How to Analyze Your Instagram Content Performance

You’re creating great content and you’re posting at the best time to reach your audience. So how do you determine if your content is performing well? Instagram offers comprehensive analytics to all business and creator accounts. By using these metrics you can determine which content is crushing it and which isn’t doing so great, and predict what kind of content will perform well with your target audience.

Understanding Instagram Analytics

There are three main components to Instagram Analytics: Reach, Engagement, and Growth. All three provide useful information that you can leverage to optimize your content, and we're going to guide you through each component.

Overview

If you tap "Insights" on your main feed, it will take you to this Insights page:

From the main Insights page, you have an overview of your analytics. Then you can tap each section to see a more comprehensive review.

1. Reach

How many accounts are seeing your content? Reach shows you the number of unique accounts that are seeing your content, including followers as well as non-followers.

As you can see, it shows the top cities, countries, age ranges, and genders that you are reaching. It also breaks down reach by type of content. This account has the best reach with posts, followed closely by Reels.

Not satisfied with your reach?

Take a look at your captions, visuals, videos, and hashtags; use this as an opportunity to experiment with your content and see what performs well. Level up your captions, and post a variety of forms of content including Stories, Reels, and posts. And make sure you’re using the best hashtags for your niche and audience.

Are you really happy with your reach?

Consider boosting your posts to reach an even wider audience.

2. Engagement

How many accounts are interacting with your content? Instagram keeps track of your Engaged Audience, which is defined as, "the number of accounts that have interacted with your content, including promoted content."

Interactions include likes, saves, comments, shares, and replies.

Your Engagement insights show you the demographics of your engaged audience, including top countries, cities, age ranges, and gender.

Engagement insights also show you which individual posts have performed the best.

You can use this information to see if your audience is more engaged with a certain type of content, like Reels or posts. You can also look at the individual content that performed the best and try to emulate it in future posts. Did you ask questions in the caption that encouraged your audience to leave a comment? Or did a certain topic resonate with your followers?

This is valuable information you can use to optimize the content you create.

3. Growth

How many accounts are following you? The Growth insights show your net growth, which is the number of new followers minus the accounts that unfollowed you.

Growth insights also show you the date range for when you gained and lost followers. And it lets you see the demographics for your followers, including age, gender, city, and country.

Insider tip:

Growth is important, but it’s not everything. It’s better to have a smaller number of followers who are your target demographic and engage with your content, rather than an influx of followers who have nothing to do with your brand and will never engage. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to followers, so don’t get too hung up on vanity metrics.

Now that you understand how to access your Instagram Insights, let’s look at how to implement them.

How to Use Instagram Insights to Optimize your content

Look at your strongest areas

You can learn a lot from your strengths. Look at the topics, captions, and visuals for your strongest performing content and try to incorporate those elements into future posts. If Reels are reaching the largest audience and have a high level of engagement, then consider posting even more of them.

Learn from your worst-performing content

Is the quality of this content as high as your top-performing posts, or was it hastily thrown together and posted at the last minute? Plan your content ahead of time to ensure that it is always your best work. Is the style of caption different from your better-performing content? Or did the topic you posted about not resonate with your followers?

Although you can learn a lot from your mistakes, don't be too hard on yourself. Consider it a learning experience, and use poor-performing content to help you create stellar future content that does perform well.

Don’t be afraid to experiment!

Social media is always evolving and adding new ways for you to create content and reach new accounts.

Have you been scared to try video content? Check out the article, How to Use Instagram Video for Your Small Business! You never know what will capture your audience’s attention until you create it.

Use your analytics to make informed decisions about the content that you create, but don’t forget to have fun and experiment too.

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