Tracking Instagram Traffic in Google Analytics - Why it's not showing up...

Ah, social media. You magnificent and mysterious beast you! It seems that no matter how long I’ve been working in marketing or how much I think I know, there is always something else to learn that when I do, makes me feel like a complete noob.

I’ve been working on ramping up the Instagram account for my employer and, despite increasing the accounts following by 50% in less than a month’s time, I couldn’t see any data in our analytics to show it was making any sort of difference. I mean, what good are tons of followers if it’s not resulting in traffic to the site or conversions? Was the traffic being grouped into the referrals from Facebook?

I had to figure this out.

Now, I’m one of those odd individuals that doesn’t use my personal cell phone for work. I mean, co-workers may contact me from time to time with a text, but I don’t conduct business on my phone. I’ve always used the desktop app for IG to do my social media marketing. 

That being said, I made an exception last night. I was checking the stats of our IG account and thought about the IG/analytics issue I was having. I clicked on our URL on our profile and noticed how a new window popped up for our website. I’d been under the impression that it the link would open in the same window… not a new one. A new window meant that the link was not working as a referral but as direct traffic. Ah ha!

Problem solved, right?

No, I had to do a little more work to make the IG traffic show up. Enter Google’s Campaign URL Builder. This fantastic tool lets you create a custom link that is trackable under analytics Acquisition> Campaigns> All campaigns. 

When I entered the campaign information and hit enter, I ended up with an URL that… well, would turn IG people off and would receive little, if any, clicks. I mean, look at this thing!

https://www.agworkers.com/?utm_source=instagram

Yuck, right? It was time to visit one of the many link shortening sites. I prefer tinyurl.com, but I know others that love bit.ly. By using tinyurl, I shortened the long link above into tinyurl.com/agwinstagram.

 I changed the URL on Instagram and now I can track referrals from IG!

So, if you are using Instagram for marketing purposes, make sure that you create a custom URL so you can track your incoming traffic from IG.

Remember, for marketing efforts to prove themselves, you must analyze the data behind them!

Thanks for the read and good luck!

LD