How do you find your number of Instagram impressions?

Going to your profile. Tap the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner, and tap Insights. Tap the metrics under the Overview section or specific posts or stories you’ve shared for a more detailed analysis.

What Do Instagram Impressions Mean?

You only get one chance to make a first impression. That’s true in real life, but not on Instagram. On Instagram, one post can receive multiple impressions, even if it’s a single person seeing the same post. The trick is understanding the difference between an Instagram impression, an Instagram view, and other Instagram metrics.

Instagram impressions are the number of times a viewer sees an Instagram ad, story, or post. If the same user sees the same Instagram content more than once, this counts as multiple impressions. Meanwhile, Instagram views are a metric that shows the number of times that a visitor interacts with an Instagram post or story. This may mean they like it, share it, follow you, leave a comment, or purchase a product through that post or story.

What Matters More? Instagram Impressions or Views?

The short answer is that they both matter. Impressions build brand awareness, and that awareness may eventually turn into some sort of customer interaction, i.e. a view. After all, people can’t engage with your Instagram account, or do something with your business, if they don’t know your business or Instagram account exists. So impressions are often the precursor to views.

What Are Some Other Key Instagram Measurement Tools?

Website analytics, also known as web metrics, is data that consists of tracking everything online, including social media. Analytics include figuring out how people found your online content (whether they used search terms, referrals from social media, clicked through ads, etc.), how long they looked at that content, if they interacted with it, and what content made them leave one platform like Instagram for another, like Amazon.

Impressions and views are two metrics that are specific to Instagram. Here are a few others.

Instagram Reach

This is the number of unique users who saw your Instagram post or story on any given day. Unless you’re putting some serious financial effort and manpower behind your Instagram posts, you probably won’t have every single one of your followers see your content. That would require them to constantly refresh and look at every post on their Instagram feeds. Overall, the more content you put on Instagram, the more you’ll increase your reach.

Instagram Impressions

As we discussed, this is the number of times your content, whether a post or a story, was shown to users.

Impressions are the total number of times your content could have been seen by people who are logged in and looking at their accounts. If your Instagram impressions are higher than your reach, it’s a sign that your audience is viewing your content multiple times. So, you might want to do more posts that are like the ones getting high numbers of impressions.

Instagram Engagement Rate

This is the number of engagements your post received divided by its impressions. Engagements include likes, comments, shares, and saves. Engagement rate tells you how many users did something when they saw a post. This can help you decide if users tend to react to Instagram stories, posts, or videos and which ones are the most engaging.

Instagram Saved Posts

Many people save posts, and then refer back to them later. If you see a lot of people saving a video about planting tulips in Fall, you can save that same video and repost it next fall. More importantly, you know a lot of your users have tulips sprouting in Spring. So what content can you post about that?

So Why Do Impressions Matter When There Are All of These Other Metrics?

Impressions matter most because they show you how often your posts are seen, by individual users and multiple users. If your impressions are not high, none of the other metrics really matter. This means you don’t have enough followers and Instagram doesn’t think your content will be anything their users will like. You need to create content that gets impressions.

How Do You Find Out What Your Impressions Are?

You need a business or creator account to view impressions. Most of us join Instagram as regular users, so you’ll need to upgrade to a business account to track metrics. You can do so by following these steps:

Go to your profile and tap the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner.
Tap Settings and Privacy.
- Toggle to the professional account choice under Settings and Privacy.
Tap Account type and tools.
Tap Switch to a professional account.
Tap Continue.
Select a Category for your business and tap Done.
Tap OK to confirm.
Tap Business.
Tap Next.
To share logins using the Accounts Center, tap Continue.
To display or hide business information on your profile, go to your profile and tap Edit profile. We always suggest making your information public. Otherwise, people wonder what you’re hiding.

You can find out how many impressions your posts are getting by:

Going to your profile.
Tap the three horizontal lines in the upper right corner, and tap Insights.
Tap the metrics under the Overview section or specific posts or stories you’ve shared for a more detailed analysis.

The Difference Between Reach vs Impressions vs Views on Instagram

Reach is the number of new, i.e. unique users who saw your Instagram post, Reel, or story. Impressions are the number of times your content is shown to Instagram users, even the same ones. Your goal is to get people to do something when they are impressed with your content. This is a view. So if one user views one of your posts three times and follows you once, that would count as one reach, three impressions, and one view.

There’s More to Learn About Instagram Impressions

Impressions aren’t just about what happens with each post or story. There are subsets of impressions, including:

Profile Impressions

Profile Impressions gives you an overview of all things related to your account within the last week or month. You can also see metrics on the number of people who engage with your content, from where, and at what time.

Audience Impressions

Audience impressions include the demographics of your audience, including their location, gender, income level, interests, and more. This is not directly related to the number of Instagram impressions you receive. However, you should take into account when your followers are most active. If you post your content at those times, you can easily get more Instagram impressions.

Content Impressions

Content impressions will allow you to compare the performance of content published on the platform. Some people post static posts, some post stories, and some post video content.

How People Found You Through Statistics

Tips to Improve Your Instagram Impressions

If you feel like your Instagram impressions are low, there are a few things you can do to improve them.

Use High-Quality Images

When uploading image posts, ensure that it’s clear and not obviously a stock photo. Custom photos, a service we provide at SEO Design Chicago, are the best. But if you can’t afford this, at least invest a nominal amount of your budget into Istock images.

Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are a way for people to see what other people are talking about, what events are happening, or just to get ideas for their own posts. Remember the #metoo movement? That worked because of a hashtag. But there are all kinds of hashtags out there for every industry. When you start to type a hashtag into a post, you’ll see how many people follow that hashtag. Then, you can choose which ones you want to include in your posts.

Post at the Right Time

Posting at the right time on Instagram will bring your post in front of the highest number of people. The right time and day varies by industry and even by account. Use common sense. Most people work during the day, so they don’t want to get “caught” looking at Instagram unless the business considers social media an essential duty. Instead, they’ll probably be online first thing in the morning or after work hours.

Use Instagram Ads

Instagram Ads can help you reach a larger audience by paying for these impressions. Some ads are even shoppable, allowing you to drive revenue from them. Even placing a small amount of money behind an ad can lead to impressive results.

Instagram Content Creation or Ads From SEO Design Chicago

If you don’t have the time to manage your Instagram on your own, you have the option of hiring a third-party vendor that specializes in these activities. Here at SEO Design Chicago, we offer both of these services – along with many more – to clients in a wide variety of industries. To get started, reach out to us today! We look forward to helping your business grow with smart digital marketing strategies.