How Often Do Instagram Insights Update?

Jamie Read more June 6, 2019

How often does Instagram Insights update? How can I use it to analyze my marketing efforts? How do I even sign up to Instagram Insights? These questions and more will be answered here.

Instagram Insights is the analytics side of the social network. It is used mainly by social media marketers to see how the audience engages with brands, how effective different campaigns are, how many visitors further engage with the brand and a ton of other stuff. Marketers love data and Instagram Insights provides as much of it as you can eat.

How do you sign up to Instagram Insights?

Instagram Insights is only available to business accounts. If you want to use it for your marketing then you need to be using a business account and sign up for Insights. The process is straightforward and still free for now. You will need an existing Facebook Page for your business and your account also needs to be public. Private accounts cannot be converted into business accounts.

Sign into Instagram and select your profile.
Select the cog icon to access settings.
Select Switch to Business Profile in the settings list.
Add your Facebook business page when prompted.
Review your contact information to make sure everything is correct.
Select Done.

You will get a notification to tell you that your Instagram account is now a business account but you can begin using it right away.

How to access Instagram Insights

Once you have converted to a business account, you can view Instagram Insights from your profile. You should see a new icon at the top that looks like a graph. This is where you find it. Select the graph and you’ll see some data on who has interacted with your account. If you’re accessing Insights immediately after converting to a business account, you may not see anything yet. It takes time to collect the data used in analytics.

You should see three tabs, Activity, Content and Audience. Activity will show you how many visits your account has and how many clicks your website has had from Instagram users. You should also see a Discovery graph showing where those visitors came from and what they viewed.

Content shows you the posts on your Instagram profile, Stories, videos and any paid posts or ads you have published. You can see how your content is performing by showing impressions, views, engagement and so on.

Audience gives you data on who views your Instagram content. That will include their demographics, when they are online, where they come from, their age range, gender and how many followers you and they have.

How often does Instagram Insights update?

Once your business account has been running a little while, Instagram Insights will show you weekly data. The data is collated and stored continually, but Insights presents you with a week at a time. This is updated every 24 hours on a rolling schedule, so you see 7 days at a time, updated every day.

This is long enough to be able to have enough data to analyze but short enough to react quickly to changes or refine your approach without wasting too much time.

How can I use Instagram Insights to analyze my marketing efforts?

How you use Instagram Insights depends entirely on what you want to achieve. Social media marketing is not a one size fits all solution. You could be building brand awareness, generating leads, building a strong community or something completely different.

Let’s use increasing brand awareness as the example as that’s a very common goal. In this case, you would be interested in three main data points, follower count, impressions and reach. All of these are available on the general overview but you can get into specifics further into Instagram Insights.

Follower count will be on the main page of Instagram Insights. It will show you how many followers your account has. For brand awareness, building this number is vital.

Impressions is accessed from Content. You can see how many impressions your post, Story or other content has received here. You can refine this depending on the demographic of your audience which you would get from the Audience tab.

Reach tracks the number of views but only unique views. Impressions does not differentiate between accounts so this tells you how many unique views your content receives.

We could spend dozens of tutorials discussing how Instagram Insights works, what data is useful for what situation and how best to use it. You may find it more useful to sign up for your business account and begin exploring in your own time. Nothing beats learning by doing!

Do you use Instagram Insights? Have any tips for new users? Share them below if you do!