Instagram is unarguably the hottest social media platform in recent times. Not only has it witnessed a massive surge in popularity with more than one billion monthly active users but also it beats the rest of the social networks hollow in terms of engagement.
According to Entrepreneur.com, its engagement is ten times more than its parent, Facebook, and a whopping 84 times more than Twitter. Since as many as 75% of Instagram users take some kind of action after viewing a sponsored post, it is a very happy hunting ground for advertisers. However, as attractive as Instagram is to marketers, they are often disappointed with the results due to a large number of issues with putting together a cohesive marketing strategy that delivers a high ROI, such as what content to post, stories or images, tags to use, description, CTAs and what is the best time to post.
Business owners are then left wondering about how they can track the performance of their Instagram account and transform it from a collection of beautiful pictures to a revenue spinner for the enterprise. Understanding the use and importance of Instagram analytics is vital for businesses that seek to make Instagram an integral part of their marketing campaigns.
What Instagram Can and Cannot Do
Instagram is an excellent platform for businesses to showcase their products and services in an appealing way that invites users to engage with the brand. While Instagram utility in elevating brand awareness is undisputable, it should never be considered as a direct selling machine even though it does allow businesses to sell online. It is invariably better for businesses to consider Instagram as a platform for increasing brand awareness and building relationships with the target audience. Even though Instagram may not lead to direct sales, it still can be an integral part of your marketing campaign as long as you ensure that it is aligned well with your overall marketing objectives.
Tracking Instagram Performance Separates the Professionals from the Amateurs
Some businesses treat Instagram as a product showcase while others consider it a marketing weapon. The difference invariably lies in the fact that smart businesses track vital Instagram performance metrics closely. Some of the important behaviors you should keep a watch on includes how well your Instagram posts and stories are being received in terms of likes, comments, or direct messages and what kind of content is being liked more by your followers.
Marketers are generally obsessed with the growth in numbers of their followers; however, it is also important to pay attention to the quality and not just the quantity. Even if you are considering buying real Instagram likes, you should engage a professional digital marketing agency to ensure authenticity.
Use analytics to figure out the demographics of the followers interacting with your posts and tweak your content if you think that the profile of your followers is not what you would have wanted ideally for driving sales. Even though there is no need to get fixated on follower acquisition, you need to ensure that there is a steady growth in the follower base.
Top Objectives to Aim For
Increase reach and boost engagement: The success of marketing on Instagram rests on the twin pillars of reach and engagement. By consistently delivering high-quality, original, useful, value-added, and entertaining content to your target audience through your posts; you will be able to bolster your connection with your existing followers as they will keep coming back for more of the same. You will also enjoy high engagement levels that will, in turn, use the Instagram algorithm to your advantage by giving more exposure to your posts in the feeds of your followers.
The effect of these twin actions is that marketers can strengthen existing relationships but also reach out to more potential followers. Remember, Instagram is programmed to assist marketers by automatically promoting relevant and engaging content to its users to make them stay for a longer time on the network. This is the reason why Instagram algorithm principal task is to discover and promote awesome content to more users.
This will become amply clear if you visit the platform’s “Explore” section where the content best suited to the user’s interests is curated by Instagram, many of which may not have a large number of likes. This also means that even if your business account does not have a large number of followers, your content can still appear in the “Explore” section of your followers if the engagement rate is high enough.
Monitor website traffic originating from Instagram: Even though Instagram is awesome, you are still at the mercy of its algorithm because you cannot control it. Savvy marketers, therefore, engage in a strategic plan to direct the maximum possible traffic from Instagram to their website from where you can persuade visitors to do your bidding.
Just inserting your website link in the bio is not good enough. To make the maximum use of the potential of the click, you should direct the traffic to a specially-designed landing page instead of the website home page from where you can lead the visitor along a pre-defined path towards an intended conversion. You are guaranteed to get a far better response than by leaving them on the home page that presents a very large number of options to the visitor.
A landing page can ensure that the visitor goes through the steps you want him to take and also gives you the chance of collecting his contacts for use in email marketing campaigns that you employ to create more enduring relationships with him. By having a unique URL for the landing page for use in your Instagram bio, you can easily track how much traffic has been generated by your Instagram campaign. You can also use UTM tracking to get to know which of the traffic was generated by the Instagram account when you are using Google Analytics.
Conclusion
By process of continuous tracking of Instagram analytics data, marketers can get to know where their traffic is originating from, what actions Instagram users are taking after visiting the website, how long they stay on each of the pages. Marketers also can figure out the kind of Instagram content that their followers love the most and the best times to post for maximum engagement.
