How to Pull Instagram Analytics

Chasing likes and followers on Instagram without looking at your data is like driving with your eyes closed. You can track every tap, save, and share to see what’s working and what’s not, but first, you have to get the data out. This guide will walk you through exactly how to pull your analytics directly from the Instagram app and explore other tools for more advanced reporting. We’ll cover what to track, how to find it, and what to do with the information once you have it.

Why Your Instagram Analytics Matter

Before pulling your data, you need to know what you’re looking for. Your analytics tell a story about your audience and your content. Tracking the right metrics helps you understand your audience, refine your content strategy, and prove the value of your social media efforts.

Key Metrics to Track

Your goals will determine which metrics are most important, but here are the key performance indicators (KPIs) most businesses should monitor:

Reach vs. Impressions: Reach is the number of unique accounts that saw your content, while Impressions are the total number of times your content was viewed. High impressions but low reach could indicate your existing followers are seeing your content multiple times.
Engagement Rate: This is the percentage of your audience that interacted with your post (likes, comments, shares, saves). You can calculate it as (Total Engagements ÷ Followers) x 100 or (Total Engagements ÷ Reach) x 100. The second formula gives a truer sense of how engaging your content was to the people who actually saw it.
Follower Growth: A steady increase in followers shows your content is resonating and reaching new people. More importantly, look at the net follower change (Follows minus Unfollows) to get an accurate picture.
Saves: When a user saves your post, it’s a strong signal that they found it valuable enough to revisit later. This is a powerful metric for educational or evergreen content.
Profile & Website Clicks: These metrics measure how effectively your content drives users to take the next step, whether it's learning more about you on your profile or visiting your website via the link in your bio.
Story Metrics: In Stories, pay attention to the Completion Rate (how many people watched your entire Story) and the Exit Rate (where people drop off). Taps back could mean a slide was confusing or so interesting people wanted to see it again, while taps forward suggest a slide was uninteresting.
Reels Plays: For Reels, the initial number of Plays shows how well it's being distributed by the algorithm. Combining this with engagement metrics like shares and saves helps you understand which Reels are gaining traction.

How to Pull Analytics Directly From the Instagram App

Instagram's native analytics tool, called "Insights," is the fastest and easiest way to get started. It’s built directly into the app and provides a solid overview of your performance.

Step 1: Switch to a Professional Account

Before you can access Insights, you need either a Creator or Business account. If you're still on a Personal account, making the switch is free and only takes a minute.

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

Note: Instagram will only start collecting data from the day you switch. You won't be able to see historical analytics for the time you were on a Personal account.

Step 2: Access Your Professional Dashboard

Once you have a professional account, a "Professional dashboard" link will appear at the top of your profile. Tap this to open your main analytics hub.

From here, you’ll see the main "Account insights" section. Tap "See all" to enter the full analytics overview. This dashboard is typically broken down into a few key areas.

Accounts Reached

This section gives you an overview of the unique accounts that have seen your content. You can tap into this report to see:

Your overall reach compared to the previous period.
A breakdown of followers vs. non-followers that you reached.
Top-performing content types (Posts, Stories, Reels) based on reach.
Demographic information about the audience you reached, including their top cities, countries, age ranges, and gender.

Accounts Engaged

This report focuses on interactions. Here you can find:

The total number of accounts that engaged with your content.
A demographic breakdown of the audience that engaged (similar to the Reached report).
A detailed count of engagement actions like likes, comments, saves, and shares.
A ranking of your top content based on engagement metrics.

Total Followers

This gives you a dedicated view of your audience growth and composition:

A chart showing follower change over the last 7, 14, 30, or 90 days, including follows and unfollows.
Demographics of your current follower base, such as top locations, age ranges, and most active times. This is incredibly useful for scheduling your posts when your audience is most likely to be online.

Step 3: Analyze Analytics for Individual Posts, Stories, and Reels

While the overall dashboard is useful for big-picture trends, you’ll often want to see how a specific piece of content performed. You can access this data directly from the content itself.

For Posts: Go to the post you want to analyze and tap the "View insights" link below the image or video.
For Stories: Open one of your active stories and swipe up. If the story has expired, you can find it in your Archive and tap on it to view its insights.
For Reels: Open the Reel and tap the three-dot menu, then select "View insights."

These individual content reports show specific metrics, like how many people the post reached who weren't already following you, or how many people discovered your Reel from the "Reels" tab.

Limitations of Native Instagram Analytics

The built-in Insights tool is great for quick check-ins, but it has some significant limitations, especially for teams that need to create detailed reports.

No Data Export: You can't export your analytics as a CSV or Excel file. Everything has to be viewed within the app, which makes it nearly impossible to analyze long-term trends or create custom dashboards.
Limited Date Ranges: Most data is limited to the last 90 days. If you want to compare this quarter's performance to the same quarter last year, the native tool won't let you.
Difficult Cross-Platform Analysis: The data sits entirely within Instagram. If you want to see how your Instagram performance contributed to overall marketing goals alongside data from your email list, Google Ads, or website, you have to manually record the numbers and combine them in a spreadsheet.
Surface-Level Insights: While useful, the built-in analytics don't offer deeper insights like competitive benchmarking, hashtag performance tracking, or optimal posting times based on historical engagement patterns.

Alternative Ways to Pull and Analyze Instagram Data

When you outgrow the native Insights tool, you have a few options for pulling your data out for deeper analysis and reporting.

Meta Business Suite

For businesses that also manage a Facebook Page, Meta Business Suite is the next logical step. It's a free platform that centralizes a lot of the management and analytics for both Facebook and Instagram.

In Business Suite's "Insights" tab, you'll find more robust views of your Instagram data. The main advantages are:

Longer date ranges: You can view data beyond the 90-day limit of the mobile app.
Basic data export: Business Suite allows you to export some charts and data tables as a PNG or CSV file, giving you a way to pull the raw numbers into a spreadsheet or presentation.
Side-by-side comparison: You can see your Facebook and Instagram performance metrics in one place.

It can feel a bit clunky to navigate, but it’s a necessary tool if you need to export data without paying for a third-party service.

Manual Tracking with Spreadsheets

The time-tested (and time-consuming) method for many marketers is to manually pull data into a spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Excel. This often involves checking your Instagram Insights weekly, logging the key numbers in a spreadsheet, and using formulas to calculate things like weekly engagement rates or month-over-month follower growth.

While this process gives you complete control over your reporting, it’s prone to human error and takes hours every month that could be better spent on creating content.

Final Thoughts

Pulling your Instagram analytics is the first step toward building a data-informed content strategy. The native Insights tool gives you more than enough information to understand your audience and see which content resonates, allowing you to stop guessing and start making strategic decisions.

As your reporting needs grow, you might find yourself stuck in a loop of downloading CSVs and manually VLOOKUP-ing data across different spreadsheets. It’s tedious and slows you down. At Graphed, we automate all of it. We connect directly to your marketing and sales platforms - from Instagram and Google Analytics to Shopify and Salesforce - so you can create real-time, shareable dashboards just by describing what you want to see. This turns hours of manual report-building into a quick conversation, freeing you up to focus on the insights, not the data entry.