Instagram has come a long way since its inception. Today, it ranks among the top five social networks globally, with a massive 2 billion Instagram users browsing the app daily. Statista mentions that almost 80% of marketers use Instagram in their social media marketing. 

To encourage more marketers to use Instagram, the platform has introduced a Professional Dashboard for tracking marketing campaigns. This Dashboard lets you look at campaign engagement, follower demographics, the amount of engaging content you have shared, and more. 

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But, the Instagram Professional Dashboard has some limitations. 

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• Some demographic insights are unavailable if you have a follower count of less than 100. 

• You’re unable to track the user sentiments. 

• The analytics insight of the Professional Dashboard is accessible only from mobile apps. 

• Finally, the Professional Dashboard is not customizable, which means you have to function with your limited information. 

That’s where custom Instagram dashboards come in.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of a custom Instagram dashboard and how to create one for your marketing campaigns. 

But before that, let’s quickly understand a custom Instagram dashboard. 

Introduction to Custom Instagram Posts Dashboards

As the name suggests, custom Instagram dashboards let you customize your dashboard to the specific needs of your campaign. It helps marketers better track their campaigns and measure, monitor, and analyze various parameters to boost their social media marketing campaigns. 

The Importance of Tailored Analytics for Instagram Posts

You can do a lot more with tailored analytics. For example:

‍Identify purchase intent: With tailored analytics, you can identify your audience’s purchase intent in real-time. This can help you improve your ROI if you’re running influencer marketing campaigns. 

‍Analyse audience sentiments: With a tailored dashboard, you can grasp the tone of discussions in the comments under a sponsored Instagram post and understand the pulse of the audience beyond good or bad.

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Pinpoint relevant comments: A custom dashboard lets you pinpoint relevant comments and gauge interaction quality by tracking the percentage of comments relevant to your brand.

‍Dig deeper into Instagram stories: Connect to influencers’ profiles to track their Instagram story views, link clicks, likes, and conversions.

‍Improve strategy with transparency: Look into previously unknown metrics from Influencer profiles, such as post impressions, cost per engagement, and total engagement on posts, to improve your strategy with data-backed evidence. 

Essential Components of a Custom Instagram Dashboard

Identify all the essential metrics that you want to track and measure. Once you identify them, feed them into your dashboard. 

It also has to be easy to read and navigate, or else you’ll get lost in the vast pool of data. 

Here are some essential components of a custom Instagram Dashboard to consider.

Profile Comparisons

Do you need to manage different profiles for different clients? Or different profiles for different segments of a business? Whatever the case, the custom dashboard should be able to break up the profiles and go deep in comparing them. When you get to compare all the profiles together, you get a better view of the trends, what’s working, and what’s not. 

Audience Insights on Instagram Feed

While the Instagram Professional Dashboard provides some basic insight, a custom dashboard provides a deeper view of the audience's insights. Once you better understand your audience, you can retweak your campaign strategy to reach the ideal customer profile.  

Highlighting Key Influencers

There’s a reason why every marketer now talks about Influencer marketing. The global influencer marketing market size has tripled since 2019. In 2024, the market is estimated to reach a record of 24 billion USD. Influencers have produced some great results for brands over time. 

For example, the collab post featuring bodybuilder and Gymshark athlete David Laid. The fashion-forward photos with a simple caption announcing the collection's release date and time have gotten over 324,402k likes since December 2022 and counting.

The main channel of marketing that brands look for when considering influencer marketing is Instagram. 

‍We have written an article on how to find micro-influencers if you’re interested.

A customized Instagram dashboard helps you identify which influencers engage with your brand and have a similar audience base. So, if you need to find new influencers for your brand, these people are the best options because they’re already engaging with your brand and familiar with your product. This means that you have a better chance to collaborate with the influencer. Also, if you’re already working with influencers, you can easily track who is the most active and engaging with your brand. This will help you understand which influencer brings the most value for you. 

Identifying Top Posts

A custom Instagram dashboard helps you to identify your top-performing posts and videos. Once you know your top-performing posts, you can analyze the findings to create similar posts in the future. For example, you can identify the post format, how you’re writing the captions, or certain filters that grab more eyeballs. 

Hashtag Performance

Hashtags are an important feature on Instagram that lets the audience find your content easily. You may use a couple of hashtags in your post. Therefore, it's important to understand the top-performing hashtags that bring you the maximum traffic through your dashboard. 

Engagement Metrics

Engagement indicates that your Instagram followers like your content and gives cue to the algorithm that your followers want to see more of your content. As you gain more engagement, your content will appear in your followers’ Instagram feed. So tracking engagement is crucial to understand whether your posts are read and liked by the followers. For example, if you see a sudden dip in your engagement, you need to investigate if something might have gone wrong. 

Competitor Analysis

While it's important to set your own campaign strategy and stick to your metrics, it’s equally important to know your competitors and how their posts are performing. Use your dashboard to keep tabs on how other brands in your industry are performing, what's working for them, how their followers are growing, their campaign engagement, and so on. 

Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Custom Dashboard

Now that you’re ready to build your custom Instagram dashboard let’s get you started. 

Choosing the Right Tools and Platforms

Begin by choosing the right tool and platform to customize and integrate with the Instagram app. Investing in a tool is a big decision that involves cost. Do thorough research to understand which tool fits your budget, is easy to use, and solves all your needs. 

For example, InsightsIQ gives you detailed insights on any social media post. It’s simple to use, and you can get up and running from day one. The tool also lets you search for creator accounts that perfectly align with your brand offerings so that you don't need to scout through numerous profiles. 

Once you select a creator for your influencer marketing, you can onboard the creator from the dashboard. No need to maintain a separate CRM for your creators. 

Setting Up and Customizing Widgets

Once you have short-listed the tool, it’s time to connect your Instagram account to it. Next, set up and customize the widgets to represent the specific data metrics you want to track visually. 

Common widget types for Instagram may include Follower Growth, Engagement Rate, Hashtag Performance, Top Posts, Audience Demographics, and others. 

Once you have selected the widgets, customize them according to your requirements. 

You can add specific filters to the visual appearance by assigning different fonts, colors, and layouts, selecting a date range for the data, and so on. 

Finally, arrange the widgets to give you a quick view of all the essential elements at a glance. It is usually easy to drag and drop the widgets, so arrange them according to your preference. 

Finally, save your dashboard and grant access to the required team members. 

Review your dashboard

Make it a habit to review your dashboard regularly and tweak and adjust your social media strategy based on your dashboard findings. 

Leveraging an Instagram Dashboard with InsightIQ

While many tools offer custom dashboard creation, we highly recommend setting up your customized Instagram dashboard with InsightIQ for three main reasons. 

1. It’s easy to use
2. Affordable
3. Offers all the features you need from your Instagram custom dashboard

Features and Tools Overview

Let's quickly review the features of the tool.

Creator Search

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Once you sign up and log in to the tool, go to the Creator Search tab to find the creators who best suit your brand. You can either add filters to the search ( for example, industry, audience location, audience age, creator’s location, etc.) or search a creator by their profile. 

The dashboard gives you a quick view of all the relevant creators with important metrics like their follower count, the average number of likes they receive, the engagement rate of their posts, and so on. 

All these data overviews help you shortlist the right creator for your influencer marketing program.

Creator Onboarding

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The next important feature of the tool for businesses is creator onboarding. This feature lets you onboard creators and monitor their first-party business account stats.

Once you have a creator on board, you can view all the essential insights in this dashboard overview. 

Campaigns

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This is the third important feature of the tool. It allows you to get detailed insights on any social media post. Just enter the post's URL in the top search box and click on analyze to get all the performance details. 

Alternatively, you can also track the performance of your own campaign. 

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You can also measure the ROI for the campaign by integrating it with your Shopify business account. 

Practical Tips and Best Practices

These tips will help you to get the best out of your custom Instagram dashboard if you’re starting for the first time. 

Maximizing Dashboard Effectiveness

Select your goals before creating the dashboard. Understand the purpose of having the dashboard and what metrics you want to measure. Knowing your goals will help you to track the right metrics. 

Use visual representations of the data, such as graphs, heat maps, pie charts, etc., to better and quickly understand it. 

Instagram is constantly bringing in new features so staying up-to-date with the trends will help you get the most out of your dashboard.

Review regularly to understand what's working and what's not. Tweak your dashboard if you’re changing your social media strategy.  

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

When creating a custom Instagram dashboard, it's crucial to adhere to Instagram's terms of service and data usage policies. Avoid collecting or displaying sensitive user data without proper consent of the creator, and ensure your dashboard complies with relevant data protection regulations such as GDPR or CCPA. Failure to comply with these regulations can result in legal repercussions and damage your brand's reputation. Always prioritize user privacy and data security in the design and implementation of your dashboard. 

Real-world Examples of Impactful Instagram Dashboard for Inspiration 

Let’s look at some impactful Instagram dashboard examples.

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In this dashboard, we can provide a complete overview of the creator's performance metrics. It gives a synopsis of total followers, engagement rate, likes, and comments.

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The dashboard also gives an overview of intent to buy a product and audience sentiment. The tool analyzes all the comments across the most relevant posts by this creator to arrive at this data. 

The dashboard also shows the follower growth rate over the months and the monthly trend of average likes per post.

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The dashboard gives a complete breakdown of the audience — gender distribution, location, age, language, ethnicity, their brand affinity, and interest.

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Finally, the dashboard also provides a breakdown of the nature of the followers.

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Time to act

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Having a custom Instagram dashboard can help you understand if your campaign is on the right track and the ROI it's generating, as well as identify the right influencer for your influencer marketing program. 

InsightIQ is a comprehensive, secure, and reliable API-based solution for influencer marketing. 

This tool lets you create a custom Instagram dashboard and up your Instagram game. 

Schedule a call to learn more about how InsightIQ can empower your influencer marketing business.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How to create a dashboard on Instagram?

To create a dashboard on Instagram, you’ll need a professional Instagram account. Log on to your Instagram profile and tap on the View professional dashboard field on the top. Go to, ‘track your performance’, and click on ‘view key insights’ to see how many people you’ve reached in the last 30 days. 

Why create a dashboard with Instagram data?

Creating a dashboard with Instagram data helps to showcase data in real-time that can be visualized by all the team members, gives easy access to the same information with easy sharing capabilities, and different visualization formats make your numbers stand out. 

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