Instagram Analytics Report: Tips, Tools and Best Practices for Building a Great Report

Author's avatar Reporting UPDATED Oct 29, 2022 PUBLISHED Dec 10, 2021 9 minutes read

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    Peter Caputa

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    Wondering how to build a comprehensive report on your company’s / client’s Instagram account performance?

    As a marketer, you can’t only provide an overview of your company’s / client’s Instagram profile performance, but you also need to provide more advanced details and insights, such as audience growth, audience retention, competitor analysis, conversion rate, and more.

    All in all, a comprehensive Instagram report should give your clients/managers a peek behind the curtains while also helping them to understand which steps need to be taken to further improve the existing social marketing strategy.

    In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know to create an easy-to-understand Instagram report — from key metrics and KPI to include to tips and best practices for building a report.

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    What Is an Instagram Analytics Report?

    An Instagram analytics report should include key metrics that highlight how your content performs and who your Instagram audience is.

    This report typically includes the following information:

    • General profile overview. Number of followers, impressions, profile views and any clicks to website.
    • Audience demographics metrics. Top countries, age, gender, and your most active times.
    • Post summary metrics. Likes, comments, engagement rate, etc.
    • Instagram Stories overview. Impressions, reach, replies etc,
    • Top performing posts and top performing Instagram Stories.

    Your Instagram Analytics Report breaks down the performance of your account through a variety of metrics, which can help you identify areas where you can improve.

    What Metrics and KPIs Should You Include in an Instagram Analytics Report?

    In order to determine which content works best for your brand and how you can better engage with your audience, you need to understand what’s going on behind the scenes of your account.

    Having that in mind, here are some important metrics and KPIs that you should be tracking:

    Followers

    This is pretty straightforward – it’s one of the basic Instagram success metrics. It tells you how many followers you have at any given time. Your goal is to keep growing your follower base by posting interesting content and engaging with people who might be interested in what you have to offer.

    Related: 18 Proven B2B Instagram Marketing Strategies

    Engagement Rate

    Engagement refers to how many people like and comment on your content. These numbers can be deceiving: a post that gets a lot of likes and comments may seem like a success, but if those interactions occur minutes or days after you post it, they don’t mean as much as instant engagement does.

    Also, you can measure engagement in two different ways:

    • Engagement rate by followers. This metric shows the number of people who have engaged with your posts. Engagement rate helps you to figure out what kind of content your followers like. It can help you decide on your Instagram strategy in regards to making relevant content for your audience.
    • Engagement rate by reach. The average engagement rate per post by reach is calculated as a percentage of sum of all your likes and comments divided by a number of posts, all divided by reach. It’s very helpful in determining the share of reactions in overall reach.

    Related: 16 Ways To Measure Social Media Engagement Using Only Google Analytics

    Website Clicks

    This is the easiest way to find out how much traffic you generated to your website from your Instagram account.

    Instagram Post Saves

    Do you want to know if people find your content useful? No problem. This metric shows you how many users saved one or more of your posts to their profile.

    Instagram Story Reach Rate

    The story reach rate is a relatively new Instagram metric that indicates what percentage of your followers saw your last 10 stories. It’s calculated by dividing your stories’ viewers by your total number of followers. To get a percentage, multiply the number by 100.

    Post Impressions

    This metric tracks how many times your posts have been seen by others since you created them. If one person has seen your post 15 times, this will be counted as 1 reach and 15 impressions.

    Top Posts

    This metric shows you how many times each post has been viewed in the last 28 days. It’s helpful to know which posts are performing well in the short term, but it’s also important to understand what’s working over a longer period of time. That’s why the Top Posts metric includes both views and reach over time.

    Email/Call Clicks

    These metrics refer to the number of times someone clicked on an email or phone number that you included in your profile bio. Those could be very important leads for your business.

    How to Create an Instagram Analytics Report

    Regardless of the stakeholders that need to see the report and the tools you use to create it, in order to build a great Instagram Analytics report, you need to focus on 3 key things:

    Establish the Right Instagram KPIs and Metrics

    With the immense amount of data that Instagram provides, it is common to get lost in all the information or even start focusing on the wrong metrics.

    In order to understand how well their campaigns or social media posts are performing and how to further adjust your strategy, you need to establish social media marketing KPIs and metrics that are aligned with your business goals.

    For example, you may be tempted to just show a simple follower count for an account from the Analytics dashboard. But if your goal is to increase sales from Instagram, then this specific number may not be as important as showing engagement rate or number of clicks in your profile bio.

    When determining Instagram metrics and KPIs, think of the information your clients/managers want to obtain from these reports. Typically, the purpose of an Instagram report is to uncover what the target customers want (including which content) and expect from your client on social media.

    Typically, clients/managers want to see the following:

    • Which campaigns were successful and unsuccessful?
    • What is the optimal time to post and reach more people?
    • How many times a day/week should you post new content on Instagram?
    • What kind of content does your audience prefer: videos, carousels, or images?
    • What communities you need to create around your brand?
    • What type of messages are highly valued by your followers: informational, product-oriented, emotional or something else entirely?

    Include a Competitors Audit

    There are two main reasons for conducting an Instagram competitor analysis.

    1. Competitor analysis will help you get a better understanding of the current state of your niche, the community you’re targeting, and things you can do to improve your own channel.
    2. Competitor analysis will help you gather the insights you need to create an effective Instagram marketing strategy (or optimize your existing strategy).

    When doing a competitors audit on Instagram, make sure you do the following:

    • Analyze your competitors’ profiles. Include the number of followers they have, how their profile image and bio lookslike, and the strategies they are using to advertise their business.
    • Describe their profile, theme, bio, and CTA used. Compare this info with your/your client’s profile.
    • Analyze your competitors’ content strategy. Analyze how they write and the type of content they post. try to analyze their engagement in regarding to the type of content they are posting (do they have more Instagram Stories, reels, or are they posting just images?).
    • Identify the influencers your competitors are working with. Analyze how influencers that work with your competirors impact their business.

    Add Actionable Insights

    Data without insight is worthless, therefore, your Instagram Analytics report can’t be complete without actionable insights.

    Insights work as a blueprint and describe what should be done and how it should be done (with exact steps) to achieve success. Here are some examples of insights you can set in your Instagram reports:

    • If you want to increase your number of followers, post more video content. Based on the data collected, your audience reacts best to video content like reels and carousels.
    • If you want to grow engagement, use better CTAs on your posts or host a giveaway.
    • To make more followers interact with your brand, use Instagram Stories and post Q&As, polls and similar.

    Free Instagram Analytics Report Templates

    If you don’t want to build a report from scratch, here are some prebuilt social media report templates you can download right now – and for free.

    Social Media (Instagram Overview) Report

    To track your Instagram business performance, it’s important to look at all the factors that affect account growth. This Instagram dashboard will help you monitor essential metrics such as:

    • Instagram impressions
    • Instagram activity overview
    • New followers
    • New posts
    • Following vs Followers

    Social Media (Instagram Posts Drilldown) Report

    This Instagram reporting dashboard will help you monitor the overall performance of your account and drill down into specific metrics such as:

    • New post (count)
    • Instagram followers by age group
    • All time new post performance
    • Profile clicks
    • New posts by media type
    • New posts performance

    Social Media (Instagram Followers Drilldown)

    This Instagram dashboard template will help you to track and measure your Instagram follower’s productivity and performance drilldown metrics. Learn how your Instagram posts and followers count are performing by tracking metrics such as:

    • New Instagram followers
    • Followers by country
    • Profile clicks
    • Followers by gender
    • Followers by age group
    • Followers by city

    Optimize Your Instagram Strategy with Databox

    Sure, Instagram’s built-in analytics system is a great way to stay up to date on the performance of your account, but when it comes to comprehensive and actionable social media reporting for your business, you need something much more robust.

    From tracking post performance, and trends in hashtag usage, to analyzing audience engagement and competitor data, Databox is a social media reporting tool that will help you go beyond reporting and create actionable reports that drive your social media strategy.

    We are already helping thousands of businesses to optimize their strategies and grow their brands across social media, so what are your waiting for? Sign up for a free-forever trial now!

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    Author's avatar
    Article by
    Djordje Cvijovic

    Grew up as a Copywriter. Evolved into the Content creator. Somewhere in between, I fell in love with numbers that can portray the world as well as words or pictures. A naive thinker who believes that the creative economy is the most powerful force in the world!

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