With over 1 billion Instagram users worldwide, people want their Instagram account to grow the most amidst the competition. But to achieve that, there are some things that you need to take care of.
One of them is tracking Instagram metrics to know how your account is performing. But what exactly are Instagram metrics, and which ones of them do you need to track, keep reading to learn about them:
What are Instagram Metrics:
Instagram metrics are specific statistics. These analytics assist the owner of the account in understanding those stats and seeing the trends in them. For instance, follower count depicts how many followers the owner has, the follower growth rate explains how quickly the follower count of the individual is increasing is analytic, and so on.
Instagram metrics to track in 2021:
Tracking Instagram metrics can be extremely important if you want to grow in this highly competitive social media platform. If someone organizes their Instagram page without looking at the metrics, they might not see the expected results despite putting in a lot of effort.
These metrics will help you know about the different regions of your Instagram growth strategy that you need to work on. So, below are the different Instagram metrics that you need to track to take the most advantage of your Instagram account:
1. Reach:
To observe the performance of your product on Instagram, Reach is the most vital metric that you need to consider.
Reach is requisite to know how many exceptional and targeted accounts have seen your post and if your social media marketing is giving awareness about your brand successfully. It will also show how far away you are from gaining your targeted followers.
So in case, your motive is to enhance brand awareness and gain the maximum number of users possible, then you need to focus on increasing your reach on Instagram.
If you post something and it gets a different reach than normal, you can use those results to understand what needs to be done, like if some post had the maximum reach, see how is it different from the rest so that you can incorporate the good things in the upcoming posts as well.
Analyze the post and see if you used any hashtags, call-to-action for engagement or if you posted a story at a time when your public was most involved. Think of all the possible reasons that made a certain post’s reach go up or down
All these aspects can have a considerable impact on the reach of any post, so it is worth it to take notice of any of such changes.
Now, you need to understand the difference between impressions and reach. Reach depicts the number of unique views that your post had, while on the other side, impression shows the complete number of views (no matter if the same person has watched your post five times).
From a brand viewpoint, keeping checks on your reach in preference to impressions is far better to track the results of your posts and stories and check how much awareness your posts are creating among a distinct targeted audience.
2. Sales:
Instagram has hosted new features to support a brand in generating quick sales on the platform, such as Instagram stories, checkout, shop-able posts, product stickers, and the most recent, Instagram shop.
Apart from using Instagram’s basic shopping features, you can also get up and make people go to your website by adding UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to whichever links you utilize. These parameters are used to see how effective your online marketing campaigns are.
In this way, you can choose any web analytics program, such as Google Analytics, to track conversations as well as the amount of revenue earned.
This can be helpful to make you understand how much sales your content is generating and the amount of traffic it is leading to your website.
3. Saves:
Instagram saves are a very useful metric used by most brands for tracking, particularly by disguising likes on the platform.
With Instagram saves, customers are able to gather and save a post for the future just by clicking the “bookmark” icon located on the bottom ride side of any Instagram post. Users usually save Instagram posts because they liked it or they want to interact with them in the future.
By following the total of saves received by your post during the time, you can analyze if the strategies you have been making are working and what you should do to attain more saves to enhance future growth?
4. Engagement Rate:
The engagement on your Instagram is a major metric that tells you how the audience is reacting to your content. If your post gets many saves, shares, and comments, you will see your content’s engagement increasing!
But how can you calculate the engagement rate? For that, you will need a social media manager and some Instagram analytics tools.
Divide the complete figure of comments and likes by the number of followers, and after that, multiply the results by 100 to provide you with a percentage.
If you get high results of engagement rate, it means that a great number of people follow your content, and you are doing well.
However, on the other side, if you get a low engagement rate, that can happen because of a few reasons. The content you are posting may possibly not resonate with your followers, or you are not posting stories at the right time for maximum engagements.
The ticket to achieving long-term success is to observe this metric; it can allow you to catch precisely what matches with your viewers and utilize this important metric to advise your upcoming content strategy.
Although, engagement rate can sometimes mislead on some content, such as videos. The viewer can get so much involved in it that they may forget to hit the like button. So it is better to use other metrics as well, like reach, for a more consistent benchmark.
Instagram Stories Views:
Instagram stories can be the ideal way to construct a good and trustworthy relationship with your targeted audience. Observing the number of views and clicks forwards will make you understand what your audience likes exactly.
A person can also use the metrics for each story to know what grips the audience’s attention, which content they click at, and what are the specific reasons that make them bounce away from your content.
You can keep track of the following IG stories metrics:
Lookout Through Rate:
The Instagram stories lookout through rate identifies the percentage of people who watch your stories from the initial to the end.
However, you should know that it only applies if you post more than a single story.
Drop-off Rate
We all know how important a first impression can be, and hence the first one of your Instagram stories should be good enough to grip the attention of your watchers, so they are inclined to watch and be involved with the whole lot.
To know how many people skipped after watching your first story, an individual can check the drop-off rate.
Finishing Rate Per Story:
The slide completion rate helps you recognize what percentage of watchers saw the complete story despite hitting away after 1 second.
So, are you ready to track your Instagram metrics?
If you want to market your channel through Instagram, then you have to track your performance. Although you better select the metrics that match your goals. If the sole purpose of your business is to spread brand awareness and not sales, then the metrics you will track will be different from companies whose target is to increase sales. However, after you understand the Instagram metrics important for your specific business, make sure you track them weekly or at least monthly, so you can develop your strategies accordingly.