Prerequisites

1. You must have an Instagram Business or Creator account
1. Your account must use Facebook authentication
2. Your account must not have age restrictions or other restrictions
3. Your account must be linked to an active Facebook Page
2. You must be logged in to the correct Instagram account in your browser
   

To switch to a Business or Creator account, go to Settings > Account and select Switch to professional account.

Adding Instagram Insights as a Data Source

1. To add the correct Instagram account, you must be logged in to the associated Facebook account in your browser. Open an Incognito window in your browser to log into the correct Facebook account before connecting with Power My Analytics.
2. Navigate to your Hub and select Sources from the menu.
   
3. Click + New Data Source and choose Meta from the gallery.
4. Sign in to your Facebook account to authenticate.
5. Grant Facebook business access: Select "Opt in to all current and future Businesses". Click Continue.
6. Grant Facebook page access: Choose "Opt in to all current and future Pages". Click Continue.
7. Grant Instagram account access: Select "Opt in to all current and future Instagram accounts". Click Continue.
8. Finalize permissions: Click Save, then click Got it.
   

Creating a Looker Studio Report

1. After adding Instagram Insights as a data source in the PMA hub, navigate to Reports > Looker Studio
   
2. Select Instagram Insights under Create Looker Studio Report (this will open the official Looker Studio application in a new window)
3. Google Looker Studio Configuration:
1. Step 1:
1. Name your data source (e.g. "Instagram Insights - Organization Name")
2. Choose Power My Analytics hub from dropdown
3. Optional: Leave "Use report template for new reports" checked to use PMA demo template
4. Click Next
2. Step 2:
1. User Account: Select Instagram Insights account (real data) or "Sample Account" (sample data)
2. Click Next
3. Step 3: 
1. Choose "Page" for reports
2. Optional: Allow "Page" modification in reports
3. Click Connect (top right) to complete the data source configuration
4. Step 4: 
1. Click Create Report (top right)
2. Include "today" in your report's date range to begin historical data storage when you first create a report

Key Reports and Fields

Limitations and Important Considerations

• Backfilling: Non-lifetime metrics can be backfilled up to 1 year.
  
• Lifetime metrics (Followers by City, Country, Gender Age, and Locale) cannot be backfilled.
  
• Followers metrics are lifetime fields.
  
• Reach and engagement data: Reach and engagement data is organic only and does not include paid reach and engagement.
  
• Engagement and Post Engagement Rate: The fields Engagement and Post Engagement Rate are deprecated. Instead, use the Total Interactions field in place of Engagement
• Reach: PMA's Reach data is a total of daily sums and does not exclude repeat visitors. The Instagram Insights API does not send accurate numbers for this field.
• Data delay: There is a data delay of 48 hours.
• Follower count and demographic data: Follower count and demographic data is only available for users with over 100 followers.
  
• Daily New Followers reporting: The Daily New Followers metric does not subtract daily unfollows and will not align with the metric in reports in Instagram’s UI. Instagram’s API does not currently provide a daily unfollows metric to subtract from this field. When first creating a report, Instagram’s API only allows this metric to be reported 30 days in the past.
• Null data: The API returns null data instead of 0 where data does not exist.
• Audience metrics: Audience metrics cannot be reported by “since” or “until”.
• Demographic metrics: Demographic metrics are only available for top 45 performers as measured by follower count.
  
• These calculations only include followers with demographic data. For this reason, demographic metric sums will be lower than follower sums.
  
• API and authentication: Facebook and Instagram use the same underlying API. PMA's Facebook Ads, Facebook Insights, Instagram Ads, and Instagram Insights data connectors use the same authentication process.
  

48-Hour Data Delay

Instagram Insights reports data for all fields with a delay of 48 hours.

This is a limitation of Meta’s API for Instagram Insights and is not a limitation of PMA. For this reason, the data reported by the following KPIs will be no more recent than 48 hours ago:

• Comments Lifetime
• Lifetime Reach
• Likes Lifetime
• Reels Interactions
• Saved
• Shares Lifetime
• Total Interactions Lifetime

Unavailable Data

• Custom fields
• Engagement and Post Engagement
• Reels engagement data
• Shares for album carousels
• Paid reach and engagement data
  
• Impressions, Lifetime Impressions, and Plays
  
• Workaround: Use Views metric instead
• Realtime data
  

Reporting Instagram Reels

To report reels:

1. Add the dimension Media Product Type to a chart with the metrics Likes Lifetime, Comments Lifetime, and Total Interactions Lifetime.
   
   
   
   

Note: Engagement data is not available for Reels.

Reporting Instagram Stories

Stories data is lifetime and may not align with Instagram dashboard:

1. Instagram only keeps Stories for 24 hours and the data may not align at the time it is retrieved.
   
2. Stories may be duplicated when reporting using the Date field. Use the Timestamp field instead to eliminate duplicate Stories.
   

Troubleshooting

See our article Troubleshooting Instagram for information on issues that may affect Instagram connectors.