Instagram Insights Explained: All You Need to Know

Instagram Insights Explained – That’s our today’s guide! Success on Instagram is just like success in business. You have to give people what they want. If you’re trying to grow on Insta, you’ve got to please your audience.

And how does one accomplish this? It’s not just about choosing the picture you find prettiest or randomly throwing posts out there and seeing what work. Those are rookie mistakes.

No, you need data and analytics on your side. The good news is that you don’t have to crunch any numbers. Instagram Insights does all the work for you. Insights is a tool that puts easy-to-understand info about your account right in your lap. You can quickly access figures about your content, followers, engagement, and more.

The best part—it’s available for anyone with a business IG account.

So how do you set it up?

What goodies will you find inside this cookie jar?

And, most importantly, how can it transform your account from a Ford to a Ferrari?

FYI: Instagram recently gave Insights a makeover. If you’ve used Insights before, there are some changes worth knowing about.

Here, you’ll find Instagram Insights explained. We’ll tell you every little nugget of info you need to know. Now let’s get started.

Instagram Insights Explained Setting Up Insights

This might be the first time you’re hearing about Insights. Don’t worry.

Your first step will be activating Insights on Instagram. It takes a few simple steps.

• First, open up your Instagram Profile and head on over to Settings and Account option. Make sure you have a Public account. In other words, the “Private account” option needs to be switched off.
• In Settings, under the Account tab, make your profile a business one. Tap on “Switch to business account” and follow the on-screen instructions.

• The biggest step here will be linking your account to a Facebook page. You can use an existing page of your own or create a new one at this stage. Oddly enough, the Facebook page doesn’t have to have any content or followers; it just has to exist.
• Before crossing the finish line, you’ll need to enter a few more bits of info. Once you think you’ve got it all, hit “Done” and get ready to make the most of your Business Profile with Instagram Insights. You’ll be able to access Insights directly from your profile page.

Creator Account

One sidenote—when activating a business account on IG, you’ll also see something called a creator account. What’s the difference?

In short, a creator account is for influencers who don’t have a business yet and are looking to grow their follower base. Creator accounts can:

• Get daily data on audience growth and other metrics (business accounts only get weekly data)
• View the Creator’s Studio to review all of your stats on one screen
• Sort DMs into Primary, General and Requests boxes
• Add a label under your display name to ID your niche or specialty

Business Account Insights

With business accounts, you can:

• Promote posts as ads
• Link your online store with your IG
• Customize your audience targeting
• Add a label under your display name to say what your business does

Dissecting Insights

Now that you’ve got Insights up and running, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the various kinds of info that are now at your fingertips.

Once you tap on Insights by selecting the menu on the upper-right corner of your profile, you’ll see three tabs in Overview:

• Accounts Reached
• Content Interactions
• Total Followers

What goodies can you find in each section?

Accounts Reached

Under Accounts Reached, there will be two types of Insights:

• Impressions
• Account Activity

Impressions will reveal the total number of actions that other people have taken on your profile in the last seven days. You’ll also see the number of people who’ve visited your profile, clicked on your website link, or clicked to Email or Call you via your profile.

A graph will illustrate which days of the week generate the most activity for you, and you’ll get an automatic comparison between the current week and last week.

Under these statistics, you may check your Top Posts. You’ll get data like the number of likes, comments, and visits and a post garners. But it’s more than just that. Insights will tell you things like how many users clicked Get Directions because of your post, or how many unique users saved your post. The list goes on and on. You can easily sort your posts according to any given metrics to see which perform the best or worst.

Content Interactions

Post Interactions refer to the number of unique accounts that have reacted to your content. Likes, Comments, Saves, and Shares. In this section, you may also analyze your Storis or IG TV Interactions.

Total Followers Insights

Our last tab in Insights is Audience. This is where you can really get a feel for who your followers are. We’re talking about deeper demographic info as well as the overall size of your audience.

Specifically, Insights dishes on the following:

• Gender: what percentage of your followers are men or women
• Age Range: you many followers you have in different age brackets
• Top Locations: the Cities or Countries that are giving you the most followers
• Followers: the days of the week or the times of the day that get you the most traffic

Promotions will clarify the performance of any paid ads you’ve put up. Just like with your other content, Insights will present the number of Profile Visits, the Reach, and the Impressions associated with a particular post. You’ll also see basic demographic info about the audience who viewed your post.

Instagram Post Insights

An additional handy aspect of Insights—Post Insights offer key data for individual posts. Select a specific post, and right underneath is you’ll see the number of likes, comments, external shares to Stories, and external saves that the post generated.

Swipe up on these Insights and you’ll see:

• Interactions: how many profile visits and website clicks the post has garnered
• Discovery: how many accounts the post has reached and how many follows it has produced

Another nifty metric is the post’s Impressions, or the total number of times the content has been seen. You’ll even learn how people found the post, seeing numbers for Home, Hashtags, and Profile.

Instagram Stories Insights

And speaking of Stories, you’ll see analyses like how many people exited a Story, how many replies a photo or video in a Story received, and the number of people who skipped a Story. Instagram Stories get their own analytics too. In a nutshell, you’ll see:

• Reach: the number of unique accounts that viewed each slide in a story
• Impressions: the total number of views for each individual story

Under Navigation, you’ll also notice:

• Back: how many times people tapped the left side of their screen to rewatch the previous story
• Forward: how many times people tapped the right side of their screen to skip to the next story in the queue
• Next Story: how many times people tapped to view another account’s story (and leave yours)
• Exit: how many times people swiped to get out of your story

Interactions, like shares, replies, and profile visits, along with a host of other metrics can be observed under Story Insights.

Taking Off with Insights

Now that we’ve got all of these Instagram Insights explained, we’ve arrived at the most critical step. Insights give you a wealth of data about your account, but it’s up to you to decide what to do with this treasure trove.

Take a moment and ask yourself: “What are these numbers telling me?” They may seem a tad complicated a first, but there’s really not that much magic to them.

For instance, looking in the Activity tab will show you which day in the past week gave you the most responses. Find out why one particular day stood out from the others. Did you make more posts than usual? Did you focus on a different topic? Pinpoint what you did, and repeat it.

Likewise, the Content section will tell you which of your posts were the most effective using any number of metrics. Determine why certain photos or videos aroused such a potent reaction from followers. Connect the dots and look for patterns between popular posts so you have a better idea of what to do next time.

Finally, the info gained from Audience Insights will help you customize your posts so that they are tailor-made to fit your adoring fans.

Are most people interacting with you in the morning? Become an early bird and get those posts out there at the start of the day.

Are you noticing a surge in popularity in a specific country? Show some love by mentioning that destination in your next posts.

These Insights provide crucial assistance on how to formulate the perfect schedule with the best content you can come up with.

Recapping Insights

And there you have it… all the ins and outs of Instagram Insights explained. Remember that they are powerful tools that are useful to beginners and experts. Think of these numbers as valuable weapons to place in your IG arsenal. Utilized properly, they can help any account skyrocket to IG stardom.