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How many times a day do you check Instagram? With over a billion monthly users, Instagram isn’t just the world’s biggest photo album; it’s a core platform for brands to engage audiences, build awareness, and drive traffic through visual storytelling.
But there’s one big challenge- tracking what happens after someone clicks your Instagram link or ad. While Instagram shows basic insights, it doesn’t tell the full story. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) used to struggle with this, putting a lot of Instagram traffic under “direct.” The good news? GA4 now does a better job of showing Instagram traffic, although some clicks may still go unidentified.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to:
Note: This post was written in 2017 and has been completely updated based on the recent updates in May 2025.
Tracking Instagram metrics is crucial for measuring your social media success and enhancing engagement. Google Analytics helps you avoid the common issue of Instagram traffic showing up as ‘direct,’ giving you clearer insights into audience behavior and preferences.
You can use Instagram Insights to monitor traffic and track followers clicking through to your website, which is essential for tracking Instagram traffic.
Important: If you have a business or creator account, you can access the Professional Dashboard for deeper analytics, including audience engagement and website tap metrics. To get started, go to your Instagram profile and tap on ‘Professional Dashboard’ to view your Insights.
Let’s start by exploring how to navigate Instagram Insights to get overall traffic from Instagram itself
If your main traffic driver is the link in your bio, Instagram provides a straightforward way to see how many people are clicking through to your site. To maximize results, optimize your Instagram bio using a trackable link via UTM parameters or third-party tools for better campaign tracking. First, ensure you have a business account, as this is necessary to access these metrics.
Once confirmed, click on the sandwich menu in the top left corner of your profile and go to the ‘Insights’ section. Click ‘see more‘ under ‘Accounts Reached’ to explore all interactions with your profile and content. In this area, you’ll find ‘Website Taps,’ showing the number of clicks on your bio link. Accounts reached shows the total number of accounts reached along with impressions made.
A recent update to Instagram allows all users, regardless of follower count, to include links in their stories. To assess traffic from these links, revisit the 'Insights' section. Navigate to your stories and click through to find the link clicks metric. This setting will reveal the number of clicks each story has generated, helping you gauge the impact of your content on driving traffic.
Understanding how to track traffic on Instagram effectively in Google Analytics 4 is crucial for refining your social media strategy and measuring its impact. Let's explore various techniques to help you accurately capture and analyze the data from Google Analytics to track Instagram, ensuring you make informed decisions to optimize your online presence.
To ensure accurate tracking in Google Analytics, it’s important to add UTM tags to your Instagram links. These campaign tracking parameters help GA4 correctly attribute traffic from external platforms like Instagram, where standard referrer data is often missing.
UTM tagging follows the measurement protocol, which defines how GA4 processes data. By tagging your destination URLs, you make sure Instagram traffic is categorized correctly and appears in the right channels and campaigns inside your GA4 reports.
Using the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is a proven practice to control how Google Analytics reads and logs your traffic. If you need help getting started, check out one of our blog posts for a quick walkthrough.
Now, let’s break it down step by step.
For starters, decide where exactly on the website you want your users to land - a homepage, an “About us” page, a certain product card, etc. — the one you think would make the best fit for your goal.
As a side note, you may also want to run a special promo or show the content you consider most useful for your Instagram visitors only. In this case, it would be a great idea to create a dedicated Instagram landing page on your website. If you decide to do so, ensure that this page is mobile-friendly, as most people will access it from within their mobile Instagram apps.
Additionally, use the noindex and nofollow tags to ensure the page doesn’t appear in search engines and that people don’t click on it accidentally from anywhere except Instagram.
Next, tag your website URL with the following three campaign parameters and their values:
By creating tracking links with UTM parameters, you can monitor and analyze Instagram traffic sources in Google Analytics, helping you attribute traffic accurately and measure campaign effectiveness.
Note: Google Analytics is case-sensitive: utm_source=Instagram and utm_source=instagram will be reported as different traffic sources. The same applies to all UTM values, and you may want to be consistent in tagging your URLs.
Sounds complicated? Let the Campaign URL Builder tool do the job for you.
As a result, the full campaign URLs should look somewhat as follows:
When someone clicks on such links, the parameters you add are sent to Google Analytics 4, and the related data becomes available in your reports.
To prevent lengthy and confusing links, it is best to take a 301 redirect approach. In simple terms, you place a pretty, short URL. While a link shortener can also create short URLs for Instagram, using a 301 redirect is often preferred to avoid potential spam associations that some link shorteners have.
For example, mywebsite.com/instagram, in your Instagram profile, but whoever clicks on this URL will be forwarded to the link that has relevant UTM tracking parameters in it. If you aren’t familiar with 301 redirects or how to set them up, talk to your webmasters — they know for sure what to do.
Another benefit of the 301 redirect is that Instagram deems such links more trustworthy than shortened ones, which means less risk of being flagged as a spammy account.
So, now that you’re sure Google Analytics 4 tracks your Instagram traffic correctly, what’s next?
Integrating Instagram advertising cost data into Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can enhance your ability to analyze and optimize your marketing efforts. If you've ever run an Instagram promotion, you should already know that those campaigns are actually managed from within Facebook Ads Manager.
You can see campaign stats on Instagram or Facebook, but what about Google Analytics 4? This is where OWOX BI Pipeline steps in. The tool automatically uploads data about costs, clicks, and impressions from Facebook and other non-Google ad services to Google Analytics.
This lets you measure costs and conversions for all your advertising services, including Instagram, side-by-side in your Google Analytics 4 reports. It also means saving a lot of your time when analyzing the ROAS and other advertising performance metrics. Give it a try for free and see for yourself.
Once you connect Instagram ad cost data from OWOX BI to GA4, you can build custom reports to track key metrics like cost per click, impressions, and conversions.
Use GA4 dashboards to compare Instagram with other channels and spot what’s working. Features like segmentation and audience building help you adjust your strategy based on real user behavior, improving your ROI over time.
Streamlining referrer data in Google Analytics 4 is crucial for marketers who rely on accurate and clear analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns, especially those originating from social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
If you're using Instagram to send traffic to your website and analyzing it with Google Analytics 4, you might notice that Instagram traffic is split between instagram.com and l.instagram.com. This happens because of Facebook’s Link Shim- a tool that protects users by redirecting them through a secure checkpoint before reaching your site.
Link Shim hides sensitive data in referrer URLs and is especially triggered for non-HTTPS websites. While it helps retain some referrer information that would otherwise appear as (direct) traffic in GA4, it causes the traffic to show up under different domains.
This can make it harder to track Instagram and Facebook traffic accurately in GA4, especially when reports show multiple similar referrers, such as m.facebook.com and lm.facebook.com, for mobile traffic. This split can skew your performance analysis unless handled properly.
If you feel that having multiple referrers for one platform hinders your analytics more than help, you can spruce them up by applying a Search and Replace filter to your Google Analytics 4 view, so let's explore how to do it.
IMPORTANT: Make sure you always have an unfiltered view of each property. Filters are irreversible: once you apply them, you won’t be able to unfilter the data.
Review your reports to ensure that traffic from these platforms is correctly attributed under the unified sources.
While Google Analytics helps monitor Instagram traffic, it has several limitations. From privacy restrictions to tracking gaps, relying solely on GA4 can lead to incomplete or misleading insights.
Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and App Tracking Transparency (ATT) limit how long cookies last. If a user returns after seven days, GA4 often sees them as new, resetting their journey.
This breaks attribution. For example, if someone first visits via Instagram but comes back a week later from another channel, Instagram won’t get credit for the conversion, even though it started the process.
GA4 only tracks clicks, not impressions. This is a problem for top-of-funnel campaigns where users might not click right away but are influenced by seeing your content.
Those early impressions, especially from Instagram Reels or Stories, can drive brand awareness and future actions. But GA4 ignores that first touch. Meta’s view-through model helps a bit, but still falls short for long decision-making journeys.
GA4 mainly uses last-click and data-driven models. Last-click credits only the final channel before a purchase, ignoring earlier ones like Instagram that sparked initial interest.
Data-driven attribution shares credit across channels but is often unclear and still limited to a 90-day window. For brands with long sales cycles, this causes underreporting of Instagram’s influence and leads to skewed marketing decisions.
Google Analytics tracks Instagram traffic using cookies. You can view useful metrics like page views and clicks, but not who those visitors are or whether they became leads or customers.
This creates a major gap. Without connecting clicks to email addresses, phone numbers, or CRM data, it’s tough to know which Instagram efforts are truly working. You miss out on seeing how traffic turns into revenue, making it hard to optimize your campaigns or prove Instagram’s ROI.
OWOX BI helps you track Instagram traffic in Google Analytics 4 by bringing Instagram ad data and key marketing metrics into one place. This gives you a complete view of how your social media efforts support your overall website performance. It solves common issues like traffic splits caused by Instagram’s Link Shim redirects.
With all your data combined, you can make smarter decisions and improve campaign targeting. OWOX BI saves time by automating data collection from multiple platforms. You get cleaner reports, better audience insights, and more effective social media strategies.
