Everyone uses some kinds of social networks nowadays. If you want your business to be called “outdated”, feel free to stick to the traditional communication methods. However, this is not the case of the 21st century. The world is integrating technology in every aspect of life, and the chance for businesses to expand their influences through social networks is limitless.
With approximately 500 millions users every day, Instagram is showing profitable investment opportunities for businesses to boost up their revenue. It has more than 1 billion active users currently, and 50% of them follow at least one business account.
According to Facebook (2019), 80% of consumers decide whether to purchase something or not through Instagram, while 83% of users find out new products or service through the platform.
So it is crucial for stores to adapt to this fruitful social network. But changing your account to business is just the baby first step.
To maximize your store’s value, there are much more works to do. This is the reason why Instagram Analytics tools are available to help you optimize every data from your business account.
Without Instagram Analytics, what will happen?
You may ask “Is it necessary?”. Let us tell you some drawbacks that would prevent your business’ growth when you underestimate the importance of Instagram Analytics.
One of the severe issues is you may target wrong audiences or attract irrelevant visitors.
Your store should come closest to the targeted viewers and from that generating leads, rather than just some random people passing by. Instagram Analytics can help you build the exact demographic for a suitable marketing plan.
Not knowing clearly about your customers also results in failure in time management.
Your account may not guarantee the necessary regularity of posts or it can be active at the wrong time. It adds up a huge amount of time as well as workload and what will you gain back? Insignificant interactions of customers.
Using Instagram Analytics can prevent this tragic situation from happening.
Another problem coming from the lack of analytics tools affects directly to your store’s future on Instagram.
Without a comprehensive management method, your store can ignore mentions and followers’ activities. Many businesses have missed potential partnerships and brand engagement simply because they forgot to track down their Instagram account.
All of the above issues can be avoided with Instagram Analytics. But at first, please remember to change your account to business account to apply these tools.
Metrics of Instagram Analytics
So, what exactly do these tools measure? Below are the metrics for Instagram Analytics.
There are 4 types of data that Instagram Analytics evaluate for your stores: Account, Audience, Posts, and Stories. Let’s get in details of each category.
1. Account
Follower growth
This feature cannot be measured immediately, but over the long term, it can help you to evaluate the growth of your store on Instagram. When you see an unusual rise or fall in the followers' number, you should re-check your contents and posting time to give the best solutions for each situation.
Overall engagement
There are many different ways to calculate engagement rate, however, with Instagram, people usually calculate engagement rate by post.
The number would often decrease when your store’s account gain more followers. But it is still a great factor to identify how many followers actually follow you.
Traffic and Click-through bio rate
Optimizing Instagram business account can raise the number of viewers to your websites. Hundreds of followers take a look at the store’s profile every day, but how many of them really click on the link in bio and visit the website?
This rate is also important in the process of judging the success of an Instagram business account. However, merchants usually forget this factor which plays the same crucial role in determining the growth of a business.
Although Instagram has developed Instagram Insight to help businesses follow their account, however, this platform does not have any tools to track down outbound traffic, and this is why Instagram Analytics tools are important.
2. Audience
Instagram Analytics tools can create a full demographic of your business account. This data can help you to choose the best marketing plan for your store, from that attract the most suitable customers.
Some key factors you should care about: Top location, age range, and gender. They can help you to see the broader picture of who your customers are, and the effectiveness of the plan that you are implementing.
Besides, the average time your followers active on Instagram is also helpful in creating a long-lasting business plan.
3. Posts
With Instagram, your posts are the hook to gain customers. Lots of factors you need to take into consideration to create a successful Instagram business account and Analytics tools can help you fully optimize and manage these features.
Comment totals
Many people believe the number of likes determines the influence of an account. I can tell you, that is a wrong belief. The comment section is the one factor to show your followers’ true interactions.
When your customers decide to spend time to communicate with you through comments, you have done the first step: Capturing their attention. The high rate of comments also indicates that you are creating appealing content, which suggests you should continue to use this content strategy.
Hashtag engagement
One of the best ways to promote your brands is by using hashtags. Hashtags are a useful tool for customers to find you easier in billions of posts on Instagram.
Instagram Analytics will help you evaluate and pick out which hashtags have the highest engagement rate, and you can choose how to adapt them into your posts.
Impressions
Impressions are the total number of times your post was viewed. It will describe how people see you: Through profile, hashtags or other methods? This metric can help you calculate the effectiveness of your promoting plan.
Engagement per follower
This metric indicates how many Instagram users engage with your account. A handful of accounts have millions of followers, but their engagement rate is low. This phenomenon does not represent a successful account. You want as many as possible customers to actually interact with your posts.
Save
This metric can show merchants how attractive their posts are. The new available Save option of Instagram plays the same role as a Wishlist of e-commerce websites. Users save posts to their personal accounts and reconsider whether to purchase it or not.
Best time to post
Posting or seeding at the wrong time makes your work unnecessarily harder. Knowing when people active on Instagram and choosing the right timing are among many amazing features of Instagram Analytics tools.
4. Stories
Just for a short time after its implementation, Story function has become a popular advertising method. Fast and simple, Instagram Story is proving its superiority among other competitors, such as Snapchat or Facebook Story.
Stories engagement with data about how many people see your stories, how many of them exit mid-way or the total number of replies can facilitate your store’s branding and marketing strategy.
These 4 metrics of Instagram Analytics are fundamental data that business must not forget since it can decide the success or failure of your Instagram campaign.
This information can give your store a comprehensive picture of what to do, so you can build a customized plan to maximize your profit. You can manage to develop your store not only on Instagram but also on other platforms, such as your website.
A suitable plan can also create a strong customer relationship. You cannot engage with your followers without knowing their demands, interests, and habits. The analytics tools can help you solve this riddle quickly.
How to fully optimize Instagram?
After reading about all these extremely advanced and profitable features that Instagram Analytics tools can bring to your business account, you now start wondering: “What is the best tool for me? How can I increase my income through Instagram?”
Besides Instagram Insights - the native analytic tool of Instagram, let Magenest introduce you with some of the best tools for Instagram Analytics: Sprout Social, Iconosquare and Later.
Sprout Social is a platform which manages and optimizes the usage of brands' social media accounts of different scopes. More than 20,000 brands around the world are using Sprout Social's service. Sprout Social provides information about the activity of your accounts that can change the direction of your development, for example, hashtag performance, audience insights or performance report.
Another excellent choice for Instagram Analytics tool is Iconosquare. Launching since 2011, Iconosquare has been proving its position as one of the best Instagram tools for brands. This platform allows you to have a deeper look at your past activities, from that you can build a comprehensive future plan for your account.
Later is also a good choice for your Instagram evaluation. This tool provides fundamental analysis such as engagement rate, posting time, audience demographics or traffic management.
Integrate Instagram into your website!
After evaluating all the metrics and tools to run an efficient and attractive Instagram business account, you can link it with your website to establish a fully enjoyable buying experience for your customers through our amazing extensions - Magento 2 Instagram Shop.
Instagram Shop helps you drive more sales by keeping customers interested in your products using Instagram functions. You can easily configure both front-end and back-end of your store to create the most suitable and unique Instagram integrated website.
After our thorough analysis (which you can find out more writings at our blog), we hope you are now appreciating the benefit of Instagram Analytics tools in increasing the value of your stores. Optimization of Instagram can bring you to unexpected growth that can change the status of your business.
So why not seize the chance and integrate with the global trend? Let’s start with installing our Magento 2 Instagram Shop for a better experience that benefits your store as well as your customers!