Instagram Stories are a big part of the platform’s appeal. 

They offer a unique way for users to share their day-to-day lives with followers and provide a more interactive experience by brands. But Instagram Stories are slightly different from regular posts - they eventually disappear after 24 hours.

Nevertheless, this has helped the growth of this exciting post format. It has led to an explosion of usage for this feature.

Instagram Stories stats

Brand Stories have a whopping 86% completion rate.

- Conviva

The significance of Instagram Stories data

Instagram Stories allow creators to create a deeper connection with consumers on the platform by providing an additional channel (that’s much more personal) for them to engage with followers. This increases brand awareness and encourages customers to purchase or download apps from their website or app store page.

Hence, it is natural for a creator/business to want access to Instagram Stories data -

• To analyze how well a creator’s stories perform compared to other accounts in their industry or vertical
• To monitor the performance of all influencers who promote a business’s products
• To make data-driven decisions about future content creation efforts

Technical challenges while capturing Instagram Stories data

Third-party data scraping is not possible

Data scraping only caters to publicly visible data but not private information such as story impressions, which is an essential metric for many brand engagement/Cost Per Mile (CPM) calculations. It’s also very difficult to scrape story data since it lasts for 24 hours only.

You will have to use Instagram’s official API to access this data. Read more about the challenges with direct integration with Instagram developer APIs here.

Linking accounts with the developer’s app

Today, creators understand the value of their data and want control over its usage. As a result, they are extremely wary about who they give access to their data. 

Added to that, Facebook has a notoriously tricky login flow for Instagram.

To successfully connect an Instagram account with a platform:

• The user should have an Instagram Business or Instagram Creator account.
• The users should link their account to a Facebook Page.
• In FB’s login flow for connecting to Instagram, the users should select the FB page linked to the Instagram account.
• The users should provide consent to share the required data.

Due to such a complex flow, you will mostly notice many drop-offs at this stage.

In some cases, even when users don’t meet all the requirements mentioned earlier, Facebook displays the account to be connected. However, in reality, it is not a successful connection, and streamlined data access becomes an issue.

To solve this problem, significant education about the flow, requirements, and what data is collected is necessary.

Stories expire after 24 hours

For accurate engagement and campaign tracking, all forms of content published by a creator are important - Instagram posts, reels, and even stories.

However, stories are time-sensitive content and expire after 24 hours. Added to that, it is almost impossible to access story metrics once they have expired. It thus gives one very little window to gather and capture the latest data.

Facebook doesn’t provide necessary story webhooks for all creator accounts

While Facebook offers a few Instagram Story webhooks, they have limitations. 

The inability to leverage these much-needed webhooks for professional accounts not linked to a Facebook page is a significant problem; most Instagram creators would not have set up their Facebook Business page.

So it gets challenging to set webhooks like story_insights, for instance, which notifies you when a creator's story is expiring. And as mentioned before, stories are only accessible for 24 hours; you need to capture the necessary data before its expiry or lose it for good!

How Phyllo helps effectively capture Instagram Stories data

With Phyllo’s Engagement API, you can get a regular stream of content data and engagement metrics such as likes, views, reach, impressions, etc. for several post formats on multiple platforms.

Now, we also report accurate first-party data of Instagram Stories (through Instagram Graph API) to ensure influencing marketing platforms get the metrics they want in a secure and user-consented manner.

Here are some of the benefits of using Phyllo API to access Instagram Stories data -

Streamlined and up-to-date metrics collection

Phyllo’s intelligent system fetches stories’ data at multiple intervals throughout the data. This ensures you never miss a story and can easily access up-to-date metrics.

Phyllo connect SDK

For complex account connection flows, such as Instagram, the Phyllo connect SDK guides the creator at every step to help them learn about the prerequisites. We provide in-app interactive guides and cues along with help options. Furthermore, you can also use the SDK in different languages.

This helps educate your Instagram users about account conversion during the connection process.

Webhook notifications

Phyllo webhooks notify you with updated story metrics. These notifications are sent at regular intervals, usually when the story is created and once after it expires.

Try out the Phyllo API today!

Currently, Phyllo handles millions of stories a month across campaigns! And these numbers are only increasing by the minute!

We aim to be a catalyst in building your business in the creator economy. 

Phyllo helps simplify and package the process of creator data collection into a single easy-to-integrate API that provides you with an efficient creator economy data infrastructure.

Schedule a call to learn more about how Phyllo can empower your business in the creator economy.

Want to test the waters before you go ahead? Sign up for a free account to access creator data with Phyllo APIs.

‍