Transform Your Instagram Analytics with Looker Studio: A Comprehensive Guide to Custom Reporting

Managing an Instagram page for professional purposes is a great idea! It's one of the best ways to reach out to your audiences and keep them updated with your news. 

To know your audience better, you must use an analytics system that lets you dig into your page data. You can then keep track of your followers and your profile views, check which post is the best performer, etc.

That's where Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) comes in! It's a reporting tool provided by Google that lets you connect various platforms and create a custom dashboard. You can therefore make a beautiful report to show your Instagram performances or great dashboards to keep an eye on your daily results. You'll find a lot of opportunities by searching through your data.

This blog post will show you how to connect Instagram to Looker Studio and create a dashboard with your data.

A free ready-to-copy template is at the end of the page, but you'll need a Looker Studio data source to use with your Instagram data. The first paragraph will explain how to create it.

Create a Looker Studio data source.

The first step to creating our report is to create a data source. A data source is a link between Instagram and Looker Studio. It will be used in our future report to gather your data. 

From the Looker Studio homepage, follow these steps:

• Click on Create, then Data Source.
• In the connector list, search for Catchr.
• Select the Instagram connector.

• Click Authorize. (If you used one of our services, this step is already done).

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• Click Authorize again to link Looker Studio and your Google account. (If you used Looker Studio before, this step is already done)

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• Click Authorize one last time to link your Instagram account to Looker Studio.

• Select the Instagram page you want to connect in the dropdown selector.
• Uncheck the use template to create this report checkbox. We will start from scratch (if you plan to use an already done template, you can still uncheck this option to follow the tutorial. It won't prevent you from using any template later on).

[SELECT COMPTE uncheck template]

• And finally, click Connect at the top right.

You just created your Instagram data source! This new page shows you the dimensions and metrics available for your future report.

If you want to learn more about this interface, follow this link.

Last step before starting the report: rename your data source with an explicit name. You'll come back later to find it quickly.

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Create your Instagram Looker Studio report.

From your data source page, click on Create Report at the top right.

This page is your report creation interface. Here's a detailed article about it.

First, I must decide what metrics and dimensions to follow on my Instagram dashboard.

My metrics:

• Followers ->The total number of followers.
• Profile Views -> How many times my profile page was visited?
• Media Id -> To count the number of posts published.
• Media Impressions -> The number of time my ads was shown.
• Media Reach -> The number of person that view at least 1 post.
• Media Engagement -> The number of interaction with my post

And dimensions: 

• Media Thumbnail Url -> To identify the post with its thumbnail
• Media Created at -> To have the publication date for a post.

Now we can start adding charts to our report.

Add charts to my Looker Studio report.

Scorecard:

We will now place some cards to have global metrics:

• Click on Add a Chart, then Scorecard
• In the metrics, choose Followers.

Repeat this action with the Profile View.

We will also use the Media Id on a card. Looker Studio will automatically count the number of Media Ids and display it. This gives us the number of posts during the period.

Table:

We want to see a table with the list of posts, with each post's Impression, reach, and engagement.

To do so : 

• Click on Add a Chart, then Table. Place it on the canvas.
• In dimensions, choose Media Created at and Media Url.
• Add Media Impressions, Media Reach, and Media Engagement to the metrics.

• Configure the Media URL to be a type of Image.

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Change the sort order to use the created date (if you want them ordered by publication date) or by Impression (if you want to see the most viewed post).

Style your report : 

Now we have a report with our main KPIs and a table by post. Let's add a few things to try to have an excellent report:

• You can add a shape to use as the header or footer:
• Locate the Shape button in the shortcut bar.
• Click on it and place the form on your canvas.
• Change the back-ground color and adapt its size.
• Copy and paste it to create your footer.

Add a Title thanks to the Text component:

• Locate the Text shortcut, and click on it.
• Place your textbox, and modify the font size to 30px and the font color to white.
• Write your title

Add your logo or the one of your client:

• Locate the Pictures shortcut, and click on it.
• Select your Image.
• Place it on the report.

Style a scorecard and copy/paste only the style:

• Select a scorecard.
• Center the text and number.
• Add a blue border and a border radius.

• Copy the scorecard.
• Right click on the selected scorecards, and click on Paste Special -> Paste style only

Style the table:

• Select the table.
• Change the font color to white and the header background-color to blue.
• Add a blue border and a 5px radius.

Share your report

There are two great ways to share your report quickly.

Download a PDF and send it:

You can easily download a PDF version of your report and send it to everyone you want:

• Click on File.
• Hover over Download as then choose PDF.

Share access to your report:

You can give access to your report in view or edition mode to a given Gmail address or Google account. Everything is detailled in this tutorial : How to share your Looker Studio report?

Template Link and instructions to Copy:

You'll find a great template following this link. It is ready to copy with your Instagram data source. 

And here is a link to a tutorial to quickly copy a template and use it with your own data source!