The article has been updated. First published: July 4, 2017

A good marketer should be an analyst, and a SMM manager is always a bit of a marketer.

The analyst examines how much money and time was invested in various advertising marketing channels, determines how effective it was. The business invested ten thousand to buy advertising placements from Instagram bloggers, the analyst determined how much benefit it did.

If the advertisement did not bring profit, it means that it was image-based.
In this article, why and with what tools to measure Instagram accounts.

Why and what to analyze on Instagram

You can sell through Instagram. Another question is how to make sales systematic and logical. So that sales take place thanks to the work of the SMM, and not in spite of it.

On Instagram, you can and should analyze:

• advertising campaigns – we disable ineffective advertising, leave only the one that brings results,
• publications in the account – we understand why these particular publications are successful, and we try to make more such publications,
• publications in stories – we understand which stories are interesting and try to do more of them,
• publications in other people’s accounts – we understand the mistakes of competitors, and we ourselves try to prevent this and find good ideas from competitors, and adopt them to ourselves.

Analyzing Instagram through the Facebook advertising account

Targeted ads on Instagram can be created through the mobile application and through the Facebook advertising account. The Facebook advertising account has more technical chips and metrics for analysis, so it is better to create ads through Facebook. Even if you want to raise publications, it is better to do it from Facebook.

Analyzing Instagram via Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights is an analytics that is available to accounts with the “Author” or “Business account” status. To convert a regular page to a professional one, you need to link your profile to your Facebook account. Next – go to the Instagram application and select the “Account” item in the settings. Find the item “Switch to a professional account” and select the desired page type. Instagram Insights determines the best posts, number, gender, age of subscribers and the best post times.

Instagram Insights shows:

• impressions of publications and account – how often publications are reviewed, conclusions can be drawn about the usefulness of publications;
• coverage – the number of unique views, a fundamental unit for analysis;
• profile views – how often they go inside the profile;
• transitions, calls – how often the communication buttons are pressed;
• likes, comments, saves and the sum of all these metrics, engagement is a metric of the success of publications with an audience.

The analysis algorithm is quite simple: Find the best publications → Find out why they are the best → Repeat.

We repeat the best publications.

Analyzing Instagram via Datafan

https://datafan.pro/ is a convenient service based on Google Data Studio that creates dynamic social media reports.

Here you can select the template you want, connect a project instagram account and see data on coverage, likes, comments. Viewing is available in an online dashboard format, or you can save it to excel files for further analysis.

Datafan can:

• Collect audience demographic data.
• Show audience growth, reach, and impressions.
• Identify popular posts by likes or comments.
• Show statistics for stories and interactions with them.
• Collect content statistics.

Other advantages: an unlimited number of reports and the ability to work not only with Instagram (Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki).

In the trial version, data for collecting statistics is available for a week, and if needed for a longer period, the package will cost from 200 rubles per month.

Analyzing Instagram via Livedun

Livedun is a cool service for Instagram analytics. The minimum tariff starts from 300 rubles. I love him for:

• directory of instagram accounts;
• the ability to search for accounts by description;
• detailed account analysis by 40+ parameters.

In the professional version of Livedun, you can analyze your account by 40+ parameters. Most of the time I use the professional version to analyze:

• the best time to post;
• dynamics of recruitment and churn of subscribers and subscriptions;
• dynamics of content engagement;
• the best publications by likes or comments, including for a certain period;
• to find the best accounts in a city or niche;
• determines the number of bots, stores and live accounts among subscribers;
• determines the most popular accounts;
• knows how to determine the geography, gender and age of subscribers, but this is not accurate.

Livedun is able to follow the comments in the account and send notifications of new comments in the Telegram.

API Instagram does not transmit data about the gender, age and geolocation of the account. How exactly such statistics are determined by third-party services is unknown. Therefore, the accuracy of such statistics is unknown.

Analyzing Instagram via Popsters

Popsters – analyzes content in various social networks, for a different period of time, and not only in their accounts. Any account or group can be analyzed. The perfect tool for content creators. Popsters can:

• search for the best content for a certain period;
• compare content in different accounts;
• identify the most viral content;
• determine the best time and day for publications;
• analyze content depending on various criteria;
• sort content in analyzed accounts and groups by likes, comments, publication date and reach.

We collect the best accounts and groups in lists and analyze accounts to find ideas for content and to find the best content.

Remember

Also, you can create your own reports and dashboards using direct uploading of data via API from Instagram and build reports in Google Data Studio. You can learn this in our free Google Data Studio course from the SMMplanner team.
In addition, our service itself offers many handy tools for Instagram, for example, automatic UTM tags. You can then use them to track the effectiveness of the campaign.

Not analyzing Instagram is stupid.

Use at least one of the analytics tools.

Analyze your content regularly.

Analyze by those parameters that affect your business objectives.

Register now in SMMplanner and schedule posts on Instagram and Instagram Stories.