Ensuring that your online retailer’s Instagram profile is registered as a business account rather than the standard individual account is vital to optimizing your brand’s social media marketing potential.
Marking your profile as a business account indicates to viewers the purpose of your page with a category label under your name, but also hyperlinked location, website, and contact information in your profile’s bio.
It also gives you complimentary access to valuable business analytics tools, all grouped together in the Instagram Insights tab on your profile.
Below we have outlined the Instagram Insights tools most useful to your online brand presence and ultimately, conversion:
The most important insight that Instagram offers is Engagement data by post. Engagement measures the number of times that your post was liked, saved, and commented on. Using the results for engagement of your post and reach (the number of unique accounts that have seen your posts) you can calculate your engagement rate.
Engagement rate tells you how the ratio of accounts who both saw your post and engaged with it, calculated by dividing engagement by reach.
With an understanding of the engagement rates of each of your posts, you are empowered to make data-driven decisions on which products, promos, and online marketing campaigns will be most successful with customers on your e-commerce platform.
Ever since Instagram took a page out of Snapchat’s book and launched Instagram stories, Instagram users have grown accustomed to watching engaging, user-generated video content when they launch the app. In fact, the engagement rate for video posts on Instagram is 38% higher than that of image posts.
Ever since Instagram changed its algorithm of the order in which users see a post on their feed, launching video content on stories and IGTV is often a far more effective way of reaching your followers.
Monitoring your Instagram story insights can help you to put out the right amount of the right content that is most engaging to your followers. Instagram story exits, the number of times that a user exited your story. This metric can be helpful in understanding how interested your followers are in your story content.
The launch of Instagram TV (IGTV) has sparked extensive content creation from so many e-commerce brands. Most notably, Kylie Jenner launched a campaign in IGTV promoting her new skincare line, Kylie Skin.
In your IGTV Insights is the average percent of video watched. Monitoring the watch length patterns of your posts can help you understand how to best engage your followers enough for them to purchase your products.
The Instagram Shopping feature is still in its beta version but eventually many more online retailers will be able to take advantage of its industry-transforming product-sharing capabilities. Retailers with access to this feature also have access to two valuable insight tools:
Product views-- the number of times people users on the product tag to view the product page
Product Button Clicks-- the number of times users tapped on the purchase button on the product page
Measuring product views and clicks online in your retailer’s conversion rate calculations will be useful in determining your effective Instagram Shopping strategy.
E-commerce is going through a period of transformation. As Instagram makes it even easier to buy your favorite products without even leaving the app, e-commerce brands will need to pay more attention to their data analytics than ever before. The line between sales and marketing will continue to blur and customer data from social media will be extremely valuable to maintaining sales. Use these tools in the app to optimize your posts to best engage your customers.
Iconosquare, once a free resource for Instagram users, has expanded its functionalities into its robust Analytics Pro Dashboard for Facebook and Instagram. This tool is great for retailers looking for analytics on audience engagement as well as content scheduling and activity management.
Take advantage of their free Instagram Audit which analyzes 20 metrics on your last 30 posts over the last 30 days and provides advice from account settings to content strategy.
HootSuite, best known for its Instagram scheduler, also has its own analytics platform. HootSuite Analytics has extensive functionality across many social media platforms in tracking, measuring, and sharing key social media metrics. It goes above and beyond Instagram Insights in that it can run customized reports at any time and shows you historical trends of your data.
Retail is often seasonal and moving faster than ever. Measuring what you need, when you need it is more important now than ever before.
Minter.io’s Instagram Analytics measure the following metrics and more in order to help businesses optimize their social media outreach.
