Using Instagram Stories is a common practice today among the businesses to showcase their products more explicitly and effectively on Instagram. This being essentially a video and photo sharing app, these Stories will help you and your business to reach out to a larger section of the followers for Instagram. This will help you to increase your prospects of sale. Ideally, this is the primary reason that most businesses find this to be the most effective platform among all social media networks to promote their brand and product.
In order to measure the ROI of your Instagram stories you will need to know the relevant metrics that will help you to determine whether or not your Stories are a hit or a miss with your users.
About Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are very popular and it was appreciated by the users as soon as it was launched. According to Social Report it is revealed that:
- Instagram Stories beat its competition Snapchat and
- It acquired about 250 million daily active users within the first year of its launch.
All these facts and figures suggest that the Instagram Stories strategy is one of the best and most important strategies to follow in your own social media marketing.
If you use Instagram Stories for your business, you will be way ahead of the game as well as your competition. But it is important for you to know many different things so as to understand that the Instagram Stories that you have created is actually good and high yielding. You will need to know that:
- It is actually reaching out to your target audience
- Whether or not these are encouraging them to get more involved and engaged with your content
- Whether it is driving them towards your site and
- Whether or not they are buying your products or services.
This will prevent you from wasting time in creating Instagram Stories that do not bring in the desired results. It is very important that you get the results from your Instagram Stories given the fact that they are live only for 24 hours. If you do not get the results by then, it will not be high in ROI.
Reach and impressions
The good news is that it is not a difficult task to measure the rate of success for your Instagram Stories. Before you start with measuring the ROI and gathering the different metrics using different analytical tools, you should first know the difference between reach and impression.
- Reach is the exact number of people or individual Instagram accounts who are able to view your content but that does not necessarily mean that they will click on it to know more and
- Impression is the specific number of times people view your Instagram Stories. This will create a sense of urge in the viewers either to know more about your product and visit your site or make a buying decision.
Once you know this difference, you will then need to look at the size of the audience that you are currently reaching to with your Instagram Stories.
These are the metrics that will specify both reach and impressions and therefore provide accurate metrics because the same user may even view your Instagram Story a number of times simply but may not get engaged and may not even perform the desired action.
In order to determine the number of your followers areactually viewing your Instagram Stories, you will need to:
- Consider the total number of viewers reached
- Divide this number by the total number of followers you have and then
- Multiply the quotient by 100.
You will get the percentage of your followers who are actually watching your Instagram Stories.
Measure the interactions
Once you know about the reach and impressions created by your Instagram Stories, you will now need to focus on the interactions that it generates, which ideally is your primary goal for posting on Instagram.
There are several different ways in which the users can interact with your Instagram Story, though they cannot comment on it. These ways include:
- Visiting your Instagram profile
- Clicking on the link you have provided on your Instagram profile bio
- Tapping on the email and
- Clicking on the call to action button.
All these actions can be measured easily. When you track these interaction metrics it will help you to determine whether or not your Instagram Stories are encouraging your users to take the desired action. If these metrics suggest that the level of interaction among the users is low, it will indicate that there is an immediate need to improve your story as well as your call to action so that you can increase clicks.
Evaluate engagement level
In addition to the interactions, you will also need to evaluate the level of engagement among the users. Ideally, In Instagram, these are the two most primary factors though both may seem to be similar when you look at these apparently.
However, when you look at it deeply, you will know that “engagement” actually refers to comments, replies and swipe-ups.
Swipe-up call to action is the most important Instagram Story feature that ensures that users are taken directly to your website when they swipe up. Ideally, according to research, the best swipe-through rates are in between 15 and 25% on an average. This ideally is considered to be a killer conversion rate.
Also make sure that you look at the number of direct messages that you have received since you have posted the Instagram Story. If you have more direct messages as a result of your Instagram Story, it will mean that your viewers are more engaged.
Check completion rate
Completion rate may be a bit more difficult to calculate. For this you will have to:
- Take the number of viewers for your last Instagram Story
- Divide it by the number of viewers you had when you launched the first Story and
- Then calculate the percentage.
Check and calculate the completion rate so as to ensure that the users are actually watching your Instagram Stories all the way through.
