Studies show that 70% of Instagram users swipe through stories daily. To put that into perspective, that’s about 500 million active daily users.
You’ve got 24 hours to make your Instagram stories have a lasting impression. In that time, your brand can gather valuable data to boost engagement and brand awareness through analytics.
How to Check Your Instagram Story Analytics
Only Instagram Business or Creator accounts can access analytics. If you already have either of these, you can check your analytics with just a few clicks.
Go to your profile, tap “insights” right above the Story Highlights, and tap the arrow beside Stories.
Instagram’s built-in analytics insight will show you data from the last 7 days by default. But you can easily change the range. The minimum is “yesterday” and the max range is the “last two years”.
Key Instagram Story Analytics and Why They Matter
Now that we know how to access analytics, here’s a look at important metrics brands can focus on.
These metrics can be grouped into three main categories – Discovery, Interaction, and Navigation. Here’s a rundown of what you need to know:
Instagram Story Analytics: Discovery
It might come as a surprise but studies suggest that the majority of customers favor products they discover on Instagram stories.
If your target audience doesn’t see you on their explore page, you still have a chance to reach them through your stories. The following metrics help with discovery:
- Reach: This metric refers to the number of unique users that saw your account.
- Impressions: This refers to the number of views and repeat views a story had.
When your stories’ reach is declining, there might be underlying issues you need to attend to. To improve reach, check analytics and rank stories by impression.
Notice the trends and understand why content performs better than others and especially why others don’t. You can also try out new Instagram story ideas to add flare to your content.
Now it’s up to you if you’d want to double down on the content that’s getting more reach or revamp the ones that are performing poorly.
Instagram Story Analytics: Interaction
According to research, business executives believe having better customer engagement translates to improved customer loyalty, increased revenue, and overall profits.
The interaction metrics you should look into include the following:
- Follows
- Sticker Taps
- Interactions
- Product Page Views
- Product Page Views per Product Tag
- Profile Visits
- Replies
- Website Visits
- Shares
- Calls, Texts, Emails, Get Directions
Use these metrics if your brand goals include increased engagement or interactions. But with the number of interaction metrics to choose from, you’re going to need clear CTAs.
According to Facebook’s (now Meta) business analytics, highlighting CTAs results in more conversions.
Instagram Story Analytics: Navigation
Understanding what works and what doesn’t helps your brand produce better content. Navigation metrics can show you these and more.
If users are skipping your story, exiting out, or don’t retain attention, there may be a need for a better content strategy.
On the other hand, back taps suggest your stories are content that people want to see more of. To recap, the metrics to watch out for when it comes to navigation are:
- Forward taps: The number of times users tapped the next story after landing on yours.
- Back taps: The number of times users pressed the back button to see the last story.
- Exit Story Taps: The number of times users exited from your story.
- Navigation Metrics: The overall total number of back, forward, next story, and exit buttons tapped on your story.
Measuring Engagement with Instagram Story Analytics
On Instagram stories, three metrics track the engagement your story receives. These are Swipe-ups, Replies, and Sticker Taps.
Number of Replies
Replies are the number of engagements your story has that are directed to your inbox. Instagram Stories that invite replies improve a brand’s overall engagement!
This metric can be used to analyze what type of content users interact and engage with the most.
These interactions maintain your Instagram Stories at the top of your followers’ feeds and help get new followers organically.
Number of Swipe-Ups
Your stories can include blog posts, product pages, links to landing pages, and more. When these are included, users can swipe up to interact with the clickable links on your story.
The number of times a user “swipes up” can be tracked to figure out what content works best for your audience.
When your swipe-ups are low, you can try adding text highlighting a swipe-up action on the bottom of the screen.
Number of Sticker Taps
Sticker taps are excellent forms of CTAs. It can be a geotag, a hashtag, or a tag mentioning another account.
Your Instagram analytics can show you the number of times users tapped on stickers you used in your stories.
Sticker Taps are a good indicator of how compelling your content is and how well your Stickers are doing. If it’s low, though, you should think about how to improve engagement:
How to Know When Your Audience is Most Active Using Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. You need to optimize stories to get the most impressions and engagement.
A great strategy for this is identifying when your audience is most active during the day. Of course, we’re going to use analytics to ensure our stories get seen.
Here’s how we can see insights into our followers’ activity:
- Open Insights
- Go to the audience tab and find “followers”.
- Switch between hours and days and identify where it peaks.
According to a Hubspot study, the best times of the day to post Instagram stories are as follows:
- Monday – 12:00 PM
- Tuesday – 9:00 AM
- Wednesday – 11:00 AM
- Thursday – 11:00 AM
- Friday – 2:00 PM
- Saturday – 9:00 AM
- Sunday – 7:00 PM.
Key Takeaways
Instagram stories are powerful marketing tools. The best way to understand what works for your brand is through analytics.
Here are some important insights on Instagram story analytics:
- Story analytics helps improve reach, visibility, engagement, and conversion rates.
- Analytics are grouped into three main categories, Discovery, Interaction, and Navigation.
- It can show you when to schedule stories to get the most views.
- Encourage your audience to interact with your brand through replies, swipe-ups, or sticker taps.
- You need a business or creator account to view analytics.
If you want to grow your brand on Instagram, Publer is the platform for you! Sign up for free today and experience how Publer can power up your social media campaigns!
Ervin Kalemi
