Ace the Instagram Race with These Crucial Metrics and KPIs
Have you ever done something and felt a profound sense of clarity — something like you exactly knows what you want to and how. Marketing metrics are the ones that can save you from being the feeling paralyzed by the same old struggles, hours or days later. In the present scenario, Digital Marketing is no longer a feel-good field measured by presumptions, assumptions, or vague measurements.
Instead, from the days how favorably someone thought of your brand to a scientific field based on precise metrics and optimizations, measurements and accurate insights have now become the norm. Professionals all across the globe these days need a marketing dashboard based on marketing KPIs in order to get better and gain the top spot regardless of what field of marketing you find yourself, including Instagram.
Believe it or not, the following post focuses on crucial metrics, and KPIs will cheer you up, and maybe even give you ideas on how to step up your Instagram game! Just hang in there!
Meet the Game Changers
Marketing Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are mainly used by the marketing teams to measure values so that they can predict the effectiveness of campaigns across all marketing channels. Since every channel is different, so it has to be your appropriate marketing metrics. For example:
- How many people open your email?
- The number of people who click on a link within your email
- Even those people who don’t want to receive your email
- Addresses that no longer exists
- How many emails actually get delivered?
- Lastly, how much income your email/link click is generating?
- The number of people who can see your content.
- Those people who love to interact with your content (like, share, etc.).
- How many people click links and call-to-action buttons on your page.
- The number of people who evolve from being a user of your site to a paying customer.
- Information about the people interacting with your brand (age, gender, location).
- How many people hover over your page before clicking on it.
Website
- This one is quite obvious- How many people visit your site.
- How many people turn from being a user to a customer.
- The number of people who leave your site after only visiting one page.
- The ratio of new visitors and returning ones
- The pages on your site where people enter after using a search engine, highlighting which pages are most visible.
- Key information about your users.
Let’s Focus On Instagram Metrics For A While
By now, I hope you get the point that metrics do carry some serious weight. Still, if you aren’t convinced I would like to share certain pointers stating why you should keep your eye on your numbers.
First, the time aspect
With time and experience, you will soon be able to figure out the type of content people can easily resonate with and which ones are falling flat. Slowly and steadily, you will gain insight into things like the right hashtags to use, the best times to post, and more.
Second, the ROI aspect
One of the most tedious tasks for a social media marketer could be proving ROI on time spent. It’s pretty continuous, a never-ending battle. Tracking apt analytics won’t just let you know how many visitors turned to customers but also save an adequate amount of money.
Now, as a marketer, nobody likes to keep investing blood, sweat, effort into your Instagram marketing strategy especially when you don’t have any sort of confirmation that what you’re doing is actually making a difference or not.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. — Albert Einstein
So, stop being insane it’s time for some tweaking and refinement. But first and foremost, you should know which specific metrics you should focus on? Yes, you heard it right! Not all metrics carry the same weightage for every situation. There is no cookie-cutter solution; some of them can be even misleading at times. For example, vanity metrics used to track registered users, downloads, and raw pageviews which has nothing to do with active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits. The moral of the story is, don’t get so wrapped up- take it slow! Your ultimate goal is to increase your understanding of what’s working and what isn’t so that you can use that information to take action and improve.
Measure your efforts wisely
Clearly, this isn’t everything that you can do to help your initial social media efforts, but it can be a good grounding at least. Let’s delve into the specifics.
So, how to measure the metric?
Step 1. Gather the total amount of engagement you received for a given time frame.
Step 2. Navigate to the Reports tab and under Instagram Reports, select Instagram Business Profiles.
Step 3. Scroll down to the overview tab and see whether the engagement rate is calculated or not.
Impressions & Reach
Another crucial metrics used to track aspects in regards to your account’s visibility. Reach and impression are way different so better we understand the difference in prior. Reach is about all the number of unique users who saw your post or Story whereas, the impression is said when the exact number of times your content (post or video) is shown to the end-users. This means chances are there of a single user seeing your content 3–4 times a day and still not interacting, but it is counted in the impression.
To find them: Go to Instagram Insights and scroll down.
Why these metrics? Reach, and Impressions will surely let you know whether you are seen in front of your target audience or not. If not, then there is certainly some kind of issue that needs to be addressed sooner. And if you find an increase in the reach on a constant basis it certainly means your content is likely making its way to new users — a good thing for any growing business!
Follower growth rate
It shows you whether you are on the correct path or not. On Instagram, maintaining or increasing your followers is quite crucial. Therefore, keeping an accurate follower count becomes very crucial. Apart from this, being a business Instagram account, chances are pretty much high experiencing random spikes or drop-offs due to something like a one-time promotion or paid social ads. So make sure you do measure your follower count over time.
Additionally, understanding what is or isn’t working is also essential within the context of your overall Instagram marketing strategy and KPIs for Instagram because you’ll want to make sure you know the types of content that should be continued and which may need tweaking. Another interesting method through which you can find your Instagram follower growth rate to look into:
- Suppose you have 2,300 followers at the beginning of the month
- And 2,455 at the end of the month, it means the number increased is 155
- Do the math, simply divide the number by the number of followers you had at the start of the month. 155/2,300 = 0.067 and get percentage = 6.7%
- So the Instagram follower growth rate for this month, in particular, is 6.7%.
Tip: you can track your account performance in Combin Growth.
Timing Matters
Timing does matter, especially when you are posting on social media. After all, one of your goals should be to maximize your reach, so it’s advantageous to plan your posting around peak times. Check out the post that emphasizes how strategic timing of the posts on social media can increase your exposure organically?
For Instagram, in particular, the best times for brands to post are:
- Wednesday at 11 am, and Friday at 10–11 am
- Wednesday is the overall best day to post to Instagram
- The safest times to post are Tuesday through Friday, 10 am-3 pm
- Sundays- 11pm-3am
Apart from this, you can also find the best time to post for YOUR business; you need to track your own data to measure success and engagement. You can do this by jumping onto Instagram Insight, hitting Audience, and scrolling down to the Followers section. There, you can check out when most of your followers’ peak times are.
Traffic
The end goal of businesses investing in social media is to drive users from the app to their website. This traffic can be then be used to sell to, reengage, and even increase awareness, but your options get a lot smaller if you don’t get them off of Instagram. Having an adequate amount of traffic to your website means you will learn the exact amount people convert from scrolling to clicking through to your website. All you have to do is head over to the Insights tab and look at ‘Website Clicks’ to show how many people have clicked on the website link in your bio. In addition to this, you can also check out Google analytics under acquisition and check all traffic. This will show you how many visitors you’re getting from Instagram and Instagram Stories:
As a brand on Instagram, the ultimate objective is to drive traffic to your website and eventually increase sales. In order to increase a significant amount of traffic, you must:
- Put your website link in your bio.
- Use the ‘Swipe up’ feature in Stories
- Use competitions to direct people to your website
Getting acquainted with hashtags
The need for adding relevant hashtags to every post has never been so high. So, try finding out which hashtags resonate best with your audience. And the Hashtag engagement metric can aid you will in solving this quest. The tool will help you to see every time that tag is used in a post, regardless of the account from which it’s posted. There is no denying the fact that a little research can go a long way. Use insights to find out which hashtags have been performing best and adapt accordingly.
Open a post and simply tap insights. The stat will simply show if the hashtags are working for you (as well as what types of Instagram posts are resonating with your audience). Speaking more about these tags, they have to be specific rather than keeping it in a general sense. Don’t forget you can also add hashtags to your Stories, making it searchable. So if you tag your Story with #lovestory and someone searches that hashtag, your Story will appear just like a post would.
Instagram Stories metrics
As the title suggests, this metric shows how popular and engaging your Instagram Stories are. Story replies, Story Taps Back and Forward, Story Exits and Impressions, are certain aspects to put your tabs on.
Over to You!
It’s definitely worth jumping into the deep end of Instagram analytics if you want to grow your account and reach new audiences. Get started!
