With Instagram’s recent algorithm updates, brands have more to leverage within their influencer marketing partnerships. Rather than solely measuring the engagement on an influencer’s social media post by looking at the likes and comments, brands are now able to ask the influencer to provide them with impression metrics, giving them further insight into the engagement the sponsored post generated, the impact it had on their audience, and the overall success of the influencer’s post. In other words, which influencers within their network are meeting the brand’s success metric goals.
Brands are pivoting their influencer campaigns, and implementing this analytics requirement to further show the value of each sponsored partnership and how influencers are directly impacting their bottom line. However, these metrics are only presented to influencers who meet two requirements: they must have their Instagram account set up as a business profile and they must have over 10,000 followers. If an influencer meets these requirements, Instagram’s impression feature automatically provides them with metrics to support each Instagram post and Instagram story that goes live on their account.
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The metrics that automatically generate data may seem pretty self-explanatory, but what do they really mean and how are they showing the brand a larger impact within each influencer partnership? Let’s take a closer look at the metrics you should be asking your influencers for.
Instagram Photo Metrics
Impressions
The number of impressions on an Instagram photo represent the number of times your content is displayed on an Instagram feed, regardless if the post was engaged with or not. An impression means that the content posted was delivered to ‘x’ amount of users’ Instagram feed. This metric is difficult to measure without the analytics provided by Instagram and it’s important that brands have access to this information to accurately evaluate the performance of each post.
Overall Reach
Overall reach is the total number of people who are seeing the Instagram influencer’s content on Instagram. Although many users may think that all their followers see the content they post, that’s no longer the case with Instagram’s algorithm updates. Each post shared by a social media influencer only reaches a portion of their followers, and it’s important to see this metric to identify how many users are actually seeing the content each influencer posts on social media.
Likes/Comments
This metric is one that each Instagram user has access to, as the number of likes and comments are clearly shown on each Instagram post. However, by presenting these metrics alongside the other impression metrics, it allows both the influencer and the brand to see how many people engaged with the content verses the number of impressions the post received.
Image Saves
This feature allows the influencer and the brand to see how many viewers flagged the photo and saved the image onto their profile. This is unique because it shows that users are saving the post so they can revisit it at another time.
Instagram Story Metrics
Impressions
Similarly to the impressions on an Instagram photo, this metric for Instagram Stories represent the number of times the Instagram Story is displayed on a user’s Instagram feed, regardless if he or she clicked and watched the story. An impression means that the content posted was delivered to ‘x’ amount of users’ Instagram feed.
Viewers
This metric represents the number of users who clicked onto the influencer’s Instagram Story and watched the post. The number of viewers can vary on each Instagram Story, regardless if there are multiple Stories posted in a sequence because users can close the Story at any point. The viewers metric on Instagram Stories is similar to the overall reach metric on Instagram posts because it shows the number of users that saw the content that was posted.
Replies
The “Replies” metric within Instagram’s insights gives the influencer an idea of how many people responded to the influencer’s Story. Instead of engagement metrics on Instagram posts such as the number of likes and comments on each post, this is a way for influencers to see the engagement metrics on their Instagram Stories. Think of it in terms of this: one reply on an Instagram Story is like one comment on an Instagram post. Whether it’s a user asking a question or making a general comment, this metric shows that users are engaging with an influencer’s Instagram Story.
Sticker insights
Sticker insights represents the number of viewers that are clicking onto the tags within each Instagram Story. For example, if an influencer tags a brand’s Instagram account “@xyz” within their Instagram Story, and one of their followers clicks on that tag and visits the tagged Instagram account, that metric accounts for one sticker insight. This is important because it shows the influencer and the brand how many people are not only viewing their stories, but engaging within them and visiting the brand’s social media accounts.
Link Opens
This metric is arguably the most important Instagram Story metric, as it represents the number of users that are clicking the link within an influencer’s story and visiting the brand’s website. The link open metric shows brands that not only are influencers driving users back to their social media accounts, but they are driving users back to their website where they are more likely to convert.
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In addition, if the brand creates a custom UTM link for each influencer to include as the link within their Story, the brand can then go into Google Analytics and see more granular metrics about the traffic driven to the website, including: how many of the visitors were new users, how much time each visitor was spending on the website, and whether or not a transaction was completed.
How Can Brands Leverage These Metrics?
Brands are able to leverage these metrics by requesting that each influencer that meets the two requirements—Instagram account set up as a business profile and has over 10,000 followers—to send a screenshot or a document combining their post’s performance metrics. By requesting these analytics at the beginning of the marketing campaign, this incentivizes the influencer to optimize their post so it can receive the highest amount of engagement.
This also allows brands to compare each influencer’s performance metrics to see which influencer’s post had the biggest impact on their audience and hitting their influencer marketing goals in terms of total reach and engagement. However, something for brands to keep in mind is that if influencers are sending a document rather than a direct screenshot, the metrics may have been tampered with. Regardless, these metrics show the brand more movement from their influencer marketing campaigns rather than solely measuring the number of likes and comments on each post.