Instagram is well-known among event marketers for its high engagement rates. But do those rates have any effect on your ticket sales?

To track your Instagram efforts and see payoff over time, you need to track the right Instagram analytics — which means knowing what to measure and why. Here’s how to get started.

Unlock Instagram’s built-in Insights

Instagram is a brand-friendly place, with 200 million users checking out a business profile every day. That’s why the first step towards better analytics is to upgrade to a free business profile, which gives you get real-time metrics on how your Stories and posts perform.

7 key Instagram metrics for events

Metrics are essential to understanding your audience and how their behavior translates to ticket sales. But rather than overwhelming yourself with numbers, choose the ones that matter most to selling out events. And remember, your data is only as good as how you interpret and use it!

1. Followers

You probably know how many followers your Instagram account has off the top of your head, but that’s just scratching the surface. With Instagram Insights, you can measure the growth of your followers and see baseline demographics on gender, age, and location.

How to get more from this metric:

  • Tailor your content to your audience as it evolves
  • Attract sponsors with demographics data
  • Track clicks on your ticketing page in your bio

Pro tip: Use a third-party tool like Iconosquare to see the relationship between your posting frequency and your follower growth to tweak your schedule.

2. Lurkers

Not everyone who looks at your Instagram posts follows you. Instagram Insights tells you how many “lurkers” see your posts via hashtags, the Explore page, a profile search, or a location link, so you can convince more of these lurkers to follow you.

How to get more from this metric:

  • Track surges in visitors from a particular hashtag to gauge its accuracy
  • Understand the relevancy of hashtags and location links you’re using
  • Tweak the positioning of your content to attract more followers

3. Post engagement

Views are good, but engagement is even better, since it means people are interacting with your content. Instagram Insights provides basic metrics on likes, comments, and saved posts, while a third-party tool like Simply Measured gives you even more information (like hashtag reach).

 

How to get more from this metric:

  • Fine-tune your posting schedule
  • Determine which types of posts are performing best
  • Hone your content strategy (e.g. looking into whether video performs better over venue stills)

4. Story engagement

A third of the most viewed Stories on Instagram come from businesses. You can use Instagram Insights to measure the number of impressions, number of unique accounts who saw your Story, taps forward (skips), taps back (rewatches), replies, swipe-aways (bounces to another Story), and exits.

How to get more from this metric:

  • Gauge how well your Story strategy is performing over time
  • Hone and refine your strategy, focusing on one metric at a time
  • Reduce bounces from your Stories 

Pro tip: Tools like Delmondo can surface insight from Instagram Stories alongside analytics from your posts to help you identify deeper engagement trends.

5. Ad performance

There are a myriad of advertising options on Instagram. You can create ads from scratch, promote a popular post, or convert a Story into an ad. If you’re trying any, or all, of these tactics, you can (and should) track their performance on Instagram.

How to get more from this metric:

  • Track basic performance via Instagram’s parent tools
  • Place and measure the performance of your ads with Boostable or ToneDen
  • Fine tune your ad performance to best use your marketing budget

6. Click-throughs and conversions

Click-throughs are easy to measure, but conversions are more challenging. This is a less concrete number, as Instagram is probably just one touch point for your target audience.

Here’s how to measure how your Instagram strategy converts to registrations:

  • Use Instagram insights to measure how many people click through to a link to your ticketing platform from your profile bio or from a link in your Stories

  • Use Google Analytics to measure activity on your website, like clicks through to ticket sales that came from Instagram

  • Compare these two sets of numbers to see how many people come from Instagram to your ticketing page to buy

Pro tip: Use your ticketing or registration partner to highlight how much traffic and sales Instagram is driving for your event.

Use Instagram analytics to drive real sales over time

There are countless metrics to monitor on Instagram, but you shouldn’t pay attention to every single one. Instead, choose up to three metrics to care about most — and focus on optimizing those. That’s where having an easy, automated way to measure your results over time can help.

To learn more about building an Instagram strategy that drives ticket sales, read The 2018 Guide to Instagram for Event Marketing.