How to find out if your Instagram followers become customers

The effort our marketing team put into our Instagram account is based on the assumption that followers turn into customers. Unfortunately marketing tools on the Instagram platform are limited, and trying to track clicks (link in profile!) and voucher codes (argh!) don’t really reflect how people behave.

So how can we find out if followers become customers?

The trick is to use Custom Audience Overlap

To get the answer, you’ll need two Custom Audiences – one of recent customers, and another of the people who have engaged with your Instagram account. Here is a good guide on setting up custom audiences.

Creating an audience of recent customers can be done by uploading a list of your customers, or by using the “website activity” as below. You’ll need to adjust the time period so there are at least 1000 customers in this audience.

Create a Custom Audience of customers

To create an audience of your Instagram followers, create a Custom Audience using “Engagement”, then select “Instagram Business Profile”.

Create a Custom Audience of people who have engaged with our Instagram

Bringing it all together

Now for the payoff! Select the two audiences then from the “Actions” menu choose “Show audience overlap”.

Voilà! You’ll be presented with a window showing you the crossover between people who have engaged with you on Instagram and your customers. In our case, 20% of our customers have engaged with us on Instagram.

Tracking over time

If you’re putting as much effort into your Instagram as we are, you might want to see the changes reflected over time. To do this, you could for instance create a 180 day audience that excludes the 90 day audience, to get two comparable time periods.

Happy Instagramming!

Thanks go to my amazing marketing team (Milly and Jess), and Jon Quinton for checking the draft of this post.

P.S. find out how we use Google Scripts to track our follower count over time.