So you know that maintaining a social media presence is important for any brand, and you’ve been working on building an engaged audience on Instagram. How do you know that all the hours and funds you’re investing in your Instagram account are paying off?

In this article, we’ll cover 3 ways you can measure your brand’s ROI on Instagram.

1. Track your click-through rate (CTR)

If you your goal is to get your followers to click through to your website or online store, this is an essential metric. Wide exposure is great, but if it’s not leading anyone to your site, what good is it? A low CTR can indicate that you’re not targeting the right audience, or that your content isn’t enticing potential customers to want to find out more.

You can calculate your CTR by dividing the number of clicks by the number of views. On Instagram, this is relevant to your profile link, promotions, or swipe-up links you’ve added to Stories.

How do you know if your CTR is good? You want to aim for higher than average in your industry. Different industries have different average CTRs, so you’ll need to do a little research to determine the right goals for your brand.

2. Track each stage of your sales funnel

Marketing is all about creating a sales funnel: the path you want your target audience to take from knowing nothing about your brand to becoming a loyal customer. It’s called a funnel because the number of people who advance to the next stage will naturally be smaller than those who reached the previous stage.

You can track 4 stages in your Instagram sales funnel by recording data for each of the following metrics:

1. Reach: The number of people who saw your post, profile, or promotion.
2. Followers: The number of people who started following your account.
3. Active engagement: The number of people who contacted you asking about your product, either in the comments or in DMs.
4. Purchases: The number of purchases made.

You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing your number of purchases (the bottom of your funnel) by the number of people you reached (the top of the funnel) or who engaged with your content.

These metrics give an idea of how wide your reach will need to be in order to generate a certain number of purchases.

3. Track engagement per dollar spent

The next piece of the puzzle is: how much are you spending on expanding your reach, and how well is it working?

Tracking engagement per dollar spent helps complete the picture. Once you know what you’re getting for every dollar you invest in Instagram, you’ll have a better idea of how profitable the investment is.

Sales per dollar spent is an important metric, but it’s not the only one that matters. Sometimes a customer will stop at the “active engagement” stage, but advance to purchasing later. Sometimes engagement will also lead to wider reach, increasing the potential for bringing more customers into the sales funnel. Therefore, it’s a good idea to track profile visits per dollar, follower growth per dollar and website traffic per dollar as well as sales per dollar.

Access your data through Instagram Insights

How do you begin collecting this data? Instagram has a native analytics tool for its business accounts, and that can help get you started. You can access it by tapping the bar icon on the upper right corner of your Instagram profile.

If you want access to more detailed data, you can connect your Instagram account to Google Analytics.

Keeping track of these metrics will help you plan and adjust your Instagram strategy, so you can increase brand awareness, reach out to the right audiences, and ultimately grow your bottom line.

Action Items:

1. Start tracking! Add it to your to-do list this week to begin to track the following: your CTR → each stage of your sales funnel → engagement per dollar spent.
2. Check your Insights regularly to keep track of these metrics.