How to Create Great Instagram Reports for Your Clients
From data to visuals to writing, explained step by step
Are you struggling to prove value to your clients with your weekly or monthly reports? Wondering how to build a regular monthly report on the company’s Instagram performance?
In this article, you’ll find the key steps and tools to help you draft comprehensive Instagram reports and catch your client’s eyes immediately.
Understanding the Problem With Instagram Insights
With over 1 billion monthly active users, and with more and more accounts related to ecommerce business, Instagram is certainly the trending social media platform these days. Gathering your Instagram report with a summary of the performance of your clients is a great way to round things off nicely.
In reality, it’s hard to build a detailed report both for your brand and for your clients. As marketers, we need not only to focus on important insights from an Instagram account but to provide more advanced data, including conversions, competitor analysis, audience growth, etc.
An efficient Instagram report should give a peek behind the curtains to help your clients understand what their audience expects from them and what they need to improve the social marketing strategy.
Here you’ll understand which data matters most for your Instagram business goals, what exactly to show to focus your clients’ attention, and how to get it right.
1. Decide on the type of reporting style
If you want to create your own Instagram report, there are different ways. One of the most common is to use a program like Excel if you want to focus on numbers. For detailed reports, you can use a spreadsheet to collect your data.
While Google Sheets works well for internal tracking, using a PDF format is better tailored for sharing with your clients. To edit your PDF report, you can use any PDF editor, like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Acrobat.
If you want to make your Instagram report look professional, using Google Slides is the best option. Whether it be a face-to-face or a virtual meeting, a slideshow makes it easier for you to present your report to a client.
Another way to design and build engaging reports is through Piktochart. It provides a lot of useful features and templates, and you can easily share it online with your client.
Make sure you make your report clean, simple, and creative. Get all your data together, show the achieved goals, and transcribe them into your final report.
2. Include the right Instagram KPIs
Before you start including some actionable insights, think of the essential Instagram KPIs for the profiles of the clients you manage. The report is the key to figuring out what the target customers want and expect from you:
- Which campaign was successful and which one was unsuccessful
- What optimal hours of the day you can reach more people
- What kind of content customers prefer: videos, carousels, or images
- What communities you need to create around your brand
- What type of messages are highly valued: informational, product-oriented, or emotional
All clients want to get high engagement, interactions, and reach, but not all of them have the same KPIs. It’s essential to feel the pulse of your communication efforts to build an all-encompassing strategy for your further actions.
Make sure that Instagram analytics are only available to business accounts. You can view insights for a week. Add the following data to your Instagram report:
- Profile Analytics: Start your report with a profile summary of all your key metrics, including profile visits, website clicks, reach, impressions, interactions, mentions, and email/call clicks.
- Audience Analytics: Find out who you’re trying to attract and find a perfect demographic of followers you need to pursue. First of all, focus on those followers who are interacting with your posts. Consider important metrics like age range, top locations, gender breakdown, and follower hours/ days.
- Analytics for Individual Posts: Dig into the performance of individual posts to figure out how a particular post resonates with your followers. Here are the following factors you should consider: reach, interactions, follows, discovery, saves, comments, and impressions.
- Instagram Stories Analytics: Insights for Instagram Stories only go back 14 days, so you need to act fast to see all the necessary metrics, including exits, replies, impressions, reach, and people insights.
- IGTV Analytics: If you’ve already jumped on the IGTV bandwagon, you can view Insights for your IGTV videos directly. Here are the main metrics you can track: comments, likes, audience retention, average percentage viewed rate, and views.
Once you decide the key Instagram metrics to measure the performance of your business account, it’s time to add these data as a starting point to your report and give your clients a clear understanding of what’s been working for their accounts.
How to save your Instagram data
The data download feature is available on the web version, but it’s in the process of releasing Android and iOS apps. It may take up to 48 hours to amass all your data. Here’s how to get your data through the desktop version:
First, click your Edit Profile option and select Privacy and Security.
Then, scroll down to Request Download and choose Download Data.
Once you click the private link, all data will be downloaded to your own computer. Now you can use all of your data and insights to fill up the report with examples and good stories.
3. Check out conversions and quality traffic
Instagram Insights have become quite developed over the last years. While you know how many people have engaged with your Instagram posts, stories, and IGTV videos, there’s no way to track traffic quality and conversion rates in real-time. If you want to understand how your followers are clicking through your website and include these to your report, look outside of Instagram analytics.
With a tool like Finteza, you can track conversions, bounce rates, and conversions, as well as visualize tracked events. It lets you segment your traffic and create more intuitive and super-detailed reports within a few clicks.
To learn more from conversion and traffic data using Finteza, you’ll need to:
- Register for free and submit your website.
- Add the Finteza code to your site’s <head> tags to collect relevant statistics within a few minutes.
- To get data about quality traffic, choose Sources -> Social -> Instagram ->Quality and click Export to CSV.
2. If you want to track a custom event, go to Events and click “Get code for a new event.”
3. Enter the name of your email and choose the track type. Copy the generated event code and insert an event code to the source code of your web page.
4. Once a new event is activated, you can track for any activities and create a detailed report from CSV format.
Once you download the reports from Finteza, extract actionable insights and add them to your main Instagram report.
4. Stack up against your top competitors
If you want to take your clients to another level, the best way to do it is to be realistic about who their competitors are and stack up against them. It will help you define their merits and demerits and fully understand how effective your Instagram strategies that you use.
The best way to do this is to conduct a detailed competitor audit using SE Ranking. You should create a project and add your clients together with keywords, search engines, and locations. Within a few seconds, you can find out the main competitors filtered by any keywords and URL in the Competitors section.
You can also easily track and monitor how your brand stacks up against your competitors using the Instagram Competitor Report that has recently added to Sprout’s analytics suite. The tool provides key metrics about your competition, including top posts, engagement, audience growth, hashtags, and other things.
Once you get a competitive analysis of your Instagram competitors, you can easily export a detailed report to PDF or send it via your email.
When benchmarking your performance against your competitors, make sure to choose similar-sized competitors. It could be useful to visually display the comparison table.
5. Create a strategic story
All of your data build a strategic story. When you start analyzing the data, you can view how each data point relates to another one. Turning that data into reality and finding a great story that makes your followers deeply connect will help you have a stronger impact on your clients with your report.
Once you have a spreadsheet with a lot of data points, the first step is to make your data clean and organized. I prefer to work with data in Google Sheets. The format depends on what kind of data you have.
Take a look at your spreadsheet and ensure that all your data points make sense. Get rid of bad data or missing values. Find any possible outliers that don’t seem to fall into your category. Outliers are often viewed as nuisances, but sometimes they could provide interesting insights.
Thereafter, it’s important to visualize the data you want. It doesn’t mean you should create eye-catching data visualizations. You can easily visualize your data using Google Sheets.
Try to sort and filter your data in the right order you want to see. Highlight the data, click Insert and scroll down to the Chart editor.
You will notice that by default, the tool creates a basic line chart using your data. It’s up to you to select which set of data you need to visualize and which ones to discard.
If you want to change your chart type, pick up an alternative form in the Setup tab or choose any suggested chart.
For example, if I want to show the Genre section against 2015–2019, I will go to the Data Range option and put it manually from A1 through F7 in the Data Range box. The chart will be automatically changed.
The Customization tab helps you change chart colors, fonts, styles, rename your titles and axes, and improve the font size. For example, you can click on the Chart Style menu and customize different background colors, fonts, and chart border colors.
Once you’re done with visualizations, you can start searching for your story by analyzing your data. Let your clients pay attention to more opportunities to flex your skills.
6. Wheel out your key learnings and takeaways
Once you gather the key Instagram metrics, analyze traffic quality and evaluate conversion rates, it’s time to put it all together and wrap up a conclusion regarding the Instagram strategy next month.
It’s important to revisit your overall patterns and findings when drilling down into your analytics because various factors can impact your day-to-day success. Define what works well. For example, your influencer marketing efforts increased online sales or your IGTV videos performed well on Instagram. So you want to ramp Instagram influencer efforts and create more engaging videos.
No one likes getting bad news, but most often, treating clients with transparency can help you build long-lasting relationships. That’s why you can show what doesn’t work and reveal tweaks for your strategy.
For example, you noticed that over the past few months your reach has declined. So you decide to revamp the type of content you share and give great insight into what your followers are most likely interested in viewing.
Don’t forget that Instagram is constantly evolving. You need to be aware of all the changes and think of your opportunities. For example, with the advent of IGTV, you can create more IGTV videos and pitch great ideas that might catch your audience’s attention.
7. Make plans for improvement
It’s a well-known fact that most clients prefer to be focused on key results and the ROI of your Instagram efforts. But make sure that all data, even including not-so-flattering statistics, is a valuable asset.
I’ve recently chatted with social media manager Judy Blackwell from Hasner Law to find out how they build effective reports for their law firm clients. Here’s what she said to me:
“After presenting your report and progress, it’s important to include an action plan including the next steps. Your efforts should be aligned with those goals in mind by reporting on the right metrics. Show your clients that they are in good hands. Provide clear recommendations and analysis interpreting your findings and assure that the plan is flexible and coherent”.
Conclusion
Building a monthly Instagram report for your clients is much more than just recording your analytics. Without reporting, you can have a social media marketing blind spot. A comprehensive report should show what works and what doesn’t work, and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your Instagram strategy.
It may look as if creating an efficient report is a complex and giant task, but breaking it down into elementary steps and following the tips above, you can build any social media report you can think of.
