Track Audience Demographics, Post Impressions and More with Instagram Analytics

Instagram is about   to introduce a chain of new tools for businesses and brands using its platform. These tools comprise business profiles with contact buttons and access to maps and directions, as well as tools for tracking the analytics around posts, and a mobile ad-buying experience.

Instagram’s analytics offering will be called “Insights,” and will be focused on two main areas: follower demographics and post analytics.  The follower analytics section offers demographic details about your audience, including followers’ location, age and gender. Location information is available by country or by city, which makes it useful to bigger brands all the way down to smaller, local businesses. Knowing where the majority of users are based can also help businesses better determine when to post content – though to some extent, Instagram’s new algorithmic-based timeline will disrupt that flow by personalising the feed to each user, rather than presenting posts in chronological order.

This updated timeline is still rolling out, Instagram told TechCrunch some days ago, although a number of users are already seeing it live in their app.

Aside seeing details such as  gender and age, graphed out as a circle graph and bar chart, respectively, the follower analytics’ section also lets you track how many new followers you have gained on an hourly and daily basis. This can better help pinpoint which posts worked to convert users to followers, or which posts may have spread virally.

However, the post analytics section focus on just your Instagram content, and how it is performing.This lets you track data on things such as impressions, reach, website clicks, and other follower activity. Impressions refer to the total number of times your posts have been seen, while reach shows you the number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts. Website clicks lets you track how many people click the link in your profile, which business often use to link to their website. The “Follower Activity” area here also helps businesses and brands better time their posts, as it displays the most popular times of the day when your followers are using Instagram.

Another module in this section lets you see your top posts sorted by impressions for either the past week or month. This area is especially interesting because it’s not a simple chart, but rather presented as a grid of image thumbnails with the number of impressions that post received is overlaid on top. This not only helps you to track which posts did well, but by viewing them all as images, you’re able to better visualise the content that works best for your audience.

This can also help you track how your posts perform over time – that is, do followers and others go back and surface older posts, or do they only click on new content?