Turn Instagram Into an Effective Funnel Step for Your Business Tracking and analyzing all of the data available to you is essential to getting results on social media.
By Lesya Liu •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Once you've got a good grip on Instagram metrics and performance of your account, you should take a look at the traffic coming from Instagram to your website and examine people's behavior once they land there.
The first thing to take care of is to set up the right tracking. A majority of analytical tools often report Instagram traffic as "Direct," because all referrer information gets stripped away when switching between apps.
To truly get all the data you're after, employ URL shorteners. Now, every time someone clicks on the link in your Instagram bio, you will have all the information you need about them. You can compare that number to the number of clicks reported in your Instagram analytics, if you do have access to them.
Another strategy I highly recommend is to build a special landing page just for Instagram traffic. Most likely, your homepage paints a very broad picture of your brand. While it may be a good starting point for people who randomly stumbled across your site, it is not ideal for people who are already on your site and had some sort of previous interaction with your company (even if it's on Instagram).
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Now that they're on your website already, you want them to take the next step, whatever it may be for your business: whether it's scheduling a call, signing up for a webinar, or placing an order. Homepages tend to have a lot of information and links crammed onto them. This results in informational overload and choice fatigue to a point where they feel lost. Take them through a clear path of the obvious next steps.
So, now that you have a dedicated page and a special link that is trackable, you are all set to dive deep into analytics. The referrer information will travel with them everywhere they go on your website, so you can slice it and dice it however you want.
So, what do you want to pay attention to? How long have they've spent on this page, what percentage of them bounced? These numbers will indicate how engaged they are on your website.
How many pages on average they've visited per session and where exactly have they clicked? This will give you a good indication of what they're interested in and looking for.
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Finally, you can see how many people with Instagram as a referrer purchased something on your site and even know how much they've spent. This is the best metric to justify Instagram as as an effective business tool. If you have a lot of people who come from Insta and convert into customers, you will instantly know that you're doing Instagram right.
You can also reverse-engineer your sales funnel to see where the disconnect happens and which parts need the most work. If not a lot of people from Instagram visit your website in the first place, you need to craft a more engaging bio and a more enticing offer for them to click in to. If they land on your landing page, but don't spend enough time or don't go anywhere -- rework and optimize your landing page.
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Finally, if they spend time on the page and wonder around your website without converting, then you need to polish your sales message to them or simplify the sales funnel and make it shorter, with fewer steps.
If you want to ensure that it's an effective tool in bringing highly qualified and engaged audience to your website, you need to track and analyze all of the data available to you.
