Whether you’re a marketer, business owner, sole trader, or you’re just running an Instagram brand account, and you’re using the Instagram Story, you need to make sure you’re using the feature to produce the best results. After all, why spend hours making content that’s not really working for you?
As with all kinds of online data, you need to review your analytics and make sure your stories are getting the kind of ROI that will help your business grow rather than chucking money down the drain. But where do you start? What kind of metrics do you need to be looking into?
In today’s guide, we’re going to talk through everything you need to know.
Getting Into Your Analytics
First, just so we’re on the same page, you need to know how to get into your analytics in the first place and where all these juicy insights are. Fortunately, Instagram has made it really rather simple. To start with, make sure your IG account is a business account, which is something you can switch to in the main account menu.
When you’ve done this, you’ll be able to access all your Insights from the Insights tab that will appear in your main menu. However, we’re specifically looking at the Stories feature today. To gain insights, you need to post a story on your timeline.
After uploading, wait a few minutes and click back onto it. Swipe up on the screen and tap the little bar graph icon on the left-hand side of the new window. This is where all story insights can be found!
For all other insights, tap the burger menu on the top-right side of the screen, and tap Insights.
Your Instagram Story Metrics
Now that you’ve found your metrics for each story, it’s time to look into what they can actually do for you. Here’s what you need to know.
Impressions – The total number of people who have seen your story.
Reach - The number of unique IG users who have seen your story. (If someone on their account revisits your story and sees it again, this will add to the impression metric, but not the reach.)
Taps Ahead – The number of taps to jump to the next section of your tale (swipe right).
Taps Back - The number of taps to go backward in your story series.
Replies – The number of times your story's Send Message feature has been used.
Swipes - The number of swipes to the next account's story series.
Exits - The number of times a user exits your story to return to their feed.
As you can see, especially if you have over 10,000 followers and have access to the Swipe Up feature where you can add links to your stories, you can see additional insights, like Replies, Profile Visits, and website link taps. If you’re using a website link and the one on your profile, make sure you’re using a service like Short.io to tidy up the link and make it far more attractive to click on. Such link shorteners provide detailed statistics si that you can track from where traffic comes.
If you’ve used a Sticker feature on your post, you’ll also be able to see how many people have tapped on this element of your story as well.
Future Features and Insights
Hand in hand with these, Instagram is planning to release some new features and insights, and at the time of reading this, they may or may not already be out, or even extras ones may have been released, so keep your eyes open for these opportunities!
“Right now, the Call feature is one of the most recently added features, allowing people to contact your business directly through the app. This includes insights like how many people click call, text, and email, or request directions to your business,” describes Taylor Harris, a project manager at Boom Essays and Paper Fellows.
How to Use Your Analytics
So, with so many insights, you may be wondering how you actually go about making the most of them. Well, while there’s no right or wrong way to go about this, there are some general tips that can really help you out.
For example, if people are tapping backward in your Stories, this is generally a good thing because it means they were interested in what you posted and want to make sure they got the content. Find your averages and see when more people are tapping back on a post. It’s this kind of content you want to make more of.
Mark Harris, a business writer at State of writing and Essay roo, explains: “If people are quitting your story or skip to the next series, this typically means they are bored or uninterested in what you have to say, so you’re going to be better off improving whatever content you posted or not posting it altogether.”
Conclusion
As you can see, the stories feature may not be as basic, and you first believe, and there’s actually a lot of depth you can go into when seeing how successful your stories are. The best thing you do is to get a baseline for your analytics, so you know your average performance and then do what you can to improve these figures over the long term.
Christina Lee is a social media strategist and blog writer over at Custom essay and Academized. She writes about marketing news and technologies for such services and spends a lot of her time helping new businesses make the most of social media opportunities over at places like Write my essay and others.
What did you learn?
- instagram analytics
- hoe to track statistics on instragram
- how to shorten links for instagram
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