There is no way that marketers, big or small, can ignore the opportunity represented by Instagram with its monthly active user base of more than a billion and an engagement rate the tops all other social media by far. With more than 80% of Instagram users following at least one business, the competition for eyeballs can be pretty intense. It has resulted in marketers spending more on their campaigns to cut through the noise. However, the only way to know if marketing campaign is working the way it should; you need to examine some critical metrics. A useful insight into the most important Instagram metrics, you should be keeping tabs on:

The Engagement Rate

In the matter of engagement, nobody does it better on social media than Instagram. It has the highest rate of engagement of all the social networks at 1.73%; the corresponding figure for Facebook is 0.16%. The level of engagement is a huge draw for businesses across all sectors wanting to connect with their target audiences, starting dialogs, and building communities. For digital marketers looking to measure the performance of their campaigns, engagement is the first metric that grabs their attention because the Instagram algorithm recognizes the value of engagement, and rewards posts by driving them up in the feeds of users to give them more visibility. The engagement of posts on Instagram is the sum of all the interactions that users have made in terms of likes, comments, and saves. However, a more realistic picture is obtained from the engagement rate that is the percentage of your followers who engaged with your posts. If your posts have not been getting the desired engagement, participating in a Like4Like program can get you the additional likes you lack at the moment.

Reach

The reach of the Instagram account is an important measure of your brand awareness and the buzz you can potentially create around your brand. Expressed simply reach is a metric that tells social media marketers how many people have seen your Instagram posts; each unique account that has seen your photos, videos, or Stories is counted in the total reach. It is important to appreciate that reach is counted only once per unique account, while impressions are clocked up every time the content is seen. As may be understood, it is the reach that is a more important metric for marketers since a lot of impressions can be generated by a few users scrolling up and down the Instagram page even if they are not looking at your post. A more accurate metric is how many people have viewed your post. Marketers treat reach as important because it tells them which of their posts are showing up more in the feeds of their followers. Engagement is a direct consequence of reach and can inform them broadly how popular, engaging, and well-timed your posts were. If you see your posts achieving high reach, it means that you have got your posting schedule right, and a lot of your followers are spending time on them.

Website Clicks

The volume of traffic being generated by your Instagram posts is a valuable metric for marketers whose objective is to generate sales or conversions. However, it is not so vital for marketers looking to leverage Instagram for other purposes like brand awareness, building communities, or engaging in activism. Most people agree that Instagram is better to put to use as a brand and community building channel than for generating website traffic or sales. However, now that Instagram is broadening its e-commerce options, marketers should remain alive to the network’s potential for boosting traffic and conversions. A compelling CTA in your posts and including your website URL is mandatory for you to get clicks to your website. Promoting the landing page through your posts or Stories is a good way of clocking up more clicks to the website.

Audience Demographics

Understanding your audience is the key to whatever you need to do to make your Instagram marketing strategy successful. By understanding the profile of your target audience, you will be able to know what they want, need, and find engaging. You can use this information to create content that they will find useful and want to engage with. The best way of making an impact on your audience is to create an ideal persona of your target Instagram customer. By doing this, you will be able to know who they are, where do they live, how old they are, what language do they speak, and what is their buying behavior. Use this as a benchmark to find out how closely your followers on Instagram resemble the persona. If you find a significant difference, you should consider adjusting your content strategy to attract and appeal to an audience that is similar to your ideal customer persona. Local businesses also use location information to appeal to customers looking to meet their urgent requirements.

Follower Growth

Since the number of followers is crucial to the success of your Instagram marketing strategy, you need to remain focused on northing your followers and growing the count. The greater the number of followers, you have, the better will be the reach of your brand, and understandably, the higher the number of followers, the more engagement you are likely to be able to generate. The growth rate of your followers is an effective metric to gauge the performance of your Instagram account. Marketers should take into consideration not only the total number of followers gained but also the speed of acquisition. A decreasing follower growth rate means that you need to make changes to your content or marketing strategy urgently. According to https://edition.cnn.com, the follower count could assume more importance for marketers if Instagram continues to implement its recent initiative of hiding the number of likes on posts.

Conclusion  Marketing on Instagram is not just about creating the best content you can, posting it, and hoping for the best. It requires marketers to be watchful and continually monitor the performance of the account on multiple parameters. Using the native Instagram insights or any of the many third-party analytics tools is essential for monitoring the performance of your Instagram account.