Metrics to use for Instagram success
Which metrics can you use to measure how successful your Instagram marketing campaigns are and identify areas for improvement?
Conversions
When people are directed to your website through Instagram, they are called ‘warm’ leads. From this point on, it becomes the job of your website to convert them into firm or ‘hot’ leads. You can use a sales funnel to determine how many warm leads are converted to actual sales and to help you plan next steps.
Sales Funnel = saw content – started following – contacted – purchase
Add these figures to your spreadsheets to achieve greater insight into how well your Instagram is performing and at which stages you are losing prospects and to make changes for future improvements. Don’t forget to also take a look at insights on Instagram for more useful analytics.
2. Growth Rates
Use the growth rate of followers to develop growth goals.
Your profile bio will show you how many followers you have on your Instagram account. Total followers doesn’t mean much in itself. The rate of profile growth tends to ebb and flow in line with events such as mentions, embedded posts and unsubscribed people.
However, it is possible to use tools, such as Google Sheets, to track your follower numbers over time. This will give you a clearer insight into your follower growth rate. First work out the difference in follower numbers between the current month and the previous month. Hopefully, this will give you a positive number (you are losing followers if not). This will tell you how many followers you have gained that month. Next, work this out as a percentage increase.
Number of new followers divided by the total number of followers the previous month x 100 = percentage growth.
Do this sum every month for an idea of how fast your community is growing. It is at this point you can identify strengths and weaknesses, as well as set growth goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track your progress and ensure you stay on top of things.
3. Engagement
Gain insight into the sentiment of your followers by tracking comments and engagement.
While likes on Instagram indicates someone is interested in what you have shared, it doesn’t give any detailed information about exactly what it is about your post that they like and why.
Conversely, properly engaged followers will take the time to comment. Not only does this give you a better idea what people are responding to, but it will also make your post more visible to others.
Using a tool like Simply Measured will help you to track comments and likes. It provides analytics, including statistics, so you can track how these change over time and depending upon the type of content you are sharing.
Use a spreadsheet to record average numbers of likes and comments for each photo and determine if there is a downward or upward trend. You can go further than this by also analysing specific comments using keywords.
4. Click-Through Rates
Finally, measure referral traffic by identifying your click-through rates from various locations. This is easy to do using Instagram insights, which tells you how may times links on your profile are clicked.