How to Look at Instagram Analytics

Your Instagram account is a treasure trove of data that can reveal exactly what your audience wants. Instead of guessing which content will succeed, you can use your analytics to make informed decisions that drive growth. This guide will walk you through accessing, understanding, and using Instagram's built-in analytics to elevate your strategy.

First Things First: You Need a Professional Account

Before accessing any valuable data, you need to switch your Instagram account to either a Business or Creator profile. If you're still using a Personal account, you won't be able to access the "Insights" dashboard.

Switching is free and only takes a minute:

1. Go to your profile page and tap the menu icon (three horizontal lines) in the top-right corner.
2. Select "Settings and privacy."
3. Scroll down to "For professionals" and tap "Account type and tools."
4. Tap "Switch to professional account" and follow the on-screen prompts to choose a category that best describes what you do.

Once you’ve switched, the "Professional dashboard" will appear at the top of your profile, which is your new gateway to analytics.

How to Access Your Instagram Analytics Dashboard

Finding your analytics (which Instagram calls "Insights") is straightforward once your professional account is set up. You can access them in a couple of ways:

• From your profile: Tap the "Professional dashboard" link directly below your bio. Then, look for the "Account Insights" section and tap "See all."
• From the menu: Tap the menu icon in the top-right of your profile, then tap "Insights."

This will take you to your main Insights overview page. From here, you can set the timeframe you want to analyze, typically defaulting to the "Last 30 days." You can change this to view the last 7, 14, or even 90 days of performance data to spot trends over different periods.

Understanding Your Key Performance Metrics

The Instagram Insights dashboard is divided into three main categories: Accounts Reached, Accounts Engaged, and Total Followers. Let’s break down what each of these sections tells you about your performance.

1. Accounts Reached: Who Is Seeing Your Content?

This section tells you about the total number of unique accounts that have seen your content. It’s the best measure of your overall brand awareness and discovery on the platform.

• Reach vs. Impressions: It's important not to confuse these two. Reach is the number of unique accounts that saw your content. Impressions is the total number of times your content was seen. If one person sees your post three times, that’s 1 reach and 3 impressions. A high number of impressions relative to your reach suggests your existing audience is seeing your content multiple times.
• Follower vs. Non-Follower Reach: This is a crucial metric for growth. It shows you how many of the people seeing your content are already following you versus how many are new. If your non-follower reach is high, it means your content is successfully appearing on the Explore page, in hashtag feeds, or being shared, which is fantastic for attracting new followers.
• Top Content by Reach: Instagram will show you a ranked list of your top posts, Stories, and Reels based on the number of accounts they reached. Pay close attention to this. The content attracting the most eyeballs is your "top-of-funnel" content - it hooks new people in. Analyze these posts to understand what topics, formats, or visual styles are broadening your appeal.

2. Accounts Engaged: Who Is Interacting With Your Content?

"Engagement" is the holy grail for many creators. This metric tracks how many unique accounts liked, commented, saved, or shared your content. An engaged audience is one that is paying attention and finds your content valuable.

• Breaking Down Engagement:
• Top Content by Engagement: Similar to the reach section, this area shows you which posts sparked the most interaction. Your most-saved post tells you what your audience finds most useful, while your most-commented post tells you what topics get them talking. Use these insights to guide your future content calendar.

3. Total Followers: Understanding Your Audience Demographics

Growing your follower count is great, but knowing who those followers are is even better. This dashboard gives you a demographic breakdown of your audience, allowing you to tailor your content with pinpoint accuracy.

• Follower Growth: This chart tracks your daily follows and unfollows. Look for spikes in follows. Did a specific Reel go viral on that day? Did you run a giveaway or get featured by another account? Pinpointing what causes follower growth helps you replicate that success.
• Top Locations: See which cities and countries your followers are from. This insight can help you schedule posts in appropriate time zones, create geographically relevant content, or even inform where you might host an event or focus your ad targeting.
• Age Range and Gender: Are you talking to Gen Z, Millennials, or an older demographic? Knowing the age and gender of your audience helps you refine your brand voice, tone, and visual style. For example, the memes and slang that resonate with a 20-year-old audience might not connect with a 45-year-old one.
• Most Active Times: This is one of the most actionable pieces of data in your entire dashboard. It shows you the days and hours when your followers are most active on Instagram. To maximize your initial reach and engagement, schedule your content to go live about 30-60 minutes before these peak times. This gives the algorithm time to start distributing your post just as your audience is logging on.

Analyzing Individual Post Analytics

Beyond the main dashboard, you can view analytics for every individual post, Story, and Reel you publish. This is where you can see a micro-level view of what works for a specific piece of content.

How to see analytics for a specific post or Reel:

Navigate to the post or Reel in your grid and tap the "View insights" link below the image or video. This will bring up a detailed breakdown.

Metrics for Posts & Reels:

• Accounts Reached: How many unique people saw this piece of content?
• Likes, Comments, Saves, Shares: The core engagement metrics.
• Profile Activity: This shows actions people took after seeing your post. It includes Profile Visits, Follows, and Website Taps (if you have a link in your bio). This is key for understanding if your content is successfully driving people to learn more about you.
• For Reels: You’ll also see Plays (total views) and Initial Plays vs. Replays, which can indicate if your video was engaging enough for people to watch it again.

How to see analytics on Stories:

Open your own active Story and swipe up, or go to your archived stories and open one to look at insights. It'll show you performance for two weeks since its publication.

Metrics for Stories:

• Accounts Reached: The number of unique people who saw your Story.
• Replies: The total number of responses you received on your story.
• Navigation: This is a powerful set of metrics that tell you how people moved through your Story sequence. It includes Taps Forward, Taps Back, Next Story (swipes to someone else’s Story), and Exited. A high number of "Taps Back" could mean the content was so interesting people wanted to see it again. A high number of "Exits" is a red flag that the content wasn't engaging.
• Sticker Taps: Here's where you'll find the info for your polls, quizzes, links, and everything else in between. Your followers love engaging with these features if used wisely - this'll show info on which ones they're finding most relevant.

Putting It All Together: A Simple Action Plan

Data is useless without action. Here’s a simple routine to turn these numbers into an unstoppable content strategy:

1. Weekly Check-in: Once a week, spend 15 minutes in your Insights dashboard. What was your top-performing post by engagement? What about reach? Note the format (e.g., carousel, Reel, single image), the topic, and the caption style.
2. Identify Patterns: After a few weeks, patterns will emerge. Do your carousel posts teaching a 5-step process always get the most saves? Do your behind-the-scenes Reels get the most comments?
3. Double Down on What Works: Take what you've learned and build upon it. If your audience loves tutorials, create a weekly tutorial series. If they engage with Q&As, make it a regular feature in your Stories. This is the surest way to growth instead of just posting and hoping something finds you luck.
4. Experiment and Test: Use your top performers as a baseline, but don't be afraid to test new ideas. Drop in one new content format or topic per week and carefully watch its analytics. It might just be your next breakthrough.

Final Thoughts

Reviewing your Instagram analytics is the single best way to transform your content from a guessing game into a repeatable growth strategy. By regularly checking your reach, engagement, and audience demographics, you'll gain a deep understanding of what your followers love and how to create more of it.

While Instagram's native analytics offer powerful insights into your on-platform performance, you really have all kinds of other important information scattered everywhere - in Google Analytics, your email platform, or an e-commerce dashboard. To truly simplify the analysis process for everything, we built Graphed for non-technical pros to consolidate these disparate reports with ease. After connecting to all these types of data sources, you can ask in plain English, "show me which Instagram campaigns drove the most Shopify sales last month." Immediately, you will get dashboards and reports with all the right information.