

Luckily, there are amazing Instagram analytics tools like Traacker that will not only help you discover influencers – but also track their performance and your collaboration with them.

And remember, once you do have high-quality users posting for your brand, this content doesn’t just have to live on social media. You can work with a User Generated Content platform to leverage this content within your eCommerce store. Learn more here!

Are you ready to track your own Instagram analytics?

There you have it – that’s all of the information you need to successfully track your Instagram analytics! I hope you see the benefit of measuring your performance and how much it can help your brand.

And just to recap, here are the tools that can help you do it…

Iconosquare: Robust Instagram analytics platform

Sprout Social: Advanced Instagram analytics

Later: Marketing Platform for Instagram

Traacker: Influnecer Marketing Platform

Photoslurp: User Generated Content Platform with advanced performance analytics

We can’t stress enough how much analyzing can help you reach your potential. Especially in a crowded social space that’s constantly changing. Without analyzing, you may not realize your followers are no longer interested in something they were dying for before. And don’t you want to be the brand that’s always keeping up with the latest trends?

Looking for more Instagram tips? Head to our complete guide to Instagram Marketing, where you’ll find everything you need to know about promoting your products on this crucial platform.