Instagram Analytics Dashboard: The Best Solution for Tracking Social Media Metrics

Instagram is a central hub for sharing content, experiences, thoughts, and perspectives. And it's only growing. In terms of engagement rate Instagram confidently holds second place after Tiktok. Even though Instagram's 0,6% is well away from TikTok's whopping 4,25%, it's still miles better than Facebook's 0,15% and Twitter's 0,05%. 

For anyone wondering if Instagram is still relevant to their business, consider that it's still the most downloaded app in the world (followed by TikTok, Facebook, and WhatsApp, respectively). 

However, advertising on Instagram without analyzing your marketing efforts may quickly drain your marketing budget. In this guide, we discuss how to build a comprehensive Instagram analytics dashboard, what metrics to include, and how to get the most out of Instagram data. 

Key Takeaways

• Social media analytics is crucial to a successful marketing strategy.
• Instagram is a relevant platform for numerous industries and is still growing.
• Using an Instagram dashboard is an effective way to visualize your data.
• Third-party dashboard tools are more efficient than Instagram’s in-app offering in almost every scenario.
• Some of the most important metrics to track on Instagram are engagement rates, impressions, follower growth, and top-performing posts.
• Three best practices for building an Instagram dashboard include combining data to see the big picture, automating the process where possible, and using data to visualize and tell a story.
• Marketing analytics platforms can streamline your Instagram analytics experience and provide actionable insights. 

Why Instagram Analytics Matter

Which one of your recent posts got the most engagement in the past two weeks? How about last month? Which hashtags are the most valuable for your audience? Which ones are you using most frequently? These are important questions that require answers if you want to achieve more with your marketing campaigns, creatives, or messaging. Tracking your Instagram metrics will help you find those answers. 

Consider the following allegory. When you’re sick, you go to the doctor. A healthcare professional runs various tests and analyzes your symptoms. With all the data, they can find out what’s malfunctioning inside your body. Then, doctors and nurses pull all the reports and charts together to understand the full scope of your condition. 

Monitoring Instagram engagement metrics is about the same thing. With all the data about your Instagram efforts, you can diagnose what isn’t working—and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

A insights-driven strategy considers all past mistakes and failures. This guarantees more cost-efficient and scalable campaigns.

Why You Should Use an Instagram Dashboard

When you think about analytics for Instagram, you likely envision long, grueling spreadsheets and enormous piles of data. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Manual reporting and building charts in spreadsheets is only good if you need to test something or find a quick answer to your question. However, using this approach in your day-to-day activities always results in wasted time and untrustworthy data. And - why so?

Copypasting Instagram metrics to your spreadsheet will eventually result in mistakes. You either accept this fact or spend more time double checking your data. Now, imaging running hundreds of campaigns, collecting all that data, and gazing at each data cell afterwards to find a mistake. It easily away the better part of the week if you want to have data worth working with.

On the other hand you have an Instagram analytics dashboard. With its help you can represent your data in any way you want in a convenient interface of popular BI tools. From simple line charts to mosaic and scatter plots, you can show your data any way you want. 

If Instagram is your main acquisition source, your business could benefit from a dedicated Instagram analytics dashboard for better transparency, visibility, and accountability for marketing activities.

The Basics of Instagram Analytics 

There are two ways to monitor your Instagram analytics and visualize your data:

1. Use a third-party dashboard builder 
2. Use Instagram’s in-app analytics platform. 

Both carry pros and cons, so let’s start with an overview of the in-app offering. 

In-App Analytics

Instagram’s in-app analytics is a useful resource for marketing professionals, but it comes with a decent number of limitations. The built-in reporting tool provides basic insights into your account performance, which can be useful when checking on a data point you’re already familiar with. 

Instagram’s platform can offer fundamental insights into performance metrics such as:

• Reach
• Followers
• Engagement
• Advertising results
• Post-specific data
• And more

So, if Instagram already provides professional accounts with in-app analytics (and even a dashboard overview), why consider a third-party tool?

There’s actually more than just one reason.

Third-Party Tools

A third-party analytics tool is essential for marketing professionals who need more than a basic glance at simple metrics. 

You can find robust, feature-rich platforms that allow you to create beautiful-yet-understandable dashboards featuring advanced performance metrics. While in-app analytics provides just the basic performance metrics, such as reach, clicks, and engaged accounts, third-party tools allow you to calculate metrics more valuable to your business, such as CAC, cost per engaged account, revenue generated by paid and organic posts, and more. 

You also get much better visualization capabilities compared to Instagram’s basic in-app charts. Since Instagram is optimized for mobile, the app’s provided analytics are also mobile-oriented. This can be a significant limiting factor, making reporting challenging or even completely inaccessible. Using a robust third-party dashboard means you can dive deeper into your reports on your desktop or laptop as well, expanding the scope of your analytical efforts. 

But the true killer feature of third-party analytics tools is that they allow to merge Instagram data with performance metrics from other channels on a single dashboard. And that means you can understand how your Instgram campaigns compare to other channels and what practices from other platforms you can implement to improve your Instagram account performance.

Besides, a comprehensive dashboard may help you capture trends faster and make informed decisions about your overall marketing strategy.

Take a look at Improvado’s organic social dashboard that allows you to explore posts, reach, views, engagement rates, and clicks across all your social channels. Having both quick overview of your channels and detailed breakdown of each campaign’s performance improves decision-making and facilitates campaign optimization.  

Now, it’s time to understand which metrics are key for the platform and how to track them on your dashboard.

Instagram Metrics to Include In the Dashboard

As with any marketing channel, your data is only as good as the metrics you’re tracking. That’s why it’s essential to grasp which metrics matter most to the individual platform or a group of platforms you’re visualizing on a dashboard. Social media comes with different factors when compared to web content, though each platform has its own KPIs.

On Instagram, you’re concerned with the amount of engagement you receive, just like on other social media platforms. However, there is an increased focus on follower growth. It’s one of the most important metrics to monitor. 

Below, you’ll find some of the most important metrics to track when building your analytics platform: 

Engagement Rate

Social media marketing is about one thing above all others—engagement. Though you can pop into your audience's inbox with email marketing and develop valuable resources on your website, no marketing channel facilitates direct engagement quite like social media. 

Instagram is no exception, which is why it’s vital to track your engagement rate.

Think of engagement rate tracking as keeping a pulse on your Instagram marketing efforts. This metric acts as a lifeline, letting you know how things are truly doing. Your engagement rate is the percentage of your following that regularly interacts with your content, considering the number of likes and comments you receive on a post in relation to your overall follower count.

Impressions

If you’ve ever dabbled in analytics, you’re likely already familiar with this metric. Impressions on Instagram work largely in the same way they do on the web. This metric is tracking the number of people who have been exposed to your account. 

You can filter that data by a specified period if you want to understand how a certain campaign has impacted your impressions.

Follower Growth

Follower tracking on Instagram is similarly crucial. Unlike simply tracking the number of likes you’re getting on a post, your follower growth is not a vanity metric. You aren’t just keeping tabs on your existing follower count—you’re actively monitoring the growth rate of your following.

Gaining a large number of followers quickly doesn’t always equate to actual conversions, but that doesn’t mean your following shouldn’t grow steadily if your campaigns are effective. Tracking your follower growth is important to see whether you’re trending upward or downward. 

Top Performing Posts

Another common social media metric that remains applicable and valuable for Instagram is your top-performing posts. When your team begins crafting the next campaign, knowing what has worked best in the past is helpful. This can assist you in understanding what your audience is drawn to and how to reach them in future campaigns.

3 Best Practices For Building An Instagram Dashboard

When building your ideal Instagram analytics dashboard, you must ensure you’re creating the most valuable central hub you can. To do that, follow these best practices for building an Instagram data hub. 

Combine Data to See the Big Picture

Using a dashboard can be incredibly beneficial in allowing teams to see the big picture. With in-app analytics your marketing vision is limited to a single channel. But a dashboard lets you combine your data and KPIs into a single source of truth to get a bird’s-eye-view. So, combining your data is crucial to make unbiased decisions and optimize your cross-channel marketing effort. 

Automate When Possible

Automation is critical in any analytics-tracking venture. Don’t waste your time with DIY solutions with manual data collection—opt for a solution that automatically sources data from Instagram and generates actionable insights based on said information.

Improvado is just what it takes to create an actionable analytics dashboard. The platform integrates with 500+ marketing and sales data sources to pull required metrics, turn it into a digestible form, and streamline to a visualization tool of your choice. 

Instead of wasting time drawing identical pie and bar charts in spreadsheets you get access to a library of customizable dashboard templates for social media, paid ads, web analytics, and other use cases. Improvado’s templates allow you to start analyzing in days, not weeks or even months.

Jumpstart your marketing analytics with Improvado

Improvado integrates with 500+ data sources to build a comprehensive dashboard for you. On a 30-min call, you can tell us more about your analytics objectives to get a dashboard tailored to your needs.

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Use Data Storytelling and Visualizations

Telling a story with data is one of the most important skills to have when communicating results to stakeholders. Use your Instagram dashboard to show how each metric relates to the next. What effect do your top-performing posts have on your engagement rate? How does your follower growth impact your reach? Find the story in the numbers, then convey that story on your dashboard for best results.

Use a Marketing Analytics Platform to Squeeze the Most out of Instagram Data

Focusing on social media performance is crucial to understanding marketing’s team impact on the organization’s bottom line. However, you need clear-cut data to design your perfect Instagram analytics dashboard that’ll fuel your decision-making. Opting for a platform that only provides data visualization without automating the sourcing of that data and transforming it into actionable insights is not an efficient way to operate. 

Instead, use a platform designed to handle all steps of the data journey, from extraction to visualization.

Improvado is an automated marketing analytics platform that sources data from 500+ sources (including Instagram and other social media platforms). With Improvado you get all the same features as when using SQL and BI tools, but in a zero-code environment. Connect your data sources, choose a template, and Improvado will automatically visualize data in a way you need.

In case your needs go beyond Improvado’s library of data sources or metrics, Improvado can fulfill any custom needs in the shoretest terms. The platform can help you develop custom dashboards from scratch or take care of advanced data queries with Professional Services offering. So, whether you’re aiming for a plug-and-play Instagram dashboard or a customized dashboard for your specific use case, Improvado got you covered. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to track Instagram analytics?

Tracking Instagram analytics is essential for optimizing content, understanding your audience, and making data-driven decisions. By monitoring engagement, assessing content performance, identifying trends, evaluating growth, setting goals, and conducting competitor analysis, you can refine your strategy, improve your account's performance, and achieve your objectives on the platform.

What's an Instagram dashboard?

An Instagram dashboard is a centralized interface that displays key Instagram data and insights, helping users monitor their account's performance, track engagement, and effectively optimize their marketing strategy.

What metrics are used on Instagram?

Key Instagram metrics include follower count, engagement (likes, comments, shares, saves), reach, impressions, profile visits, click-throughs, and audience demographics (age, gender, location, active hours).

What are best practices to build an Instagram dashboard?

Best practices for building an Instagram dashboard include:

• Goal identification
• Picking relevant metrics
• Data visualization
• Customization
• Regular updates