Instagram Stories are a way to connect with your audience, show off what's happening behind the scenes, and even drive sales. But if you're not tracking your metrics effectively, you could be missing out on a lot of valuable information and potential to boost your ROI.

One of the most important metrics for influencer marketers is Return on Investment (ROI). It's easy to see why: if you're spending money on an influencer campaign, you want to know that you're getting a good return on that investment. This is especially important in current circumstances with the onset of a recession, reduced marketing budgets, and focus on quick profitability.

In this blog, we’ll look at the important Instagram Stories metrics to boost your marketing efforts.

Reach metrics

• Number of views

The number of views is the most basic yet crucial metric for Instagram Stories. This is because it tells you how many people are seeing your content and gives you an idea of how much interest your content is generating.

The more views your Story gets, the more people see it—which means the more likely they are to engage with your brand or product and move down the sales funnel.

While this metric is important, it's not the most important thing you should be measuring. If you're only looking at the number of views and not also taking into account the quality of those views, you're missing out on valuable information. That’s where the next two metrics come in.

• View percentage

The view percentage is the percentage of your followers who have viewed your story. 

For instance, if you have 100 followers and 10 of them have viewed your story, then your view percentage is 10%.

View percentage = No. of story viewersTotal no. of followers  100

• New viewers percentage

This number tells you how many new viewers per Story you gained. It's a great metric to track if you're looking to get more followers and build your audience.

Engagement metrics

Reach is a good measure of success on Instagram. The more people who see your content, the more opportunities you have to engage them and earn their business.

But don't forget about engagement! If people aren't engaging with your content then all of those views are meaningless; they're just numbers that don't mean anything.

Here are a few Instagram Stories engagement metrics to look at -

• Likes

Unlike the usual Instagram posts and reels, blatantly double-tapping (liking) Instagram Stories is not yet common - especially for brand accounts. This means, when you do receive likes on your Instagram Stories, the viewer has truly “liked” your content and has taken the additional step of tapping on the heart icon at the bottom.

The more people like your story, the more likely they are to watch future stories. And the more likely they are to watch future stories means that your brand is becoming more familiar and trustworthy with each story that gets liked.

• Replies

Instagram Stories replies are also an important metric because they let you know if the person who saw your content was engaged enough to respond—that means they were interested enough in what you were saying to take action!

Make it a point to go through all your Instagram Stories replies and keep note of how many of these replies were appreciative, suggestive, complaintive, etc. This will help you gauge the overall response towards your Instagram marketing efforts at a microscopic level and make tweaks when required.

Tip: Make sure you reply to every message to encourage them to keep engaging with you.

• Shares

Sure, you can measure likes and replies and followers—but just tracking metrics will still not help you improve your Instagram Stories ROI effectively.

You’ll have to also dig into how many people are actually sharing your content. 

That's right - it's not just about how many people see your Instagram Story, but how many people see it and then decide to tell their friends about it by sending it to someone through Direct Message (DM).

You can track this by looking at the number of times your post has been shared by other accounts—and if you want to get really fancy, you can even track how many new followers those shares bring in.

Tip: Let users share your Stories easily by ensuring you’ve enabled Story sharing in your settings.

• Swipes

This metric tracks the number of times that users swipe through your Instagram Stories. 

If you notice a high number of swipes, this could indicate that users are not finding your content engaging enough to stay interested. You may have to work on your strategy to gauge the interest of your followers.

Completion metrics

• CTA completion rate

This metric defines tracks if Story viewers clicked the link button and completed your goal. This might be signing up for a newsletter, entering your email address, or submitting a form.

CTA completion is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your ads and campaigns. It tells you how many people clicked on your link, so you know if you're getting more engagement with this format than with other ads.

Instagram Graph API - Track Story metrics effectively

Developers can use Instagram’s Graph API to retrieve user media, manage and reply to comments on their media, find media where a business or a user have been @mentioned by other Instagram users, find media based on hashtags, and get basic metadata and metrics about other Instagram Businesses and Creators. 

Check out the various trackable metrics provided by the Instagram Graph API

However, setting up and using this API can be quite a hassle for most non-technical people.

That’s where Phyllo comes in - The universal API for creator data.

With Phyllo, you get a single API to integrate with multiple social media platforms. 

Phyllo is an evolved productization of custom social media/creator platform integrations. Rather than thousands of developers building their integrations with YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, Spotify, and Instagrams of the world, Phyllo has made these integrations scalable and trustable. 

Phyllo provides the data such as:

- Profile data

- Content feeds

- Audience demographics

- Insta stories

- Reels

- Content views, etc.

Also Read: Instagram API Integration 101 - For The Developers of the Creator Economy 

Try out the powerful Phyllo API today!

It's important to measure the success of your Stories because they have a direct impact on your brand image, which can lead to higher sales, more followers, and more traffic.

Currently, Phyllo handles millions of stories a month across campaigns! We aim to be a catalyst in maximizing your influencer marketing efforts. 

The best part is, Phyllo API not just helps you track Instagram Stories metrics, but also multiple other formats of many creator economy platforms. 

Read more: The Universal API for influencer marketing platforms: Phyllo

Schedule a call to learn more about how Phyllo can empower your business.

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