New to Instagram insights? Want to know which statistics you need to track as a marketer?
Keep reading to find out.
What are Instagram Insights
Instagram insights is a feature available to all Instagram Business Accounts that allows you to check your account statistics and see your content performance over time. This is a very useful feature especially if you’re marketing on Instagram.
So, if you have a Business Account and want to know whether your Instagram strategy is helping you grow your followers and which posts get the most engagement, you need to learn your way around Instagram Insights.
In this post, we’re sharing the top 3 statistics you need to track on Instagram. But first, you might want to know where to find this data. So let’s start from there!
How to check your Instagram Insights
There are two main ways in which you can access your Instagram insights data:
- On the Instagram mobile app. Just open your Instagram app and click on the [Insights] button located under your bio. This will open up your Account Insights page (as shown below). From here you can find a range of statistics, graphs and charts that show you how successful your strategy was in the last 7 days.
- Using an approved third party analytics app like Sharemyinsights. This app allows you to access a wider range of statistics, manage multiple accounts and see lifetime insights. Unlike the Instagram app, you can track your statistics from your desktop which is much more convenient.
Regardless of where you choose to get your insights data from, the most important thing is knowing how to analyze it and use it to improve your strategy. I know that many people get confused with seeing so many different types of statistics and don’t know which ones they should be tracking.
Here are 3 Instagram statistics you need to start tracking:
1. Accounts Reached
Reach is an important statistic to track if you want to monitor your account growth over time. Accounts Reached indicates the number of unique users that have seen your posts, Stories, and IGTV videos. However, reach is different from impressions, which includes multiple views of your posts by the same account.
Use this statistic to check whether your content is optimised for reaching new people. If you see the number of Accounts Reached is decreasing for 3 or more consecutive weeks, it’s time to realign your content & hashtag strategy.
2. Content Interactions
These statistics measure the level of interaction on your content in the last 7 days. The Instagram app allows you to see how much engagement (likes, comments, saves and shares) each of your posts, stories, and IGTV videos received and see which type of content format has performed better depending on your goal.
When you track interactions, take a look at these statistics:
For Posts & IGTV
- Likes
- Comments
- Saves
- Shares
For Stories
- Replies
- Shares
Besides that, you can also see how your top posts rank up to 2 years back based on a series of metrics. The most popular metrics to rank your posts are:
- Top posts by likes
- Top posts by comments
- Top posts by reach
- Top posts by profile visits
- Top posts by follows
- Top posts by website taps
3. Followers Statistics
The top 3 wouldn’t be complete without talking about Followers Statistics. On Instagram, Followers insights help you understand how your audience is changing over time. But just because you are attracting more followers shouldn’t mean that you’re successful. You should always know that quality > quantity on Instagram. So knowing the demographics and location of your followers tells you how effective you are in attracting your ideal followers and which are the best times to post for engagement.
To understand your audience, look at the following statistics:
- Followers Growth
- Time Active
Note: The times are recorded and shown in Pacific Eastern Time so you may need to convert that data to your time zone.
Conclusion
Now that you have a better idea of the 3 main statistics you need to be tracking on Instagram, start checking your insights to see what’s working and what isn’t working for your target audience. Based on this data, you will be able to create more engaging content that gets more likes and more followers.
Time to start tracking your Instagram insights!
Related: how to make money on Instagram with 1k followers
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The Mistake Most Marketers Make With These Three Metrics
I’ve watched hundreds of brands pull Instagram Insights data and immediately panic because they’re reading the numbers wrong. Here’s what happens: you see that your engagement rate dropped 2%, you blame the algorithm, you change everything, and six weeks later you’re still confused.
The real problem is that most marketers track these three statistics in isolation. They watch reach go up while saves go down, and they think something’s broken. They don’t. What’s happening is your content is reaching the right people, but those people aren’t resonating with it yet. That’s not a failure. That’s data telling you to adjust your angle.
Let me be direct: the three stats you need to track matter, but only if you track them together and over the right timeframe. I’m talking about minimum four weeks, ideally twelve. One week of data is noise. One month is a pattern. Three months is a strategy that either works or doesn’t.
The second mistake is obsessing over vanity metrics. Impressions look great in a presentation. Reach sounds impressive when you’re explaining your work to someone who doesn’t do marketing. But here’s what matters: are the people seeing your content the ones who might buy from you? If you’re reaching 100,000 people who will never care about your product, you’ve wasted 100,000 impressions.
This is why saves matter more than you think. When someone saves a post, they’re telling Instagram’s algorithm and you something specific: this content has future value to them. They might buy later. They might recommend you. They might just remember you when they need what you sell. A post with 500 impressions and 47 saves is performing better than a post with 5,000 impressions and 8 saves. Full stop.
The third mistake is not comparing across content types. Your carousel posts will have different engagement patterns than Reels, which will behave differently from Stories. I see marketers kill Reels because they performed worse than carousels on their feed, never realizing that Reels reach different audiences and have different conversion pathways. You need separate benchmarks for each format.
Here’s what I do: I track these three metrics separately by content type, every single week, in a simple spreadsheet. I note what the post was about, who I tagged, what time I posted, and what the caption length was. After four weeks, patterns emerge. After twelve weeks, I know exactly what content type works best for my audience and which angles get saves versus likes.
Then I double down on what works. Not by posting the same thing twice, but by understanding the underlying angle that resonated and testing variations. If carousel posts about case studies outperform everything else, I don’t suddenly post only carousels. I test whether Reels with case study angles work. I test whether Stories with case study snippets drive saves.
This is the difference between tracking statistics and using them to build a strategy that compounds over time. Most brands never get here because they’re too busy reacting to weekly fluctuations.
More questions
Should I track engagement rate or engagement count?
Engagement rate, always. Count tells you nothing without context. An engagement rate tells you how your audience is responding relative to reach. If you have 50,000 followers and 100 likes, that’s different from 500 followers and 100 likes. Calculate it as (likes + comments + saves + shares) divided by impressions, multiplied by 100. Compare rates week over week, not raw numbers.
How long should I test before deciding a metric is improving or declining?
Four weeks minimum, but I’d argue for twelve. A single month can be affected by external events, holidays, algorithm shifts that reverse themselves, or timing. After twelve weeks, you have genuine seasonal patterns and enough data to spot what’s real versus random variation. If you’re changing strategy every two weeks based on three statistics, you’re not building anything.
Can I use these three metrics to predict sales or leads?
Not directly, and that’s important to understand. These metrics show engagement and awareness. You need separate tracking for clicks, website traffic, email signups, or actual purchases depending on your business model. What these three statistics do is tell you whether you’re creating content that your audience considers worth their time. That’s the foundation. Sales depend on many other factors beyond engagement.
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For Stories specifically, see how to use: the Instagram Story analytics dashboard.
Still stuck? Try the Instagram help hub.
