How to measure the success of your Instagram Marketing Strategy?

Instagram metrics and which to track according to your brand objectives

“What gets measured, gets managed.” — Peter Drucker

When it comes to Instagram, I will agree that it’s not all about the numbers. But metrics do matter. If you don’t try to understand how your content is performing, then all your efforts in creating any content will go to waste. It will be like shooting in the dark and hoping one of the arrows strikes your target audience. Instagram metrics are your guiding light to a successful Instagram marketing strategy, making sure that you are actually successful with the goals you set out to achieve. And help you adapt to the ever-changing algorithms.

Here’s why you need to track Instagram metrics:

• To understand your followers better, who they are and how they behave on the platform.
• To know what your audience wants to see, to be able to help them better with your content.
• To measure the success of specific campaigns, and make sure you achieve the objectives of your campaign.
• To keep your strategy in line with brand objectives

Let’s glance at some Instagram metrics to track:

• Reach — Reach tells you how many unique profiles saw your content.
• Impressions — Impressions tell you the number of times a piece of content was viewed.
• Post Engagement — Engagement is how the audience interacts with your post. Track the number of Likes and Comments on your posts to understand what is resonating with your audience, and the number of times the post was Shared or Saved, to know if what you are creating is valuable enough for them.
• Website Taps — Website taps reflect the number of times any links you’ve included in your profile have been clicked.
• Reel Plays — Reel plays are the number of times your reel is watched for over 3 seconds.
• Story Views — Story views are the number of times your story is viewed.
• Story Engagement — Story Engagement includes accounts reached, likes, replies, and profile visits. Audience response on the various stickers and tags (mention, poll, question, quiz, etc.) available for you to use on your stories also tells you how a person is interacting with your story content. Link clicks are an important story engagement metric.

Follow these content metrics weekly and monthly to ascertain the performance of your content over a period of time. These will give you a good idea about what kind of content your audience wants, what they engage with, and if you should be making any changes in your Instagram content strategy.

Besides the above, some other metrics will help you understand if your content is helping you achieve your goals.

• Followers — Number of people following your account
• Accounts Engaged — Accounts engaged gives you the number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content and demographic information on the accounts you’ve engaged, including top countries, top cities, top age ranges and gender breakdown.
• Story Mentions — It’s important to track if someone mentions you in their story.
• Tagged Posts — It’s also important to note when someone tags you in their post.
• DM Enquiries — Any questions, bookings, and enquiries to know more about your brand, is also something you should keep track of.

BONUS Instagram feature to utilise and keep track of — Action Button. The Action button is the best new feature on Instagram. It allows you to connect the button to an online service, add a lead form to gather contact info, reserve a table, or book a call. The button shows beside the contact info on your profile. Track the number of clicks and click-throughs on this button.

Does this list seem overwhelming to you? Don’t worry, you don’t need to track all of this to learn the effectiveness of your strategy or campaign.

Here’s a way to make your Instagram reporting simple and organised — only track metrics that are relevant to your business goals.

Translating business goals into social media metrics to track:

1. Brand Awareness — Your goal is to increase the visibility of your brand to a wider audience. You want to increase recognition and recall for your brand among potential customers. In that case, track the following metrics:

• Profile Views
• Reach
• Impressions
• Post shares
• Reels plays
• Story views
• Story mentions
• Tagged posts
• Followers

1. Brand Engagement — If you want to establish a relationship, interact with, and cultivate a connection with your audience, follow these metrics:

• Story engagement
• Accounts engaged
• Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• Saves

1. Lead Generation — Instagram provides you with many ways you can capture leads. Utilise and track the following to collect leads:

• Action Button Response
• Website taps
• DM enquiries
• Link clicks

It’s not overwhelming anymore, is it? If you are clear about the reason you want to market on Instagram, you can narrow down the metrics to track, and just refine your content according to those metrics.

Would you like a template to track and analyse all Instagram metrics? If yes, then comment your brand objective below.