Analytics are an essential tool in social media marketing. They help you measure how your content is performing and figure out how to tweak your strategy to improve your stats, your conversion rates, and ultimately, your bottom line.

In previous posts, we’ve covered how to view and understand your analytics on Instagram (What Exactly Do Your Instagram Insights Mean?) and TikTok (TikTok Analytics: Everything You Need to Know). In this post, we’ll take a deeper dive into Stories analytics on your Instagram Insights.

Accessing Instagram Stories analytics

Only Business and Creator accounts on Instagram have access to Insights, so if you’re still using a personal account, you may want to consider making the switch. See our previous post, Should You Switch to an Instagram Business Account? Pros and Cons to learn more.

Instagram has just made accessing Insights easier: instead of tapping on the hamburger menu icon on the upper right corner of your profile page and selecting it from the menu, you can just tap a convenient button on the right hand side under your bio.

Your Stories analytics will be under the Content tab. Just scroll down past Posts until you see the Stories section.

There you’ll see thumbnails of the last few Stories you’ve posted, with the number of views displayed on the bottom center of each thumbnail.

You can tap “See all” to see all the stories you’ve posted over the past 14 days.

Stories interactions

On the upper left corner, you’ll see a menu button that says “Reach.” You can open this menu to select the various metrics you’d like to look at across all your stories.

Here’s what each of them mean:

Back: The number of people who went backwards from this Story post

Calls: The number of people who followed the CTA to Call on your profile

Emails: The number of people who followed the CTA to Email on your profile

Exited: The number of people who swiped away from this Story

Follows: The number of people who started following you because of this Story

Forward: The number of people who tapped forward from this Story

Get Directions: The number of people who tapped Get Directions as a result of this Story

Impressions: The total number of times your post has been viewed — including multiple views from the same user (contrast with Reach below)

Next Story: The number of times people tapped to move to the next Story in their feed

Profile Visits: The number of people who visited your profile as a result of this story

Reach: The number of unique accounts that viewed this Story (so one account that viewed it multiple times counts as 1)

Replies: The number of replies to this Story

You can also tap on a particular Story and swipe up to see specific analytics for that Story.

If you used an interactive sticker in your Story, such as a poll or emoji slider, you can tap the eye and bar graph icon that appears on the upper strip (right next to the Insights icon) to see how many people interacted with the sticker and what the average result of your poll was.

The following Story included the question sticker:

How does this information help you?

The metrics listed above tell you how your followers are reacting to your Stories.

Tapping back, for example, means that they wanted to look at a particular Story image or video more than once. This can mean that that post caught their attention and they’d like to spend more time looking at it. That’s generally a good indication that a post was engaging.

Tapping forward, exiting, or moving to the next Story is the opposite: it means didn’t want to spend as much time looking at that slide. This could mean the slide was less engaging.

Profile Visits, Calls, Emails, Get Directions, Replies, and Follows are all indications that a Story has inspired the person viewing it to learn more about your business and engage with you, and that’s a great sign. This is also true of responses to your interactive stickers.

Reach and Impressions are great for giving you a baseline to compare the other metrics to: if most people who viewed your post engaged with it, but the number isn’t that high, that means the post was engaging but didn’t reach a lot of people. If your Reach and Impressions numbers are high but your engagement numbers are low, that means that lots of people are seeing it, but aren’t inspired to engage with it.

Creator Studio

You can also view your Story analytics on Creator Studio. There are two advantages to using Creator Studio: it’s accessible via desktop, and it shows your stats for all the Stories you’ve posted, not just from the past 14 days.

If you haven’t used Creator Studio for Instagram before, click the Instagram icon at the top of the screen and connect your account. You’ll find your Stories in the Content Library under the “Stories” tab.

You’ll see each Story’s Reach right on the chart. You can take a look at each Story’s analytics by clicking the Story on the list.

Knowledge is power — record your analytics!

No matter what you do with the information later, it’s always a good idea to track your analytics. On the app, you can only track Story analytics for up to 14 days — and Creator Studio doesn’t display overall analytics specific to Stories. So it’s important to take time every week or two to record your stats in a spreadsheet for later comparison.

The more information you have, the more you will know about how people are interacting with your posts.

Action Items:

• If you haven’t already, switch to a Business or Creator account and take a look at your Story Insights.
• Take note of which Stories seem to be performing the best, and analyze what might have made those posts more successful.
• Brainstorm some ideas for additional posts that fill those criteria, and see how they perform. Comparing with the previous successful Stories may help you hone in on what is working well and what isn’t.