Are you tracking the right Instagram KPIs for your business? Social media platforms are the go-to places for businesses to grow online. In 2021, over 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide.

This figure is projected to increase to almost six billion in 2027. This increase in the number of social media users is thought to be due to an increase in the number of mobile phone users across the globe.

This has led to an average increase in the number of hours spent on social media platforms by social media users. Averagely, internet users spend around 147 minutes per day on social media.

This is good news for every business owner or marketer using social media to build brand awareness. However small or established your business is, Instagram is one of the best social media platforms, if not the best social media platform, to build your brand online.

Data shows that there are over 1 billion Instagram accounts registered worldwide.

With 59% of adults using Instagram and 38% of that figure logging into Instagram multiple times a day, it is safe to say that Instagram marketing should be given high priority in every social media marketing strategy.

While growth on Instagram is highly dependent on data, tracking the right Instagram metrics is the key to sustaining that growth. In this post, you will learn the top 10 Instagram KPIs you need to track in 2022 to keep your business profitable.

What are KPIs?

KPIs are measurable values that demonstrate performance over time for a specific objective. They are quantifiable measures to show how effectively a business or marketer meets its targets and objectives.  

Why are KPIs important?

Businesses use KPIs to evaluate success at reaching targets. They are often seen as scorecards for understanding and tracking the progress of any campaign.

If you measure the same KPIs month over month, you’ll detect patterns that can help you grow your business or optimize your campaign for growth.

These patterns could help you predict your slowest quarter and use that time to focus on more important tasks. You only need to keep track of a few KPIs to monitor your company’s health.  

KPIs drive progress by setting targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help people or businesses stay on track enough to make better decisions continuously. 

How do you choose KPIs?

The best approaches to setting or picking KPIs are not far from setting goals and objectives or asking important questions which help you pick milestones that measure progress.

These questions are important because they will drive you toward picking metrics or defining points along the journey that indicates progress. 

Why is it important to analyze Instagram KPIs?

 Analyzing Instagram KPIs help you ensure that you are not wasting time, resources, and energy on Instagram strategies that are not converting or directly linked to your corporate/ business goals.

Most importantly, you want to clearly show how your Instagram advertising or organic page activity is adding value to your whole marketing campaign in terms of growth, engagement, and revenue over time.

What are Instagram KPIs?

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as a way of measuring a company’s progress toward the goal it is trying to achieve. Instagram KPIs are set metrics used to measure a company’s progress on Instagram.

Why track Instagram KPIs?

There’s a saying that states that what doesn’t get measured can’t be improved. Many businesses use KPIs to track the overall performance of their digital marketing strategy.

In the case of Instagram marketing, KPIs are used to measure the success and impact of your marketing strategy and campaigns on your business. Tracking the right Instagram metrics allows you to:

1. Stay on track with your Instagram marketing campaigns and make necessary adjustments:

As with every campaign, every Instagram strategy should have an end goal. This could be sales, leads, engagement, or brand awareness. Goal setting determines the kind of KPIs you would track, which would eventually lead to Instagram growth.

If your Instagram marketing campaigns perform poorly, you must go back to the drawing board and make the needed adjustments to improve them.

2. Identify trends over time

When you constantly analyze data, trends and patterns start to emerge. With the right social media KPIs, a consistent path to your marketing goal can be easily spotted.

On Instagram, tracking trends is paramount for growth. Sometimes, it could be that a certain type of content that increases follower growth or a certain blend of hashtags increase engagement.

When you track the right KPIs, you can easily spot bottlenecks that may prevent you from achieving your goals.

3. Monitor your progress

Without a KPI, it’s impossible to know whether your business is growing. Business growth is a direct result of consistently hitting KPIs. The same is true for Instagram.

4. Plan predicted growth

When your KPIs are specific, measurable, achievable, reliable, and timely, you can easily project your growth in 6 months or even 12 months and plan for ways to accommodate that growth.

Best Instagram account for businesses in 2022

Before you set and track important Instagram metrics, you need to ensure you use the right Instagram account for your business. Currently, Instagram offers users three different types of accounts;

1. Personal account
2. Creator account
3. Business account

Instagram Personal account

As the name implies, this account is for Instagram users who don’t plan to use Instagram for business purposes. When starting out on Instagram as a new user, you are given a personal account by default.

This account type doesn’t have Instagram analytics. This means you can’t track any Instagram metric nor does it allow third-party access to social media analytics.

Aside from that, Instagram’s personal account profile doesn’t have contact buttons, gift cards or delivery stickers, or swipe-up functionality on Instagram stories. It doesn’t support the scheduling of future posts using Facebook creator studio.

But personal accounts do have some benefits. For example, they can access the entire Reels and Stories music library. Also, only personal accounts can be set up as private on Instagram.

Instagram creator account

The Instagram creator account is a type of professional account made for content creators. Content creators are typically influencers, public figures, and celebrities who don’t sell products or services as business owners.

Creator accounts have an Instagram insights tab. This gives creators insights into their follower growth rate, engagement rate, and other Instagram metrics. Other Instagram metrics can be accessed using Facebook creator studio.

Unfortunately, Instagram creator accounts do not have API access. This means they can’t be used with third-party social media analytics. Message filtering is also a feature of Instagram’s creator account.

Creators are given the option of filtering messages with 3 tabs:

• Primary
• General
• Requests

Creator accounts give options for displaying your contact information. You may choose to display your email and phone number. The option of displaying a physical address is reserved for business accounts.

Instagram business account

The Instagram business account was created especially for businesses, organizations, corporations, firms, etc. This account is similar to Instagram’s creator account. The differences are:

• Instagram business accounts allow API access. This means they allow 3rd-party Instagram analytics tools.
• The Instagram business profile allows displaying contact information, including a physical address.
• A variety of call-to-actions is available to business accounts. Call-to-action such as; order food, book now, and reserve are available for businesses to explore.

Track your Instagram KPIs with Porter:

Here are the benefits of using Porter to track your Instagram KPIs:

• Porter Metrics Instagram Reporting tool is a no-code data reporting tool marketers have used to generate beautiful conversion-focused reports.  

• With Porter Metrics Instagram reporting tool, you’ll be able to set up instantly without any need for codes, developers or analysts. 

• This IG reporting tool makes data visualization a lot more interesting, so you can access and view your reports within the tools you are already familiar with. Tools such as Google Studio, Google Sheets, Analytic, and the likes.

• Interestingly, you’ll be able to access an entire bank of beautiful templates you’ll use to create convincing reports your clients and investors will not be able to resist.

• Get a free custom report or Schedule a call here if you want us to generate your first few amazing reports. Interestingly, the Porter Metrics team has made it so that you can do it yourself once you land on the website. It’s easy as ABC.

Features

Porter Metrics Instagram reporting tool features 80+ customizable report templates to help you quickly whip up your reports for presentation. You can do all of this without having to write a single code or have an analyst or a developer looking over your shoulder. 

To sweeten the deal further, If you schedule a call with us here, we will quickly generate your reports for you – in line with core business needs and details you want to understand or extract from your business data. 

Our IG reports have been known to help marketers and businesses understand the performance of various Instagram pages and advertising campaigns. With this report, you will be able to see important details clearly while understanding important aspects of your business to scale on for growth. 

Pricing

Porter Metric’s Instagram reporting tool pricing is pocket friendly and absolutely unbelievable. From a $15 monthly subscription plan you can get a handful of value that no competitor provides in the reporting tool space.

 As always, experts recommend the mid or top tier packages which are known to give a lot more umph and value for money – by the mid-tier, I mean the $30-$80 per month plan which will give you access to a lot more than is available in the basic solo plan.

Below is a visual depiction of Porter Metric’s Pricing Plan.

Now that you’ve seen how cheap our pricing is – let’s get you started on a 14 days free trial

Top Instagram KPIs to track in 2022

1. Reach

Instagram reach refers to the number of unique visitors that view your Instagram posts. Emphasis is placed on “unique visitors” because Instagram will only acknowledge a post viewed by a user and count it as a reach even if that user sees the post multiple times within a given period of time.

This example sums it all up:

Unique visitor sees a cat post on Instagram = 1 unique reach

Unique visitor sees the same cat post multiple times = 1 unique reach

Now, you may be wondering and thinking… What’s the difference between Instagram reach and Instagram impressions?

Let’s clear the air on that. Impressions refer to every view your post gets on Instagram. This means if Mr A views a cat post on Instagram, it will be recorded as an impression.

If Mr A views the same cat post 5 times, Instagram records those views as 5 impressions. Tracking your Instagram reach is very important because marketing aims to ensure lots of people see your offerings, products and services.

The fewer that see them, the lesser the chance the business acquires leads or customers. If your reach isn’t as high as you would want it to be, then you need to tweak your current Instagram marketing strategy.

But, before you tweak anything, you have to understand this fact about Instagram’s algorithm; Organically, your post won’t reach 100% of your followers. It is said to be so because Instagram wants you to pay for ads.

This hasn’t been proven true, nor has Instagram officially released a statement to address this. But, observation through analytics shows us that our posts won’t reach 100% of our followers no matter what we do.

Topics that tend to get more reach are usually entertaining and highly educational posts. Company profiles normally have less reach. Having known these, if you feel that your reach is below par, then;

• Your post is probably not entertaining nor educational
• Your Instagram content isn’t written for your ideal customer
• You’re probably posting inappropriate content
• You’re probably using bots to grow your page.

So, how do you increase your reach?

1. Create content that resonates with your ideal Instagram audience
2. Block bots and inactive users
3. Post regularly on your Instagram account
4. Share your feed posts in stories
5. Use call to action in your posts
6. Post reels regularly

2. Story views

The Instagram story was launched after its closest competitor, Snapchat launched theirs. Well, the launch was successful as there are two times more stories posted by brands on Instagram than on Snapchat.

One of the best ways to build a relationship with your audience is to track Instagram story views. The view count, taps forward, and taps back will tell you what really resonates.

A high story view metric indicates that your audience loves your brand and resonates with its content. Instagram story views rate is calculated by tracking a metric called watch-through rate.

Watch-through rate gives a percentage of those who view your stories till the end. Mathematically, watch-through rate = final story views/first story view x 100

To get other advanced story views metrics, try porter metrics, a no-code solution with 600+ custom metrics to help you generate more concise reports from Google data studio in less than 5 seconds.

3. Reel engagement

Tracking reel engagement in 2022 is one of the smartest things a marketer or business owner can do. The Instagram reel is the fastest-growing feature on Instagram.

From engaging tutorials to product launches, Reels are entertaining and engaging – and great for increasing brand awareness because of their “viral nature”.

Natively, reels have more reach than any other post type on Instagram, hence, it has become a must-track KPI for any business.

Measuring engagement on your reels is as easy as taking a walk in the park especially if you use porter metrics to create your marketing reports. To track the engagement rates in your reels, the following metrics need to be monitored:

• Comments
• Likes
• Reach
• Views

All of these metrics including 600+ custom metrics can be gotten from Porter metrics.

4. Sales

Monitoring sales metrics for businesses is crucial to success. Instagram has a number of features that businesses can use to drive sales, including integrated product tagging and creator-led shopping.

Instagram has made it easy to shop on the app and created a check-out system that allows users to pay directly. This makes sales an Instagram KPI you must track.

To increase sales of your products, especially if you sell physical products, it’s advised you take full advantage of Instagram e-commerce features such as:

• Instagram Feed Post Shopping
• Instagram Shops
• Instagram Stories Shopping
• Instagram Live Shopping
• IGTV and Instagram Reels Shopping
• Instagram Guides Shopping
• Instagram Shopping from Creators

5. Followers Growth

It’s generally accepted that paying attention to your Instagram followers or any other social media page is a waste of time. Some describe the “number of followers” as a vanity metric. Well, this could be wrong and right. It being right or wrong has more to do with the current state of your business.

The number of Instagram followers on your page shows how known your brand is. So it is important you track them. An individual with lots of Instagram followers is usually viewed as an authority or an expert.

Profile credit: Khaby Lame

The same applies to businesses. A business with lots of followers is usually perceived as a credible business, hence, this is one important Instagram KPI you must track.

How your brand is being perceived by the public directly impacts your revenue. The more people love your brand, the more you gain followers, and the more they buy your products or services.

How to grow your page followers

Your business Instagram content plays a big role in how many followers your page has. Aside from content, here are other ways to grow your page followers:

• Optimize your Instagram profile
• Post Instagram reels regularly
• Work with influencers
• Post consistently
• Collaborate with other brands
• Run Instagram ads
• Explore Instagram stories

6. Mentions

Instagram mentions are an important KPI that must be tracked by all businesses online. Mentions provide an opportunity to build your brand awareness. It can also be seen as a measure of your brand-building efforts.

This is because no one would bother mentioning your brand in a positive light if you aren’t already delivering excellent products or services. Tracking mentions also allows you to tackle negative reviews or mentions about your brand in a timely manner.

On October 11th, 2015, a technical glitch at Southwest airlines delayed about 800 flights. Passengers took the case up on social media and complained bitterly about the situation.

The social media team responded positively to every mention of the delay which turned out to be thousands. This was well received by people such that they started praising the social media team and the customer support they received from the airline.

This eventually stopped a catastrophic PR disaster. Tracking mentions of your business would help you build a stronger brand that will win the heart of your fans. Below is a list of some of the best social mention tools:

• Brand24
• Mention
• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• TweetDeck

7. Profile visits

This is a metric that shows the total number of Instagram users that have viewed or visited your profile over a period of time. This is an important Instagram KPI to track because it gives an overview of your:

Instagram search SEO – this shows your profile is well optimized for your business such that it pops up for keywords related to your business

Content strategy – if your content resonates with your target audience, your page is bound to get more reach, leading to more profile views and follows.

8. Best time to post

This is an Instagram KPI you should always track if you intend to grow on Instagram. Timing plays a big role in the performance of your post.

Posting at the right time allows you to reach your audience when they’re more likely to engage with your content rather than when they are distracted. Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes recent posts over older posts. This is because they want to keep people on the platform.

So, the algorithm keeps pushing newer posts for more reach to encourage more usage. As a business owner or marketer, you must keep posting regularly on Instagram to get prioritized.

So, when is the best time to post? The answer lies in your audience insights as it tells you when your audience are most likely to be online to see and engage with your contents. 

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post at other times, but a study showed that people interact more with content on Instagram during work-hours midday and mid-week.

Ultimately, the best time to post is determined by the data on your analytics. Follow it meticulously and optimize your posting time.

9. Website clicks

With this KPI, you can monitor how many people click on your website link to discover what motivates your audience. This can help you increase traffic to your landing pages or any other page you intend to send traffic to.

Keeping track of this metric makes it possible to generate more revenue for your business. Let’s assume you sell coaching services and your content drives more than 500 visits to your landing page weekly. With a 1% conversion rate, you can easily sign 5 clients weekly.

10. Engagement rate

Engagement rate tells you well your content resonates with your target audience. To measure this Instagram KPI, the following metrics have to be tracked:

• Likes
• Shares
• Comments
• Saves
• Video views

Your Instagram post engagement rate goes a long way in building your Instagram business page in the long run. When engagement rates are low (low likes, shares, saves and comments), your followers won’t grow, fewer people see your products and services, and you’ll generate fewer sales.

You need to work on your content strategy to boost engagement rates on your page. This means getting your customer avatar clearly spelt out. Only when you truly know the ideal customer can you create content that resonates with them.

Another way to boost engagements on Instagram is by posting Instagram reels regularly. Reels have been gaining traction for the past year and still gaining more till now.

Short video content is now being prioritized by the algorithm more than ever, hence, it’s imperative you jump on it while it lasts.

Conclusion

Tracking the right Instagram KPIs and getting a detailed report about your Instagram marketing efforts can be difficult. But, not for you. You’ve learned the right KPIs to track to boost your marketing efforts. To recap, these are the top 10 Instagram metrics to track in 2022:

1. Reach
2. Story views
3. Reels engagement
4. Sales
5. Followers growth
6. Mentions
7. Profile visits
8. Best time to post
9. Website clicks
10. Engagement rate.

If you intend to get a concise, visual report and are having trouble doing that, try the Porter metrics no-code Instagram reporting tool that gives detailed Instagram reports in your current tools.