17 May Instagram’s analytics will offer audience demographics, reach & more

Instagram is preparing to launch a series of new tools for the businesses and brands using its platform, including business profiles with contact buttons and access to maps and directions, as well as tools for tracking the analytics around posts, and a mobile ad-buying experience. Now we’re able to see what Instagram’s analytics feature looks like in action, thanks to a leak from one of the product’s early testers.

Details of the new analytics feature were first posted on Instagram scheduling tool Later.com’s blog – the same site that first unveiled photos of the forthcoming business profiles, as it turns out.

Note, however, that these screenshots were snapped ahead of the user interface revamp that turned Instagram’s interface from blue-and-white to black-and-white. That means when this feature launches more broadly, it will have a different visual appearance, though the content being tracked will not likely change.

According to what’s shown in the screenshots, Instagram’s analytics offering will be called “Insights,” and will be focused on two main areas: follower demographics and post analytics.

The follower analytics section offers demographic details about your audience, including followers’ location, age, and gender. Location information is available by country or by city, which makes it useful to bigger brands all the way down to smaller, local businesses. Knowing where the majority of users are based can also help businesses better determine when to post content – though to some extent, Instagram’s new algorithmic-based timeline will disrupt that flow by personalizing the feed to each user, rather than presenting posts chronologically.

This updated timeline is still rolling out, Instagram told us a few days ago, though a number of users are already seeing it live in their app, we’re hearing.

In addition to seeing details like gender and age, graphed out as a circle graph and bar chart, respectively, the follower analytics’ section also lets you track how many new followers you’ve gained on an hourly and daily basis. This can better help pinpoint which posts worked to convert users to followers, or which posts may have spread virally, for example.