The Advanced Guide to Calculating Instagram Stories ROI
Have your Instagram Stories been performing as well as you would like them to?
Are you generating a steady flow of leads, prospects and sales from your Stories?
If you aren’t, don’t worry. This is exactly what we will be talking about today.
Why calculating ROI for Instagram Stories is necessary
One of the major considerations for a social media marketing campaign is getting the most bang for your buck. Traditionally, it is often difficult to calculate exact metrics for a marketing campaign.
However, platforms like Instagram offer robust analytics that can allow you to track reach, engagement and impressions. However, to really turn these clicks and likes into sales and profit, you need to send people to a website, online store or landing page.
You need to understand how many of the people who engage with your Stories eventually take an action that gets them into a sales funnel of some kind. One of the major metrics you will be looking at to calculate your ROI is CTR (Clickthrough Rate).
Your CTR is basically the percentage of people that swipe up or click on your Stories. So, if 57 people out of 100 who view your Stories clicked through to your link, your CTR would be 57%.
1. Performing an initial analysis with Instagram Insights
From your Insights module, you will begin to form a picture of how your content is being received by your audience.
Detailed story metrics such as replies, profile visits, swipe ups and sticker taps are all very useful for understanding whether your messaging is persuasive enough.
You also have secondary metrics such as impressions, reach, forward and backward taps, exits etc. to gain some additional data about your Stories.
One of the important metrics you will want to look at during this phase is ‘completion rate’. Basically, completion rate is the percentage of people who viewed the first segment in a story vs the people who viewed the last one. So, if 78/100 people watched all of your stories, your completion rate will be 78%.
2. Using Google Analytics to track actual landing pages
Instagram Insights is great, but if you want to view how your performance on Instagram reflects on your overall marketing plan, you will need to use Google Analytics.
Within Google Analytics, there is a section called ‘Social’ which contains the ‘Social Overview’ report. This report will tell you how much traffic your social media pages are driving to your website.
You will need to set up a ‘goal’ within Analytics for this report to become active. This could reflect any goal you have for your business, such as newsletter signups, registrations for a live webinar or a purchase from your online store.
For something like a purchase or sign up for a webinar/membership, you will have to enter in the URL of the thank-you page (where your audience will be redirected to after they buy).
As you start setting up multiple goals for your social campaigns, you will see the Social Overview report slowly starting to show some activity.
Once you set up a goal, you will also have access to the ‘Social Conversions’ report, which is a more detailed analysis of how the traffic your social media profiles are generating is translating into actual sales and subscribers.
3. Using UTM Parameters to get campaign revenue information
Once you have set up the aforementioned reports, you will have a decent overview of how your social audience is responding to the offers on your landing pages. If you want to dive even deeper, you can set up UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor) tracking codes.
Adding UTM codes to your URLs will allow you to track specific campaigns and traffic sources. For example, you may be running a summer sale campaign that you’re creating content for on your Stories, advertisements, and feed content. For all of these, you ideally want to differentiate between the sources of traffic, so you know exactly where the sales are coming from.
Google has a comprehensive Campaign URL Builder that you can use to create your custom URLs. Since you will be tracking traffic from Instagram and more specifically your Stories, you should input ‘instagram’ in the campaign source field and ‘ig_story’ as the medium field on your URLs. You can add other information such as specific sales or offers as necessary.
UTM parameters are great for split testing different content types or ad variations. Also, make sure you use a URL shortening service like Bit.ly to shorten the campaign URL so it doesn’t look suspicious on your profile or bio.
It’s great to have a lot of people viewing and reacting to your Stories, but you shouldn’t stop there. To really make sure your Stories are helping your business, you need to ensure that people who view them are taking the buying actions that add to your bottom line.
By using the process we have laid out to connect Google Analytics and UTM parameters to your Instagram, you will have a much more detailed understanding of the ROI involved. This will allow you to make better decisions with your time and money, so you can continue to reap the rewards of marketing on Instagram in the long run.