This week saw me delivering a session specifically around Instagram for a group of coaches, consultants, authors, speakers and entrepreneurs. In this session, I covered a bunch of stuff, from reels to stories to how to get found under explore. The topic that made everyone start scribbling notes, however, was all around how to track the performance of your Instagram account – so I figured it might be worth sharing a thing or two with you here!

Before you read on, though… to implement anything you read here, you’ll need to make sure your Instagram account is either a creator or business account. There aren’t huge differences between the two – business accounts are best for businesses and brands with physical addresses. You don’t get access to the full music library, but in my opinion, this is the best option of the two!

How engaging are you on Instagram?

Churning out Reels and posts seems like a good strategy, but it’s not going to do much for you in terms of results unless you’re getting engagement! In your insights, which you’ll access from your Instagram profile, you’ll be able to set a period (looking at 90-day periods is good) and see how many interactions you’ve had in that period. Simply divide these by the number of followers you have and multiply by 100. Keep track of this number as you make changes to improve your score.

Is anyone showing interest in you or your services?

The best way to see this is to figure out how many people are coming to your website from Instagram – you can measure this in Google Analytics. You can also see in your Instagram insights how many profile visits you’re getting too. Keeping track of this is a useful metric; as you learn more and implement changes to improve some of the metrics I’m sharing with you here, in theory, you’ll be generating more interest.

On that note, it’s also interesting to see how many profile views created how many new followers in the period. But if I’m honest, this is a nice to know rather than a key metric.

Are you reaching beyond your audience?

Measure the reach of your posts and aim to grow this. That’s the simple version… if you want to take it a step further, measure the reach of your top 5-10 posts in that period and analyse them. Why did they perform better than the rest? What was the trend in terms of content type, the posting option, the theme, the hashtags, were there any common words in the copy?

When you look at these posts and implement what you’re learning, you’ll find your overall reach improving along with the average reach across your posts. Content that reaches further usually does so because it’s had more engagement, and with those engagers now seeing you in their feeds more often because they engaged with you… they’re more likely to click further over to your profile and then your landing pages!

Instagram insights data overload…

There are a bunch of different things that Instagram insights tell you, and although interesting, it can be a bit of a rabbit hole you don’t need to find yourself lost in! Select a few metrics that are important to you and track them regularly. (Weekly for most things, monthly or quarterly for the more in-depth analysis stuff!)

You need to keep track of what’s happening, but don’t spend so much time on here that you lose time for creating content! Don’t let the data overwhelm you and create a block when it comes to producing! Go have fun, and create content, but measuring the data means you’ll be doing it purposefully and doing it strategically!