Track Instagram Analytics with GA4 to Understand Your Instagram Traffic

How many times a day do you check your Instagram? What are your friends posting about? Instagram is the world’s dominate photo sharing network — over 1 billion people use Instagram every month. However, there’s more to Instagram than being the world’s largest photo album. Businesses, whatever their size or activity, use the service to engage with their audiences through compelling visuals, raise interest and awareness about the brand, show off their products and tell inspiring stories.

And then, there’s the task of tracking Instagram analytics to know what exactly people do after they click that link in your Instagram profile or hit a button in your promoted post and land at your website. Which leads us to the main question, "Can you use Google Analytics dashboard just for Instagram?" An effective analytics dashboard is essential for viewing and managing the performance metrics of your Instagram campaigns.

In this article, we’ll tell you how to:

• Track Instagram traffic in Google Analytics 4 with UTM tags
• Get Instagram advertising cost data into Google Analytics reports
• Combine referrals in Google Analytics

In fact, Google Analytics 4 and Instagram didn’t really go well together up until recently, Instagram traffic ending up under (direct) in Google Analytics reports. The reason was that with mobile or desktop apps, no referrer information is passed in the header, making it difficult for Google Analytics 4 to attribute traffic to apps. If you want to learn more about the causes of inflated Direct traffic, see our other blog post.

Big kudos to the team behind Google Analytics for making constant improvements to tracking across mobile apps and websites! It’s been about a year since Google Analytics started displaying Instagram in its reports. Truth be told, and it better be only us who faced this — there’s still a portion of unidentified traffic coming from Instagram. Fortunately for all of us, there’s a solution.

Note: This post was written in 2017 and has been completely updated based on the recent updates in August 2024.

Instagram analytics, combined with Google Analytics Instagram tracking, measure the performance of your content on Instagram. They provide insights into your audience’s behaviors and preferences, enabling you to craft strategies grounded in data rather than intuition.

This data varies from simple metrics, such as the number of views or likes a post receives, to more detailed information, including the optimal times your followers are active online.

Additionally, Instagram analytics can track engagement trends, follower demographics, and the effectiveness of different content types, helping you refine your approach and maximize your impact on the social media platform.

Utilizing Instagram traffic analytics offers numerous advantages, from guiding content creation to keeping an eye on your competition. It allows you to measure your success, gain insights into your audience, and identify trends using key metrics like engagement, reach, and interactions with your content.

They also provide valuable data on hashtag performance. Leveraging these insights from Instagram analytics helps you make informed decisions and strategically manage your data.

Navigating the social media landscape, such as changes in the Instagram algorithm, is challenging. Understanding what truly captivates your audience begins with Google Analytics Instagram reporting.

By replicating your most successful content based on audience feedback, you can explain growth and performance to your team, managers, and stakeholders. Instagram analytics also offers demographic information such as age and location, enabling you to understand your audience’s content preferences and peak activity times.

Regularly examining your Instagram analytics, including Google Analytics Instagram reports, is crucial for spotting trends in content strategy, engagement, and reach.

For instance:

• Are your Reels gaining more traction than your standard posts?
• How consistent is your follower growth?
• Are you posting frequently enough?

These metrics provide clues on how to refine your Instagram strategy.

Comparing your performance against industry counterparts using a Google Analytics property is essential. Tracking your competitors on Instagram allows marketers to support their strategies with solid data. An Instagram competitor report can reveal content gaps and opportunities for your brand. For example, noticing that your competitors seldom respond to comments might indicate a need to prioritize audience engagement on your account.

Tracking key metrics on Instagram is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your social media strategy and optimizing your interactions. Utilizing Google Analytics Instagram tracking can help overcome the challenges of categorizing traffic on Instagram, which often appears as 'direct traffic,' complicating performance analysis. These metrics provide valuable insights into your audience’s behavior, preferences, and engagement levels.

• Reach: Measures the number of unique accounts that have seen your post, indicating your content’s awareness and impact.
• Engagement Rate: Calculates the percentage of your followers interacting with your content through likes, comments, saves, and shares.
• Traffic: Tracks clicks from your website, call-to-action buttons, and links in Instagram Stories, which is crucial for understanding audience motivation.
• Saves: Counts how many times your posts have been bookmarked, reflecting their value to your audience.
• Shares: Shows the number of times your content has been sent to other users via Instagram, a strong indicator of content appeal.
• Audience Growth: Provides daily metrics on follower increases and losses, helping you track your audience dynamics.
• Watch Through Rate: Measures the percentage of viewers who watch your Instagram Stories, Reels, and videos from start to finish.
• Instagram Stories Views: Offers detailed metrics for each story slide, including replies, impressions, and navigation, to analyze audience engagement and content effectiveness.

You can use Instagram Insights to monitor traffic and track followers clicking through to your website, which is essential for tracking Instagram traffic. 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. 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.

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.

The most reliable way to measure campaign source of Instagram traffic in Google Analytics 4 so far is to add campaign tracking parameters (a.k.a. UTM tags) to destination URLs. Not only does this apply to Instagram, but also to any external source that’s meant to drive traffic to your website.

Also, there is a need of measurement protocol is crucial as it underpins how GA4 processes and interprets data from various sources. UTM tags, integral to this protocol, ensure that traffic from external platforms like Instagram is precisely captured and analyzed to meet specific needs.

UTM tagging using the urchin tracking module is a proven practice to ensure that Google Analytics account interprets that traffic exactly the way you want it to. Take a look at one of our blog posts for more information. But let’s get straight to the details, shall we?

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, make sure that this page is mobile-friendly, as most people will open it from within their mobile Instagram apps.

Also, use noindex and nofollow to make sure the page doesn’t appear in search engines and people don’t click on it accidentally from anywhere but Instagram.

Next, tag your website URL with the following three campaign parameters and their values:

• utm_source=instagram identifies Instagram as the source of your traffic.
• utm_medium=social identifies the medium of your traffic. Make sure to use lowercase to ensure that your Instagram traffic goes into what Google Analytics defines as the Social channel. Note that "cpc" is a typical value used in paid advertising.
• utm_campaign=profile provides more specific details about the traffic source or the campaign. You can replace the profile with any utm_campaign value you prefer.

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.

Make sure you separate campaign parameters from the URL with the question mark, and place an equal sign between the parameter and its value. Separate each parameter-value pair with an ampersand.

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:

• https⁣://www.mywebsite.com/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=insta_profile
• https⁣://www.mywebsite.com/little-black-dress/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=sunday_sale
• https⁣://www.mywebsite.com/about_us/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=instagram_profile

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.

In order to prevent lengthy, confusing links, your best bet would be to take a 301 redirect approach. In simple terms, you place a pretty, short URL.

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've integrated your Instagram ad cost data using OWOX BI with GA4, create custom reports to analyze specific metrics like cost per click, impressions, and conversion rates.

Use GA4's explorations and dashboards to visualize and compare these metrics against other advertising channels effectively. This analysis will help spot trends, evaluate campaign success, and shape future ad strategies.

Take advantage of GA4's advanced features, like segmentation and audience building, to refine your marketing tactics based on user behavior and ad performance. By consistently adjusting your strategy based on these detailed analytics, you can significantly boost the ROI of your Instagram advertising efforts.

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 use Instagram to drive website visitors and Google Analytics 4 to analyze those visits, you might have noticed that Instagram sometimes splits the traffic into Instagram⁣.com and l⁣.instagram⁣.com. The “L” letter appears when users pass through Facebook’s Link Shim before arriving at your website.

A Link Shim is a tool designed to keep users of Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram warned of malicious or spammy websites, and to protect their personal information, such as IDs or usernames, from being disclosed in the referrer URL.

When sending users to an external website (especially to non-encrypted HTTP websites), Link Shim temporarily redirects them to a non-HTTPS webpage and overwrites the referrer to hide any personally identifiable information.

Thanks to this, Link Shim actually preserves the relevant referrer data that would otherwise end up under (direct) in Google Analytics. However, it also leads to Facebook and Instagram traffic being split across multiple referrers in Google Analytics reports. Facebook may also send m.⁣facebook.com and lm.⁣facebook.com, “M” standing for “mobile” in both cases.

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.

1. Open your GA4 property. Navigate to the Admin section, located at the lower left of the interface.
2. Navigate to Data Streams. Under the 'Property' column, click on "Data Streams." Select the web data stream where you need to adjust the referrer data.
3. Create Data Modification Rules: Find and click on "Modify event data" within the data stream settings. Click “Create” to begin setting up a new modification rule.
4. Set Up Modification Rules for Instagram: Make the modification rule straightforward, like "Consolidate Instagram Referrers." Set it to activate under 'Condition' when the referrer includes "instagram.com" or variants like "l.instagram.com", and configure it to overwrite the 'session_source' parameter with "Instagram" in the 'Configuration' settings.
5. Test and Verify the Rule: Use GA4's preview feature to see how the rule modifies your data. Based on the preview outcomes, adjust the rule if necessary.
6. Activate the Rule: Once satisfied with the setup, save and activate the rule to apply changes to incoming data.
7. Monitor the Impact: After implementation, monitor the incoming data to confirm that referrer data from Instagram and Facebook is accurately consolidated.

Check your reports to ensure traffic from these platforms correctly appears under the unified sources.

OWOX BI offers a powerful tool for businesses aiming to better understand their social media campaigns, and track their Instagram traffic within Google Analytics 4, effectively integrating Instagram to Google Analytics. This integration brings Instagram ad data and other marketing metrics into GA4, providing a fuller picture of how your social media efforts are performing alongside your broader web analytics.

By automating the aggregation of data from various sources, including the tricky referrers from Instagram’s Link Shims, OWOX BI simplifies what would otherwise be a complex data collection process. This allows marketers to overcome some inherent challenges of working directly with GA4, enabling more precise data handling and segmentation.

With more precise insights into how Instagram activities impact overall business objectives, you can make more informed decisions and fine-tune your social media analytics strategies effectively. OWOX BI thus helps bridge the gap between social media performance and comprehensive campaign analysis. So, try merging the data from all the non-Google services you use, in a single interface with OWOX BI.