Read a post's analytics and explain what each number means for your goal.
Open your account analytics now and go to the page for a single post. You will see a long list of numbers. Most people either ignore them or look only at the biggest one. Both habits skip the numbers that tell you whether a post helped your business.
Priya runs the account for a centre whose customers are parents. She opens her analytics for the first time in a month and sees views, reach, impressions, plays, likes, average watch time, followers gained and profile activity. One video has far more views than the rest, and she feels pleased. Then she realises she has no idea whether any of it brought a parent to the centre.
Reach is roughly the number of different accounts that saw a post. Views count how many times a post was played or seen, so one person can be counted more than once. Each platform defines these a little differently and has changed the definitions over time. When precision matters, check the definition in the app's help pages.
Reach and views show how far a post travelled. They do not show whether it worked for the business. A video can reach many people who scroll past after a second. A video seen by few people can bring in three enquiries from exactly the right parents. Attracting viewers and attracting buyers are different things, which is the same point lesson 3.1 made about hooks. Treat reach and views as context for the other numbers, and look for the result elsewhere.
Low reach usually means the feed did not widen the post's audience because early viewers did not respond. The metrics in the next section help you find out why they didn't.
Average watch time is how long, on average, people watched before leaving. Instagram, for example, shows it for each reel, and its help pages explain that it is the total watch time divided by the number of initial views. It is hard to judge on its own, because a longer video has more room for watch time, so compare it with the video's length as a percentage. A 30-second video with an average watch time of 12 seconds means viewers watched 40 percent of it on average. A 60-second video with an average watch time of 15 seconds (also invented) comes to 25 percent, even though 15 seconds is the bigger number. Once you account for length, the second video did worse.
The retention graph, which you first met in lesson 4.1, shows the share of viewers still watching at each moment of the video. The official Instagram and TikTok help pages do not describe a graph like this, so check whether your app shows one before you count on it. A sharp fall means something lost viewers at that point. A steep drop in the first few seconds points to the hook. A slow slide through the middle points to a long setup. A drop just before the end often means the payoff came late or the close dragged.
These two numbers are where your work from modules three and four shows up. Use them to decide which part of the script to fix next: the hook, the setup or the close.
Saves and shares are two of the strongest signals a viewer can give. A save means the person wanted to come back to the post, for example for a tip, a checklist or a list of steps. A share means the person thought someone else should see it. Both suggest the post was useful or worth passing on, which is what the teaching posts from lesson 2.3 aim for. If one content pillar keeps getting saves, your buyers find it useful. If a video gets shared a lot, look at who it was shared with, if the platform shows this, and read what the comments say.
Likes are easy to give and tell you less. Glance at them, but give them little weight compared with a save, a share, or a comment that asks a question.
The numbers closest to business results are the ones that show a viewer taking a step towards you:
Profile visits: the person wanted to see more of the account. Link clicks: the person went to your website or booking page. Messages: the person started a conversation. Follows from a post: the person wanted more.
Most platforms group these as profile activity or "actions". On Instagram, any public account, personal or professional, can see profile activity in its post insights. Find them and record them for every post. They show whether your content is doing its job far better than views do.
Platforms cannot see everything, so add your own records. Your log from lesson 7.3, "From comment to conversation to customer", shows which conversations started on social and which became sales. Put the platform actions side by side with that log to see which posts lead to customers as well as attention.
In the activity, you will open the analytics for your last five posts and note the reach, average watch time, saves, shares and profile actions for each.
Open the analytics for your last five posts. For each one, write down reach, average watch time, saves, shares and profile actions.
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