Businesses can engage their audiences effectively through Instagram—not only through regular feeds, but also through Stories which have become a powerful tool to advertise a brand to a large audience. Brands and business owners can significantly improve their performance on the market with Instagram Stories.

Hence, measuring your success with Instagram Stories has become a crucial part of continuously improving them to facilitate your promotion strategy. In order to analyze whether your Instagram strategy has been successful, it’s essential to know what factors need to be measured and how it can be done.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• The details of your Instagram Stories analytics
• What each metric means, and
• How you can use your metrics to improve your Instagram stories strategy.

Understanding Instagram Stories analytics

Instagram stories analytics are split into three categories: Discovery, Navigation, and Interaction. Let's take a closer look at each one, why they matter, and how to boost performance with them.

Discovery

Discovery involves reach and impressions. Reach is the figure that defines the number of accounts that viewed your Story. Impressions represents the total amount of times your Instagram Story was viewed.

Why does discoverability matter?

High discovery rates are crucial for business owners who advertise on Instagram and for bloggers and influencers who earn profits out of it. The more people a Story reaches, the better. To find out what part of your audience is watching your Stories, you need to compare the number of your followers with the number of reach and impressions.

How to boost your Instagram Stories' discoverability

We suggest using the following tips to boost the discoverability rate of your Stories: add stickers, locations, or hashtags so a Story is more likely to appear in the “Explore” section or the sticker’s larger Story. For small business owners, Instagram has another suggestion: You can use Support Small Business, Gift Card, or Food Order stickers.

For small business owners particularly, you can boost discoverability using Support Small Business, Gift Card, or Food Order stickers.

Navigation

Navigation involves the following user activity:

• Forward Taps: Number of times someone tapped to the next Story.
• Taps Backward: The number of times someone tapped back to see the previous Story.
• Next Story Swipes: The number of times someone swiped to the next Story.
• Exit Story Taps: The number of times someone exited your Story.
• Navigation: The overall total of back, forward, next Story, and exit actions taken with your Story.

Why does navigation matter?

Navigation data is the indicator of what works and what doesn’t. If a user switches to the next Story, it means they found the content you shared uninteresting or irrelevant. If they tap back to see what you’ve published, the content has captured their attention. How do you get your users not to want to swipe? Make your Stories attractive, useful, and concise. In Stories, people are not looking for drawn-out points or excessive text.

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Make your Stories attractive, useful, and concise. In Stories, people are not looking for drawn-out points or excessive text.

Interaction

The interaction metric for your Instagram Stories involves the following activity:

• Profile visits: How many times your profile has been visited after one has viewed your Story.
• Replies: The number of people who replied to your Story.
• Followers/subscribers: The number of accounts that started following you after viewing your Story.
• Shared: How many times your Story has been shared.
• Website visits: The number of people who clicked the link on your profile after viewing your Story.
• Stickers: The number of clicks on a location, hashtag, tags, stickers, and products in your Story.
• Calls, text messages, emails, routes: The number of people who took one of these actions after viewing your Story.
• Product page views per product tag: The number of product page views for each product tag in your Story.
• Interactions: The total number of actions people have taken since viewing your Story.

Why is the interaction metric important?

If the goal of your Stories involves an interaction or other activities, interaction statistics can help you measure your success in achieving them.

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Main metrics to be measured with Instagram Stories analytics

Now that you understand the three main categories of Instagram Stories analytics, let's take a deeper dive into some of the important metrics:

• Hashtag and location stickers
• Swipe-ups
• Replies
• Traffic
• Peak activity time

Hashtag and location stickers

Instagram Stories Analytics also shows the number of clicks on stickers, making it easy to gauge their effectiveness in your Instagram Stories. You will be able to see how many people clicked on each sticker, which will help you understand if they are useful to your audience or not.

Instagram recently expanded its search and research page by adding hashtags and Location Stories. Now, when you add a hashtag or location sticker to a Story, other users can find it by searching for it on the Browse page. This means that your Stories are now available to everyone on the platform!

This means that your Stories are now available to everyone on the platform!

Swipe-ups

Instagram Stories Analytics also tracks the types of interactions your Instagram Stories receive. These interactions are split into swipe-ups and replies. Recently, Instagram has added a new function: links to Instagram Stories. Currently, this feature is only available for business accounts, verified accounts, and accounts that have more than 10,000 followers. Tracking the times when users “swiped up” on your Instagram Stories is the most efficient way to track what kind of content is the best for driving traffic.

If the swipe-up traffic is low, try adding text or arrows to draw your users’ attention to the bottom of your screen. It’s possible that your audience needs a little push in the right direction.

If the swipe-up traffic is low, try adding text or arrows to draw your users’ attention to the bottom of your screen. It’s possible that your audience needs a little push in the right direction.

Replies

Replies indicate the number of times users responded to your Story. Unlike post comments, replies are only visible in your inbox and don’t appear publicly.

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Traffic

As Instagram Stories’ popularity continues to grow, it's important for business owners, influencers, and brands to view their feeds and Stories as two separate platforms. While the content of your feed and Stories should work to reach one aim, it's important to track traffic and other valuable data separately to figure out what works best for each channel. To start tracking the traffic metric, you’ll need to set up the Urchin Tracking Module (or UTM). UTM is a piece of a unique code that you need to insert to the end of your URL. With UTM, you can be sure that Google Analytics is tracking your Instagram traffic with maximum accuracy.

While the content of your feed and Stories should work to reach one aim, it's important to track traffic and other valuable data separately to figure out what works best for each channel.

One more suggestion is to add a UTM parameter to your website link in your Instagram bio so you can see how many people visited your site after seeing your Story.

Peak activity times

Instagram Stories are only available for 24 hours unless you add them to your Instagram Highlights section. The best way to raise the chances of your Story being seen is to post it when your audience is the most active. To check the time of the highest followers’ performance, do the following:

• From the Instagram app, go to Insights.
• Click on the audience tab. Scroll down to Followers.
• Toggle between hours and days to see if there are any noticeable peaks.

Tips for optimizing your Instagram Stories strategy

Here are a few tips on how to create engaging Instagram Stories based on Instagram Insights.

Find what your audience likes the most

Track Instagram stats over time so you can highlight the best performing posts. If you spot content that overcomes other Stories, look for ways to recreate it. Hung Vanngo, a king of makeup creates breathtaking makeups for top celebrities and shares tutorials that followers are crazy about.

Optimize your content based on users’ preferences

Understanding the needs of your audience should shape your entire Instagram business strategy, including Stories. For example, businesses that offer writing services would target people who need help creating written content and who might not be native English speakers. Pay attention to age, gender, and location to create content that is relevant to your followers.

Listen to audience feedback

Qualitative data such as audience feedback matters as much as quantitative data. If you've used stickers for polls, quizzes, or questions to grab your audience's attention, pay attention to the responses. Use reviews to inspire new products and services or content. And don't be afraid to ask directly. People love it when their voices are heard.

Analyze the ways people prefer to communicate with you

Among the plethora of options on how followers can contact you, there are always preferred channels over others. Take a look at the number of messages, phone calls, or emails to see if one outperforms the others. Although this may not seem like a pitfall, communication methods can be an obstacle for some customers. Millennials prefer messages over phone calls while othe generations may feel more comfortable while texting or even calling.

Millennials prefer messages over phone calls while the other generations may feel more comfortable with texting or even calling.

Boost discoverability with the proper hashtags

Hashtags are one of the most effective methods of how your Stories can be discovered by non-followers. If the discoverability data does not correspond to your expectations, you can increase it not only with location tags and hashtags, but also the tagged accounts of others.

This will not only help you to improve reach but also gives an opportunity to show appreciation and happy customers in action.

If your discoverability data does not correspond to your expectations, you can increase it with hashtags, location tags, and even tagging tagging the accounts of influencers or happy customers.

Use Instagram Stories analytics to improve your marketing performance 

The path that businesses and influencers take to build trustworthy relationships with their followers is paved with Instagram micro-engagements and interactions. Instagram nowadays is more than an app to share funny pictures with the audience; it’s also a self-sufficient business platform. The more your potential customers engage with your content, the more likely they’re buying from you or the more likely your ads are to boost revenue. Now that you know what every metric means, why they matter, and how to measure them, you can optimize your Instagram Stories strategy for better Instagram marketing.

About the author

Haley Osborne is a freelance writer interested in management, web design, and writing. She regularly touches on the topics of self-development and modern trends. Her goal is to provide quality and inspiring content to those looking to learn and grow.