7 Essential Instagram Metrics to Measure Instagram Campaign Performance
Setting up great social media marketing campaigns is definitely one of the most important aspects of your online promotion. But how can you be sure if it is actually working or not? This is where the social media data insights come into the picture.
If you don’t keep a tab on your social media campaigns’ performance, you will never be able to gauge the effectiveness of those in terms of goal achievement. This includes all the major social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
In this blog post, we are going to talk about seven essential Instagram metrics that will surely let you keep track of the growth of your Instagram campaigns. But this is not so easy, and it can be somewhat tricky to decide where to start.
This is where this post will come to your aid. Here, we have not only listed the Instagram metrics for you but also discussed why exactly you need to focus on choosing them!
There’s a lot of important info coming your way as you scroll down. So, just take a sip of your coffee, and let’s get started!
So Why Do You Need to Track Your Instagram Metrics?
Before you start digging right through the Instagram metrics, it’s imperative to know why you need to delve into them.
To put it simply, if you look at your Instagram account analytics, you will be able to understand the results of your efforts, whether they are going in the right direction or not!
Now, obviously, these efforts are very much likely to coincide with your company’s marketing goals, or you can simply monitor them as per your Instagram KPIs. Having the whole set of metrics right in place will make the entire Instagram marketing process much more streamlined and profitable.
But which are the ones you can use?
Now, let’s look at the Instagram marketing metrics you can use to measure your campaigns!
Measure Your Instagram Campaigns with these 7 Crucial Metrics
Most of the blogs found on the internet about Instagram marketing metrics mainly focus on various forms of engagement. But here in this post, we have tried to cover a variety.
But fret not; there are some key metrics we have handpicked, which will allow you to meter the Instagram engagement level as well. I know you are looking forward to those only. But bear with me on this; your time will not be wasted.
So let’s take a look at them:
Follower Growth Rate
The first Instagram metric on the list is the Instagram follower growth rate. Just like the name suggests, this metric will help you quantify the rate at which your Instagram followers are increasing.
Now, nobody would deny that a high Instagram follower count would definitely boost branding and add credibility to your company. However, it cannot reveal much about the current state of your Instagram marketing campaigns in reality.
This is where the Instagram follower growth rate metric can help you. It can give you a decent idea about whether your business is expanding its previous Instagram reach and catching a new audience base or not.
To put it simply, the speed at which your Instagram follower count inflates will prove to be much more significant than the actual number of followers you have. This could be the deciding factor while evaluating the performance of your campaigns.
Let’s look at an example to understand it better. Suppose you have 50 new followers in a month. Now, if you had started with 500 followers, that would give you a monthly growth rate of 10%, which is quite excellent. But if you had started with 5000 followers, then the growth rate will be only 1%. This means that your Instagram campaigns are quite stagnant, and you should dig into some new strategies.
Engagement Per Follower
Believe it or not, but almost 70% of Instagram posts never get seen. Now, even if you have all the followers in the world, your business won’t go anywhere if most of your posts aren’t seen and fails to create an engagement.
Instagram constantly updates their algorithms, and thus engagement is more important than ever to ensure that your posts are seen and creates more engagement as a ripple effect.
When you track Instagram engagement per follower, it lets you monitor the degree of interest your audience is showing towards your brand. This is a very important metric if you wish to evaluate the partnership with a social media influencer on Instagram. You can also consider the possibility of whether you want to continue the partnership or not. Now, who would like to pay for a sponsored post on an Instagram account with no so-called engagement?
Much like the follower count and growth rate, here also, you should not just look at the raw numbers. Instead, it’s very much important to compare the number of likes and comments based on the size of the audience you already have.
You can look into the Instagram engagement metrics on a monthly or weekly basis, but it’s better not to go for a daily basis engagement analysis. This is because day-to-day fluctuations will not give you an accurate picture.
Just look at the total number of likes and comments you are getting during a specific period of time. You can then divide that number by the total number of followers you had at that point in time.
Suppose, if you had 84 likes and comments last week and you had 600 followers, then very easily you can get the engagement rate of 14% for the week. Now to make the entire thing a bit easier, you can use some tools as well. I mean, counting the likes and comments of every Instagram post can be a bit tedious task at times.
Website Traffic
Much like most other social media channels, Instagram can be equally powerful to drive traffic towards your website. After all, that’s what you are aiming for, isn’t it?
This is exactly why you need to consider Instagram campaigns and their analysis very much seriously.
Now, there are a few limitations of this platform – like, it cannot drive much traffic like others as you can’t add clickable links to each Instagram post. You can only add the link in your bio. But since you can add links to the stories as a verified user, it allows you to drive a substantial amount of traffic towards your site via Instagram.
The best thing is that you can track the source of all this traffic directly in Google Analytics. You can find it in the Analytics segment, where the source of traffic is grouped into the channels. Here, you will even uncover the traffic from the Instagram stories separately! Plus, it allows you to track “Goals” as well, where you can see the Instagram traffic and accurately measure the ROI of your Instagram campaigns!
Link Clicks
Knowing how much traffic your Instagram campaigns pull is fairly easy, but how can you discover which are the Instagram stories and updates that were clicked?
Fortunately, you can take your Instagram analytics to the next level just by creating URLs with Google’s Campaign URL Builder tool and UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor) parameters. This will tell your Google Analytics platform where exactly a particular visitor came to your website from. These UTM parameters are nothing but informational tags that you append to your normal webpage URL.
Now, one might find the UTM URLs to be a bit unwieldy to type out manually – luckily, you can get a plethora of tools that can help you generate these URLs. Like for example, you can look into Google’s Campaign URL Builder, a free and quite popular tool that effortlessly serves the purpose.
Plus, if you find the UTM URLs a bit clunky, you can shorten the finished URL using bit.ly or any similar tool.
But what if you want to take it to the next level? Then you can take your reports a step further and impress your clients while demonstrating the results from Instagram. You can also incorporate other tools in this equation like Google Analytics and AgencyAnalytics that include goal completion and goal value KPIs. Needless to say, these reports will help you measure how much traffic from various social media channels like Instagram sends off to your or clients’ websites.
Comments Per Post
We all love likes on our Instagram posts, but everyone knows comments are worth much more!
When it only takes a second to tap that red “heart” Instagram-like button, if you want to type out a comment, then it indeed requires a bit more time and involvement! So, the moment someone leaves a comment on your Instagram posts, it is indeed a solid proof that you or your brand has really caught their interest and definitely managed to connect them in one way or the other.
Ergo, the number of comments you receive definitely proves to be a valuable Instagram metric, which must be monitored meticulously. So, just make sure to keep your eyes open and track the average amount of comments, whether it goes up or down. For example, if your average number of comments goes down, you can try and figure out how to overhaul the engagement level. Numbers going down prove that there is a lack of engagement on your Instagram posts and campaigns.
After all, data never lies!
Apart from that, you can also keep a tab on the Instagram posts that generate the most amount of attention, i.e., the most number of likes, shares, and comments. This will help you acquire brilliant ideas and develop similar content types to keep the engagement level high consistently.
Instagram Stories Engagement
Instagram Stories are great ways to improve your engagement. You can either use videos or photos that will add some uniqueness compared to the regularly posted Instagram content. These Stories need to be strikingly impressive and captivating since they will automatically disappear after the 24-hour duration. However, this disappearing feature makes Instagram Stories a little bit challenging to track and measure the engagement.
But how to do it then?
One approach could be to track the metric with Instagram’s own native analytical tool – these are called Insights. All you need to keep in mind is that you’ll need an Instagram business account to access this set of tools.
When it comes to creating Instagram Stories, there are two things that you need to bear in mind. You should pay attention to the views and exits!
But what are they exactly?
The views part tells you how many unique viewers have seen your Instagram Story. Usually, the longer time you have spent on Instagram, the more followers you should get, and automatically, the Story views increase accordingly.
After all, that’s the plan here, right?
The next part is the exit part, which tells you the slides from which people exited. Reviewing the exits is a great way to check what interests your audience and what not! If you find one particular slide where a lot of people have exited from, you must rethink the post and use that experience before posting the next Instagram Story.
Helpful! Isn’t it?
Reach
This is also a very significant Instagram metric, but it requires you to own a business account. If you have, then you can review Reach within your Instagram Insights.
To put it simply, this Instagram metric tells you the total number of people who have seen your posts. Pay attention because this is different from impressions. For example, if the same person sees your post three times, the impression count will be 3. However, the person will be counted as only 1 in terms of Reach. This is what makes this metric so important for your business. With this, you can get the real figure as to how many people have actually seen your Instagram posts.
One of the ways to increase the Reach could be to use powerful yet relevant hashtags. But you need to be careful while using them and, of course, you need to use them correctly.
Apart from monitoring the Reach, you should also track the Reach Rate. This is nothing but the percentage of your Instagram followers who are seeing your posts. You can quite easily calculate it by dividing the total Reach of the post by the total number of followers.
Final Takeaway
I believe, after reading this post, you will also agree that there is no second thought that Instagram could be a fantastic channel to promote your brand and products or services. Besides being effective, it’s fun, gives you a creative outlet, and allows you to connect with your audience in a very interactive manner.
But you need to always keep in mind that your Instagram marketing strategy should be a fine mixture of entertainment and profitability. By keeping track of these 7 essential Instagram metrics, you can surely keep a tab on your growth seamlessly.
Keep focusing on these metrics, and you’ll get a clearer picture of how your current Instagram strategy is performing. Plus, you can develop a ton of exciting new ideas from the valuable data, which will never let your Instagram campaigns become stagnant.
Remember, being dynamic is the key here!
So what are your thoughts on this? Do you often keep track of your Instagram performance using these powerful Instagram metrics? Let us know your views in the comments section below and keep the discussion going on!
Till then, happy Instagramming!
