Instagram Stories are an excellent way to build long-term relationships with your followers by posting content behind the scenes which also portrays your human side to them. Nowadays, several brands use Instagram Stories because they find it easier to connect with their fans than they could do through regular feeds. When using stories for business, it is also important to measure the return on investment(ROI) on Instagram stories. The article presents the details on some of the metrics to evaluate the stories performance and how to calculate them.
How Should Marketers Track Instagram Stories
Marketers have the sole responsibility of tracking and measuring any campaign taken into matter. In order to get an exact picture of the audience’ mind, it is foremost important to identify the right kind of metrics before delving into the numbers.
Instagram Stories are live only for 24 hours unless you add it to the highlights. Growth Insights, recently introduced by Instagram allows you to see which stories attracted more followers. People who create and post Instagram Stories must look into the following metrics to track the performance of their stories.
Total number of Story views
Clicking the little eye icon tells you exactly how many people viewed your story. Now Instagram also allows users to see who viewed their stories if it is more than 24 hours since the story was posted. Getting to know exactly who viewed your stories can help in deciding the group of audience that you should target.
View Percentage of Stories
The total number of people who viewed the story divided by the number of followers gives a value which should be multiplied by 100 to get the View percentage. This number lets you know what percentage of followers view your stories and can perfectly measure ROI on Instagram stories and is very useful to compare stories and conclude what type of content the followers prefer more. When you post multiple stories, one story might be viewed more times than the rest. Adding to this, if you are a new user to Instagram, posted multiple stories and waiting for people to view your stories, you can purchase Instagram Story Views at cheap prices, which not only increases story views but can boost up followers for your account as well.
Completion rate
Completion rate represents exactly how many watch your story to the fullest. The number of viewers of your last story divided by the number of people who saw your first post gives the completion rate. This metric denotes how well your posts attract the audience and the value differs for every business. It is important that each business fixes itself a threshold value as a baseline criteria. The average completion rate can be calculated for a period of over 14 days. Promotions, Q & A sessions can seemingly improve the average completion rate because users hardly exit from such kind of story formats.
Total number of replies
Direct messages are the only way your followers can interact on Instagram stories. They just tap “send a message” in the bottom left hand corner to send you DM. Make use of the messages, reply to them promptly which can help you build a healthy relationship with customers.
Beyond Instagram Stories metrics
There are other things which you should look into other than the metrics explained above. You need to think differently to understand how Instagram Stories can impact your business. All you need to do is set your marketing goals because your presence on Instagram is decided by the reach which is computed by algorithmic intelligence. Keep communicating with your clients through email, including a call-to-action to navigate users to your website.
Instagram Swipe-Up
Instagram has recently added a new feature called “Swipe-Up” which only verified business accounts with more than 10K followers can access. It allows account owners to include a separate link to the page and a call-to-action (CTA). When you swipe up, Users are directed to a different website and they can return back to the app by clicking the “x” in the top right-hand corner. CTAs can be used along with Instagram Stories to promote content, product teasers, sales. events, online courses and whatnot.
Conclusion
It is important that you set goals for Instagram stories as you do for social media platforms. Using your analytics is an ideal practice to track your website traffic through Instagram. The real ROI on Instagram stories is not in getting more story views but it completely vests in how you use the right strategy to convert your followers into clients and retain them.
