When did you last take a look at your Instagram “Insights”? If it’s been a while, I recommend dipping in there and browsing around to see what content is performing best for you. 

Here’s a quick guide to help.

1. From the home page of your Instagram profile hit the MENU button and then “INSIGHTS”.

2. Under the “Content” tab within here, hit “See All”. This will take you to a page where you can compare all of your posts over a variety of time periods (I recommend “1 Year”) and across a variety of metrics.

So which metrics matter? This depends on your goal, but I’m going to outline a few key ones to pay attention to… and put them into basic language instead of tech talk!

ENGAGEMENT

This is going to show you which content in the past year you’ve had the most interaction on, which is made up by combining the number of likes, comments and saves. Engagement is a good metric to tell you the type of content you should do more of! Better than “likes” where people might just tap the heart and move on, engagement is typically an indication that people STOPPED and payed attention to your post. An added bonus: The Instagram algorithm rewards posts with good engagement, so if you put up a post and it gets a lot of interaction quickly after being posted, it’s more likely this content will be pushed higher up in users’ feeds, which in turn means more people will see it. 

SAVED

As the title suggests, this metric is for posts that people have saved into their private Instagram collection. Consider saved as the equivalent of bookmarking a website. It means people want to be able to find it and come back to it again, perhaps because they found it useful or were inspired by it. Your “saved” numbers will be quite a bit lower than most of your other metrics, but if you have a few posts that drastically stand out here, that’s probably an indication of content that has the potential to drive business for you. (Some of my most-saved posts are around really specific marketing advice, which is what people most commonly book my services for.)

FOLLOWS

This is the number of new accounts that started following you as a result of a particular post. This will often coincide with posts that have been shared a lot. If you’re looking to grow you audience, pay attention to this. 

A few others in short: 

REACH: The number of unique accounts (people) that have seen your posts. 

IMPRESSIONS: The total number of times your post has been seen. (The same person might see a post multiple times but not interact with it. This is why “impressions” are higher than your “reach”. 

WEBSITE CLICKS: The number of times your website was clicked because of a post. If you’re focussed on conversions / sales, then this is helpful to know.

So there you have it! A quick guide to Instagram analytics to help you understand how your content is resonated with your audience.