9 minute read time

6 Important Instagram Metrics for Your Brand (with Tips to Track Them)

Krishna Bora - Dec 7, 2018

If you promote your brand on Instagram, the only way to grow your audience and become more influential is through tracking the right metrics. You don’t want to put your blood, sweat, and tears into an Instagram marketing strategy without knowing how successful you are and in what ways you can make it better.

Numbers prove whether of not your strategies are actually making a difference to your brand. It may sound overwhelming to go through all the numbers and graphs, and most likely, you hate doing it. To feel more prepared to deal with the data, you need to figure out which metrics to focus on.

Here’s a breakdown of all the important Instagram metrics that you need to monitor. Based on this guide, you can decide which ones you should assign more importance and which ones you can let go for now.

Instagram facts

Before we dive in, here are some cool facts about Instagram you need to see:

1. There are around 16.6 million Google searches for Instagram every month.
2. June 2018 – Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users who grew from 800 million in September 2017.
3. There are around 4.2 billion likes on Instagram every day.
4. On average, Instagram users upload around 95 million photos every day.
5. Video posts get 38% higher engagement rate than image posts.
6. Video posts have the highest overall engagement rate. (38% higher than image posts).
7. Instagram Stories is used b around 400 million users every day.
8. 72% of Instagram users have purchased a product they saw on the app.
9. When it comes to social media marketing, data is the only benchmark to show how fruitful your marketing efforts have been.

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The 6 Instagram metrics that matter the most

1. Impressions

Impressions refer to the number of people who saw your post. It also includes the posts which didn’t receive likes or comments. Looking at the data, you can analyze how well you’re promoting your content on Instagram.

Using hashtags ensures your content reaches a wide audience, improving your impression score. Pay close attention to each of your posts to know which trends help promote your content to your audience.

Here’s a great example from Greenpeace for you:

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You will find your reach and impression rate on the Activity tab that essentially shows how many people have interacted with your content. Remember that this section of insights shows data only from past 7 days.

2. Engagement rate

Be it an individual post or your entire account, likes, comments, shares, and saves are the integrations that determine your engagement rate. Looking at engagement on individual posts should give you an idea about the content your followers like and how to improve your marketing strategy to produce more of your most engaging content.

Comments are one of the most important integrations during the initial phases of growing your Instagram account. Take hints from the kind of comments your posts receive and reply to them.

It’s one of the best ways to build a relationship with your followers and grow the engagement rate on your account.

Here are the industry standard guidelines for engagement rates of an account:

1. Less than 1% = engagement rate is low
2. Between 1% and 3.5% = average or good engagement rate
3. Between 3.5% and 6% = engagement rate is high
4. Above 6% = engagement rate is very high

Once you calculate your engagement rate, you can check how well your account is performing and which types of content will help you get better results.

Engagement rate is an important metric in influencer marketing. This metric helps in evaluating which influencer can reach a large number of the target audience, and helps you predict engagement on your sponsored content on their account.

Here are some benchmarks to find the best influencer for your account:

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3. Trending or branded hashtags

It’s no secret that hashtags rule on Instagram. Posts with at least one hashtag gain around 12.6% more engagement than ones without them. They work similarly to keywords for search engine optimization.

You should make a list of all the hashtags that get the most engagement to post more relevant posts as much as possible. The hashtags with most followers bring more engagement to your account. Once you’ve found them and start posting content with them, your posts will reach more people, and you’ll see a better impression and engagement rate.

Coming up with your own hashtag is a great idea to encourage user-generated content. You don’t need any tool to track results. Instead, you can simply look for your own hashtag and see how many posts pop-up. You can also repost them on your account to drive awareness to your hashtag and improve your fans’ loyalty to your page.

After all, who wouldn’t like realizing that one of their favorite companies likes them, too?

Here’s an excellent example of a simple, yet quirky branded hashtag by Levi’s:

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4. Click-throughs from your bio link

The link in your biography—aka the bio link—is the only clickable spot on Instagram, and tapping into its potential can give your brand a significant boost. It can take your followers to any desired page with a single click.

This is a great place to get leads as well as encourage people to visit your website or a landing page. Marketers should keep an eye on the number of people who actually click the bio link and learn if your followers are interested in what products or services you’re offering them.

For brands who want to make the most of their Instagram business profile, there are other links they can add, too. However, these may not be customizable.

For example, you can take followers to a sign-up form or add links to call or email your brand directly. You can also link to a particular page on your website, a discount page, your blog, etc.

Here’s an example for National Geographic’s Instagram page:

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A link can also take your followers to a video about your brand. There are several simple video creation tools online which can help you make highly engaging social media videos for your brand. Bring your Instagram followers to a variety of brand videos and keep them engaged.

5. Follower growth

In simple terms, follower rate gives you an idea of whether or not your content is reaching new people and catching their attention. However, though it may add brand credibility, having a lot of followers doesn’t shed much light on the health of your marketing campaigns.

What’s more important in determining your Instagram performance is the way your follower count changes over time. Calculating your follower growth is simple. Take the number of new followers from the beginning of the month, and divide it by the number of followers you had at the start of the month.

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For example, if you started with 100 followers, and you get 50 new followers in a month, your growth rate is 10% – which is excellent. But if you started with 1000 followers, and gained only 10 new followers in a month, your growth rate is 1%. This indicates that you need to revamp your Instagram marketing plan.

6. Instagram story engagement

Instagram stories can either be videos or photos, but they appear only for 24 hours. With simple video making tools, more brands have started to include stories as a part of their social media marketing strategy.

Since they last for just 24 hours, it’s difficult to track engagement on your stories. However, by combining a few data points and doing some math, you can get a decent idea on how your stories are performing.

Here are ways you can track how successful your Instagram stories are:

• Unique views: This tells you how many people saw your story. If you’ve uploaded multiple stories, you can still see how many views each story has received.
• Completion rate: This data shows how many people view your full story. Again, this is something that you’ll have to calculate on your own. You need to divide the number of people who saw your last story by the number of people who saw your first and multiply it by 100.
• Direct messages to your story: This data shows the number of people who sent your brand a direct message from the story. This provides you the with the closest numbers on engagement metric since users can’t like or share any of them. Divide the number of DMs from your story by the number of views to get a make-do engagement rate.

Also, remember that you won’t have any historical data on your stories, so it’s important to track your performance over time. You will have to record your data to keep a track of engagement manually.

Wrap up

Instagram is a great way to expand your reach and get your customers to interact directly with your brand. Consumers these days seek authentic connections with brands and appreciate seeing the human side behind companies.

Social media and Instagram specifically are great channels to accomplish these goals, but only if you know how to measure your success.

Next time you go to analyze how successful your Instagram account is performing, keep these tips in mind:

1. Promote your posts with hashtags to ensure that they are reaching to a wide audience.
2. The link in your bio provides an opportunity for marketers to drive leads directly to specific pages on their websites.
3. Keep an eye on your engagement rates to determine what kind of content your followers interact with most, and then create more of it.
4. The way your follower count shifts over time can tell you how successful your Instagram marketing is as a whole.
5. Measuring results from your Instagram stories is tricky, but doable. You just need to keep an eye on the engagement received on them before the story disappears.

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll get a much clearer picture on how successful your Instagram marketing is and what you need to do to improve it.

After all, being able to reach your audience where they are matter in today’s marketing landscape. But you have to know how to measure your success if you want to improve your efforts and see a noteworthy ROI.