How to Get Instagram Analytics Report

Trying to understand your Instagram performance without a proper report is like navigating a new city without a map. You know you're getting somewhere, but you aren't sure if it's the right direction. This guide will walk you through how to use Instagram's own analytics to build a meaningful report, see what's working, and make smarter decisions about your content.

First Things First: You Need a Professional Account

Before you can access any data, you need to have an Instagram Business or Creator account. If you're still using a Personal profile, you're missing out on all the valuable analytics. Making the switch is free, simple, and takes less than a minute.

If you haven't already, here's how to switch:

1. Go to your profile and tap the "hamburger" menu (three horizontal lines) in the top-right corner.

2. Tap Settings and privacy.

3. Scroll down and tap Account type and tools.

4. Tap Switch to professional account and follow the prompts. You'll choose a category that best describes what you do and select whether you’re a Creator or a Business.

Once you’ve made the switch, you'll see a new "Professional dashboard" link right below your bio on your profile page. This is your gateway to all the data you need for your report.

Your Guide to Instagram Insights: The Official Analytics Tool

Instagram Insights is the built-in analytics tool available to all professional accounts. While it has some limitations (like an inability to easily export data), it provides a wealth of information for building a solid foundational report. You can find it by tapping "Professional dashboard" on your profile.

Let's break down the key sections you'll find and what the metrics actually mean for your strategy.

Accounts Reached

This tab tells you who is seeing your content and where they are coming from. It's the best place to understand your audience's demographics and how far your content is traveling beyond your existing followers.

• Reach: This is the number of unique accounts that saw any of your content at least once. It answers the question, "How many individual people did I get in front of?"

• Impressions: This is the total number of times your content was shown to users. Impressions will always be higher than reach because a single person can see your post multiple times.

• Reached Audience Demographics: This section is pure gold. It provides a breakdown of the gender, age range, top cities, and top countries of the users you’ve reached. This data helps you confirm if you’re connecting with your target audience and can inform everything from the content you create to the language you use. For example, if you see a large portion of your audience is in a younger demographic, you might lean more into Reels and trending audio.

Accounts Engaged

This section is all about how people are interacting with your content. High reach is great, but strong engagement indicates that your content is actually resonating with the people who see it. Engagement is a key signal to the Instagram algorithm that your content is valuable.

• Engaged Audience Demographics: Just like with reach, you can see the demographics of the people who are actively interacting with your content. Comparing this to your Reached Audience can be telling. If there's a big difference, it might mean you're reaching a broad audience but only a specific segment finds it engaging enough to interact.

• Content Interactions: This gives you a high-level count of key actions taken on your posts, a crucial part of any report.

  • Likes: The most basic form of engagement.

  • Comments: A stronger signal of engagement. Comments show someone took the time to share their thoughts, indicating a more invested follower.

  • Saves: A powerful metric that signals your content is valuable and "evergreen." People save posts they want to revisit later, which tells the algorithm your content is high-quality.

  • Shares: Shares expand your reach organically, as they put your content in front of a new audience via direct messages or Stories.

Total Followers

This view focuses on the growth and makeup of your community. It helps you track your progress over time and understand your existing follower base.

• Follower Growth: Here you can see a chart mapping your follows and unfollows over a select period. Seeing a big spike in follows can help you trace it back to a specific post or Reel that performed well. Seeing a wave of unfollows might encourage you to look at content from that day to see what could have missed the mark.

• Follower Demographics: This shows you the gender, age range, top cities, and countries of your followers, which may differ from the people you are reaching. This is your core community.

• Most Active Times: This is one of the most actionable pieces of data in Insights. It shows you the days and hours when your followers are most active on Instagram. Use this data to schedule your posts for when your audience is most likely to be online, giving your content the best possible chance to get early engagement.

Analyzing Individual Content Performance

A comprehensive report shouldn’t just look at a high level. It needs to drill down into what specific posts, Reels, and Stories are driving results. You can access insights for any individual piece of content by tapping the "View insights" button on your post or by swiping up on your Story.

Post and Reel Insights

When you check the insights for a specific post or Reel, you’ll get detailed performance metrics that show what action it inspired people to take:

• Reach breakdown: See how many of the accounts reached were followers versus non-followers. A high proportion of non-followers means your content is doing a great job reaching new audiences, likely through hashtags, the Explore page, or shares.

• Profile Activity: This shows how many people took action after seeing your post. This can include Profile Visits, Follows, and Website Taps (if you have a link in your bio). These metrics are amazing for measuring the return on your content creation efforts. If your goal is to drive sales, a post with a high number of Website Taps is a clear winner.

Story Insights

Stories have a unique set of metrics that tell you how captivating your content is and where people are losing interest:

• Replies: The number of direct messages sent in response to your Story. It's a key indicator of community engagement.

• Navigation: This is where you see the user journey through your Story.

  • Back: Someone tapped to re-watch the previous Story. This is a good sign! It means your content was interesting enough for a second look.

  • Forward: The number of taps to see the next photo or video in your Story. This is normal behavior, but a very high number compared to your viewership could suggest people are speed-tapping through boring content.

  • Next Story: The number of swipes to move on to the next account’s Story. A high number of these early on in your sequence may mean your "hook" wasn't strong enough.

  • Exited: The number of times someone left the Stories viewer altogether after seeing your Story. This one hurts, but it's important feedback. If you see a major drop-off on a particular slide, you know that type of content isn't hitting home.

How to Manually Create Your Instagram Report

Instagram doesn't offer a "download report" button. To truly analyze trends and track performance over time, you'll need to create a simple report yourself in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Excel. It might seem tedious at first, but this process forces you to look at the numbers thoughtfully.

Step 1: Define Your Goal and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Before you record a single number, ask yourself: what is the goal of my Instagram presence? Is it driving traffic to your website? Building an engaged community? Generating sales? Your goal determines which metrics matter most. These key metrics are your KPIs.

For example:

• If your goal is Brand Awareness, your primary KPIs might be Reach and Follower Growth.

• If your goal is Community Engagement, your KPIs might be Comments, Saves, and Engagement Rate (Engagements / Reach * 100).

• If your goal is Driving Traffic, your main KPI is likely Website Clicks.

Pick 3-5 key metrics to focus on. Don’t try to track everything, or you’ll end up with a crowded report that tells you nothing.

Step 2: Choose a Reporting Cadence

Decide how often you will update your report. For most businesses, a weekly or bi-weekly check-in is ideal for staying on top of trends without getting overwhelmed. Monthly reports are great for seeing the bigger picture and summarizing performance for stakeholders.

Step 3: Collect and Organize Your Data

This is the manual part. Create a simple table in your spreadsheet. Each row can represent a reporting period (e.g., "Week 1 - Oct"), and each column can represent one of your chosen KPIs.

Navigate to your Instagram Insights and pull the data for the desired time frame (you can select from a 7, 14, 30, or 90-day view). Manually type these numbers into your spreadsheet.

You can also create a separate tab for tracking individual post performance. Create columns for the date posted, post type (e.g., Carousel, Reel), Reach, Likes, Comments, Saves, and any other KPI you care about. This allows you to easily sort and identify your top-performing pieces of content.

A Simple Reporting Template Looks Like This:

Step 4: Analyze and Add Context

The numbers themselves don't tell the full story. The most valuable part of any report is the "Notes" or "Insights" column. After logging your data each week, take a moment to answer: "So what?"

• Did your reach go up? Why? Check your individual post performance. Was it because of a particular Reel that went viral?

• Did your follower growth slow down? Was it because you posted less frequently?

• Did a carousel post get a ton of saves? That's a great sign your audience wants more deep-dive, educational content in that format.

This qualitative context turns a boring data log into an actionable report that informs your future strategy. It helps you recognize what to double-down on and what to stop doing.

Final Thoughts

Pulling your Instagram analytics report is a vital habit for growing your presence and reaching your business goals. By consistently tracking your performance, analyzing individual posts, and adding context, you can move away from guessing what content works and start making data-informed decisions that build a stronger, more engaged community.

This manual reporting can be time-consuming, especially when you need to combine your Instagram data with insights from Google Analytics, your email platform, or your sales tools. We built Graphed to solve exactly this challenge. Instead of spending hours pulling data once a week, we help you connect all your data sources and create live, automated dashboards in seconds. Just ask "show me my Instagram follower growth vs. my website traffic from social media," and watch the report build itself, which frees you up to work on the creative strategy that delivers real results.