How to do great Instagram campaigns without analytics
Don´t focus on analytics
Instagram is a very unique Social Media channel, and you can run campaigns with little use of analytics. Here is how.
As with any other campaign, you must be clear on the target. It can only have one of two goals. Create awareness or create sales.
Instagram is special
This fact is what makes Instagram very special. Because Instagram is either a perfect sales channel for you or will never work as such. It boils down to your product and what you do with the media. https://www.youtube.com/embed/4p7f6jfsuaw?feature=oembed
Influencers and appealing product
The channel works well for visually appealing products that target (younger) women. The product works exceptionally well if it can be sold as impulse buying products. And if an influencer can endorse them.
Unless you can tick 2 to 3 of the criteria that we just mentioned off as relevant for your product, then you will most likely have problems getting much out of the channel.
Use Instagram to create awareness
Creating awareness means that the goal of the campaign is to be visible to your target audience. But not in a way that leads to sales. There can be different reasons why you do not what to sell via Instagram.
Perhaps it is not possible to sell your product or service online. Or because Instagram is a mobile media and your product cannot be sold via a phone. It could be that the campaign is a part of the first step of the sales funnel, where the purpose is to build awareness or trust.
Get likes
This means that the actions you want your users to take are not so significant because you aim to influence them or perhaps to engage in a dialogue with them (get likes).
Get users away from Instagram
However, as part of your sales funnel, you will eventually need to get the users away from Instagram and onto your site. It is therefore essential that you do this as soon as possible in your funnel set-up.
This task can be difficult since Instagram is a browsing media by design and this makes it unnatural for the users to leave Instagram. In other words, it will be a hard sell for you to make them move away from the platform.
Own the user
You still want to make them go to your site because to want to own the users that you reach. Getting them to your own website allows you to do remarketing and perhaps also to get their e-mail address. So the Call to Action should always be to get a user to your site, even if asking for likes is a more natural thing to do.
Create sales
The other goal of an Instagram campaign could also be to drive sales. Your goal here is much more evident here than the first target. The campaign must be a part of a funnel (via your site) that leads to sales.
As mentioned before Instagram can be an extremely good sales channel if the right conditions are met. Unfortunately, they will not be for most businesses. You need to target a young audience with a highly visually or emotionally appealing product.
Inside tip
We have seen a lot of data from many sites, and Social Media, in general, is one of the worst-performing channels when it comes to leading to sales. Traffic from Social Media has a lower conversion rate than other channels (the best are SEO and Direct).
The worst Social Media channels are Instagram and Twitter when it comes to converting users into customers. So consider yourself warned!
Minimal Analytics Requirements
If you spend time and energy creating Instagram content, then you want to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. So, you don´t want to do Instagram entirely without analysis measurements, but you can come a long way with a few steps.
Focus on reach
If your goal is to create awareness, then you are interested in reach. That is how many people saw, linked, and shared your ad or post. This is easy to check on your Instagram feed. You are also interested in how many clicked on your site. The user who did this has much more value to you. You can get this number from Google Analytics.
If you are interested in sales, then you are a little bit more in the dark when it comes to data. You can get data on the traffic from Social Media, but since few converts, it will probably not tell you much.
You will also discover that Facebook (Instagram) and Google define a conversion differently – funny enough in ways that favor their own platform. So their number don´t match.
Don´t expect sales
Unless your business is very different from the majority of businesses, then you won’t be able to sell much via Instagram traffic anyway. And you will discover that your available data is confusing and biased if you try to measure it. Our advice is to don´t spend too much time trying to understand traffic from Instagram on your site, because you will not find clear answers anyway.
Have a clear vision
It is more important that you have a clear vision of how you will use Instagram and ti have realistic expectations of what you expect to get out of the channel. And if you do want to measure Instagram (you should), then base your analysis on trends in actives on Instagram, not on your website traffic.
