Measuring Your Instagram Ad Results

After you’ve created and placed an ad on Instagram, the next task is to measure your ad results. Many businesses overlook this step, but you're smarter than they are! Tracking the effectiveness of a campaign sets you up for future success and saves you money and loads of time. Why would you want to keep running an ad that barely converts to a sale when you could be running a winner?

Viewing Insights via Instagram

Insights include data from your posts about impressions, reach, likes, comments, and more. They are easy to receive via the mobile app. Follow these steps to access them:

1. On your Instagram profile page, tap the Insights bar graph icon at the top middle of your phone screen.
2. Scroll down to the Promotions area.
   The Promotions area of Instagram shows only active campaigns in this area.
3. Click the See More link, if necessary, to see your results.

   If your promotion is still in progress, you don't need to click the See More link. Any promotions that have run are listed with a thumbnail photo of the ad.

4. Review the link clicks that your promotion received (listed to the right of the thumbnail) and jot down that information to store with other data later.
5. Tap anywhere in the field where your promotion is listed to view the ad as it was originally shown to your audience.
   Instagram shows you what your ad looks like on this screen.
6. Tap View Results.

   The Results page appears with a smaller version of the image, your impressions, reach, likes, comments, and saves. It also displays the total post engagement for your ad versus what one of your typical unpaid posts gets.

   The Results page shows you key information about your promotion's performance.

Now that you've collected this data, store it in a spreadsheet so you can compare it to one of your typical post’s results as well as future campaigns. This data is important to use for comparison if you plan on A/B testing other images, captions, text, audiences, or even ad types.

Viewing Insights via Facebook Ads Manager

Ads Manager provides more data on your Instagram ad than Instagram’s mobile app. You can see campaign results in Facebook Ads Manager whether you created the ad in Facebook or in Instagram. If you're tracking results closely, Facebook Ads Manager is the better bet because it shows more information about the money you spent and the cost per result. It also allows you to export the data to a .csv or .xls file.

Follow these steps to view your results in Facebook Ads Manager:

1. Go to Ads Manager by clicking Manage Ads in the drop-down list to the right of your Facebook page.

   All current and completed ads appear on the dashboard.

2. View a summary of the results by looking to the right of your campaign name.
   Scroll right to see everything!
   The Facebook Ads Manager dashboard shows an overview of your ad’s results.
3. Drill down into the campaign by hovering your cursor over the campaign name and clicking View Charts.

   You see the Charts screen.

   Click View Charts under your campaign name to see further campaign results.
4. Toggle between all three Chart screen options (Performance, Demographics, and Placement) to get the information you need.
5. (Optional) To export the results of your campaign:
   1. Click the box to the left of your campaign name.
   2. At the top right of the screen, under Filters, click Filter by Selection.
   3. Click Export. That’s all there is to it! Check your web traffic and any other conversions taking place on your website. Include this information with your other Instagram campaign results data so they're part of your final data analysis.