Instagram Insights Data Connector User Guide

Instagram Insights Data Connector User Guide

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Instagram Insights provides valuable data about your Instagram business or creator account's performance, audience, and content. This guide will walk you through connecting Instagram Insights to Power My Analytics and creating reports with the data.



Prerequisites

Before connecting Instagram Insights to Power My Analytics, ensure you meet the following requirements:
  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 Facebook & Instagram 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

Follow these steps to create a Looker Studio report using your Instagram Insights data:
  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
For a quick start, you can use our pre-built Instagram Insights demo template.

Key Reports and Fields

Instagram Insights data in Power My Analytics offers a wide range of metrics and dimensions. Here are some popular metrics you can use in your reports:
  • Reach Metrics: Lifetime Reach, Daily New Followers, Impressions, Accounts Reached
  • Content Metrics: Impressions, Total Interactions, Reach, Likes, Saves, Comments, Video Views
  • Demographic Metrics: Followers by Gender, Followers by Age
  • Location Metrics: Followers by City, Followers by Country
For a complete list of available Instagram Insights fields, refer to the Schema Explorer or Instagram's developer guide.

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.
  • 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.
  • Lifetime Impressions scorecards with filters: Lifetime Impressions scorecards with filters may show “No data”. Add a filter to include Engagement greater than or equal to 0, joined with an or to a filter to include Engagement less than or equal to 0.
  • 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.

Unavailable Data

  • Custom fields
  • Engagement and Post Engagement
  • Reels engagement data
  • Shares for album carousels
  • Paid reach and engagement data
  • 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.



  2. When reporting Reels, use the Plays field in place of the Video Views field.
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.


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