Instagram Adds Analytics For Businesses

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Instagram announced it will launch a new suite of marketing and advertising analytics tools to give businesses more insight into how their campaigns perform. These tools will roll out to current advertisers over the next few months before they're released to additional brands later this year, the company said.

Instagram's new dashboard for advertisers gives businesses details on three areas: account insights, ad insights, and ad staging.

"For example, an advertiser will now have access to a real-time campaign summary and data showing how their target audience is responding to each of their sponsored photos," the company said in the announcement. "Also, brand marketers will be able to better understand the best time of day to post a photo or video," it said.

The account insights tab displays an overview of the business's impressions, reach, and engagement, the company said. Users can browse a week-by-week snapshot of their paid and organic content with details about how each post performed.

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The ad insights page shows the performance of paid campaigns with brand analytics -- including the impressions, reach, and frequency -- for each individual ad. This page displays details such as your campaign's objective, target demographic, the dates the ad ran, target impressions, and details on each ad in the campaign, such as the impressions, reach, frequency, Likes, and comments.

The third dashboard, ad staging, lets advertisers preview, save, and collaborate on ad creative for upcoming campaigns. Unlike Facebook, businesses can't yet purchase ads directly from the dashboard. For now, businesses will still need to work directly with Instagram salespeople.

Instagram launched image- and video-based ads in October, shortly after its third birthday, with a handful of brands.

"Our aim is to make any advertisements you see feel as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos many of you already enjoy from your favorite brands," the company said at the time. "We want these ads to be enjoyable and creative in much the same way you see engaging, high-quality ads when you flip through your favorite magazine."

Launching an analytics suite comes as no surprise as the photo-sharing app continues to grow. In March, research company eMarketer released new numbers on Instagram's growth. This year, 40.5 million users will log on monthly, it found, trumping Twitter's monthly active users by 2.7 million.

"Instagram usage in the US has ramped up rapidly and is already maturing, reaching regular usage levels nearly matching Twitter's, particularly on smartphones and among millennials and Gen Xers," the report said. "By the end of this year, almost 25% of US smartphone users will snap a photo, slap on a filter, and share their creations with their friends on Instagram on a monthly basis."

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