As one of the most popular social media platforms, Instagram is known to be the best media to post your promotional campaign to get the best engagement with your audience. 

However, there are some Instagram metrics that you need to know before you create your marketing campaign. These metrics can be obtained through Instagram analytics.

Hopefully this article will help you get a better understanding about Instagram analytics.

Instagram Follower Growth Rate

Follower growth rate is one of the most important metrics that you need to measure when you are trying to understand your Instagram analytics. Although it looks similar to follower count, it is completely different.

Follower growth rate gives you more info about your Instagram growth over a period of time. This will help you get a much better view of whether your Instagram account's following has successfully grown or not.

Follower growth rate can be measured with a basic calculation, for example: Let say you have gained 85 new followers on August and you started the month with 1000 followers, you can calculate your follower growth by:

(85/1000) x 100 = 8.5% Follower Growth Rate for August.

Try to track your follower growth rate over time continuously to determine trends in your follower growth rate. This will help you determine what goes right and what goes wrong. 

When your follower growth rate is decreasing (can be seen as you are losing numbers of followers), you can easily identify which posts are giving you this negative result.

Instagram Engagement Rate

Gaining lots of followers is good, but you need to know that having followers that listen to you is much more valuable. Every content creator or Instagram business account manager's biggest nightmare is having a massive number of followers that ignores their content. 

It is not only a sign that their content is not living up to their followers' expectations, but it can also probably cause them to start losing a lot of those followers.

Instagram engagement rate is a measurement of how effective your content is. This can also help you understand the reaction from your followers. It measures whether people like your content or not. 

In Instagram analytics, engagement refers to how often your followers either give their like or comment on your post. This means that your followers had to make an effort to show whether they enjoyed your post or not.

Hashtag Performance

A hashtag is a phrase that is preceded by the symbol # a way to mark something as belonging to a specific category. It is added to posts to help people find the post by a specific theme. 

Adding hashtags that are trending to your posts will instantly help your posts gain more visibility to a much larger audience. Different hashtags popularity show you which type of content is the best type to post in order to gain better engagement and more exposure for your account.

Using hashtags that are relevant to your business or content or what your audience is searching for can help you keep reach and engagement in check.

Knowing your hashtag performance will provide you with helpful information to assess and compare the effectiveness of your Instagram marketing campaigns and therefore you can set the right expectations.

Get A Better Understanding About Your Audience

Understanding your audience is the key to achieving your goals. Whether you are using Instagram as a platform for digital marketing to boost sales for your business or creating engaging content, you need to get a good grasp on what your audience needs.

Instagram analytics will show you detailed data of your audience by their specific criterias such as gender, age group, demographics, and location. You can use this information to focus your campaign in these areas. This will also dig deep and help you understand what your audience are searching for the most and their sentiment. 

By learning about your audience through Instagram analytics, you will be able to pinpoint which posts are the most popular and most effectively engaging with your audience.

Learn The Best Time to Post Your Content

Learning about timing will help you understand when your target audience spends time on Instagram. This will guide you to select an optimal posting time.

You might already make the best—engaging content, but if you do not know when the exact time to post it, your content will get less exposed. Because poor timing may be the cause of lower audience engagement. 

But worry not, Instagram analytics will show you the best time to post your content. It can help you to look at your posts over the course of a week or month and learn when you receive the most views and engagement from your audience.

Summary

Although Instagram analytics can be tricky, when you finally understand, this will help you reach your campaign goals. After gaining knowledge on your follower growth rate, Instagram engagement rate, hashtag performance, learning about your audience, and knowing the best time to post your content, you will finally be able to run your campaign effectively.