5 Key Metrics To Assess Marketing Campaigns On Instagram

Over the past decade or so, e-commerce has grown significantly in part due to the advent of social media. Social media marketing currently forms most contemporary businesses’ digital marketing plans and strategies with good reason.

This is because social media has a great potential for reaching new audiences. This includes social media applications like Instagram, which has over a billion users worldwide. That translates to over a billion potential customers in real terms!

Now, to succeed with any Instagram marketing campaign, it has to be targeted to a specific audience. That means you have to set specific marketing goals and objectives from the get-go. But to measure the success of that campaign, you have to factor in various metrics to assess whether you’re on track to meet your set targets.

As a business, you need to determine how successful your digital marketing strategy is concerning your campaign goals. That’s why metrics are important.

So then, how do you assess marketing campaign success on Instagram? Here are some key metrics you ought to pay attention to:

1. Follower Growth Rate

number of followers matters to a great extent, especially if your goal is expanding your reach. The more followers you have, the more engagement you’ll get and the more visible your brand will be in theory.

The follower growth rate doesn’t just consider the number of followers you have amassed. It focuses on the rate at which your followers are growing. This makes it a more useful metric because it shows whether your campaign, which probably started at a specific date, is performing well.

So, say at the beginning of the campaign you had 1000 followers. Then, a month into your campaign, you find out that you have 1300 total followers—an increase of 300 followers. From this, you can calculate the percentage increase in followers during this one-month period, which would be 30% (300/1000 x 100%).

A follower growth rate of 30% is decent; and from this data, you can confirm that your campaign is indeed making headway given the brief space of time. That said, if you want help with increasing your organic followers, consider using an Instagram growth service.

2. Engagement Rate

One of the main purposes of social media marketing is to increase engagement with followers. The more people engage with your posts, the better.

The engagement rate (a percentage) reveals how people interact with your content. It’s not merely calculated based on the number of likes, shares, and comments. But it goes a step further by benchmarking the number of engagements against the total number of followers to determine the performance of your marketing campaigns.

This is how you calculate it: (Total number of engagements/ Total number of followers) x 100%.

But although this is relatively easy to calculate, it may not give an accurate picture because there are gaps in the formula. There are alternative formulas you can use. The more accurate approach uses impressions instead of the number of followers.

This formula also incorporates the number of saves into total engagements because the number of saves is a high-value Instagram metric. The algorithm ranks it ahead of other metrics such as likes or comments.

However, it’s important to note that while there are different approaches to calculating engagement rates, the one you choose depends on your campaign goals.

For example, maybe you don’t want to assess the organic engagement rate. Perhaps you just want to know how many people commented on your posts. This will be a quick data extraction procedure. But for the more complex goals, you may need to go deeper.

3. Reach

Now, whatever content you post on Instagram, the purpose is for it to be seen by as many people as possible. Therefore, you’d want to reach more people through your content. But it’s important to note that reach isn’t the same as impressions.

It’s often the case that your impressions will be higher than views because one user can have several impressions, whereas views reveal the actual number of users who viewed your post.

The great thing is that these two metrics are measured separately in Instagram insights. Also, Instagram insights reveals information about whether the reach or impressions were generated by followers (or non-followers).

This data is important if you’re aiming to reach out to newer audiences because it reveals how successful your campaign has been at bringing new audiences.

But whatever the case may be, reach is the more reliable metric between the two. It’s more reliable and less complicated to analyze. Impressions have a lot of potential gaps that may lead you to make incorrect assumptions. You simply may not know why one user generates many impressions on your posts while others don’t.

4. Instagram Stories Metrics

Instagram stories are brilliant for assessing the success of your marketing campaigns. They add a different dimension to Instagram metrics. However, since they’re only up for 24 hours, you need to know which metrics to look for.

For example, you could look at the number of views a story has to see if it has generated any results. Further than this, you could assess how many direct messages you received through that story or how many people ended up visiting your profile.

5. Referral Traffic

If you want to know how many people were directed to your domain site through the link in bio, pay attention to this metric. Therefore, it shows the number of viewers that have taken the initiative to visit your site.

Mind you, there’s an option to add a link in your bio on Instagram. However, if your business has a profile with Google Analytics for your webpage, you can easily ascertain the click-through rate.

So, what happens is when someone clicks the link on your bio, the analytics tool identifies that visitor as a referral. Therefore, the greater the number of referrals, the better. You can then use this information to assess your campaigns, preferably based on a month-to-month basis.

Conclusion

When dealing with Instagram metrics, it helps to start with setting clear goals or aims for your campaign first. You use these goals as a benchmark to make adjustments as you proceed with the campaign.

Once you’ve established these parameters, you’ll know which metrics to focus on the most. You could even use the service of Instagram automation tools to help you keep track of them.