Instagram Insights for beginners: the numbers worth watching
Insights is Instagram’s built-in analytics, free on any professional account. It shows plenty of numbers; only a few of them should change what you post next.
Getting Insights
Switch to a professional account (creator or business) in Settings. It’s free and reversible. Insights then appears on your profile’s professional dashboard and under each post, covering roughly the last 90 days.
The terms, in plain English
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Views | How many times your content was shown or played. Instagram now uses views as its main headline number across formats. |
| Accounts reached | How many different accounts saw your content at least once. |
| Interactions | Likes, comments, saves, shares and replies combined. |
| Profile activity | Profile visits and taps on links and contact buttons. |
| Follows | New followers attributed to a post or reel. |
The four numbers to watch
- Reach from non-followers. Shows whether you’re being recommended to new people. Reels usually lead here.
- Shares and saves per post. The strongest signs that content is useful or worth passing on.
- Profile visits to follows. If lots of people visit but few follow, fix your bio and top posts.
- Watch time on reels. Where people drop off tells you what to cut.
Turning numbers into decisions
- Sort your last 20 posts by shares. What do the top five have in common? Make more of that.
- Check your audience’s most active times and use our guide to posting times to test them.
- Look at the age and location of followers. A UK business with an audience mostly elsewhere has a targeting problem.
Engagement rate
Insights doesn’t show a single engagement rate, but you can work one out: interactions divided by followers (or by reach), times 100. Our calculator does it in a second.
A note if you’ve bought followers
Bought followers will show up in your follower count and audience breakdowns, and they’re unlikely to interact, so your rate per follower will drop. Rate per reach is more useful in that case, because it reflects people who actually saw the post.
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