In the last article on the Instagram graph, I covered some fields and edges on the Instagram Account, Story, and Media nodes. In this post, I talk a little bit about the available metrics on the Instagraph.

Account Insights

Like a Page node, an Instagram Account node has its own Account-level insights… But what metrics are available? Easiest way to find out is to just make up a bogus metric name and try it out. The error message will list the valid metrics (listed below).

token.get(f'{insta_id}/insights?metric=wanker')

• impressions (day, week, days_28)
• reach (day, week, days_28)
• follower_count (day)
• email_contacts (day)
• phone_call_clicks (day)
• text_message_clicks (day)
• get_directions_clicks (day)
• website_clicks (day)
• profile_views (day)
• audience_gender_age (lifetime)
• audience_locale (lifetime)
• audience_country (lifetime)
• audience_city (lifetime)
• online_followers (lifetime)

In the documentation, we are further told that the lifetime period for “audience-related metrics will only use the previous day’s data,” which doesn’t feel very lifetime-y. But whatever.

Here is an example:

# Get impressions number for each day from 2018-05-01 up-to-but-not-including 2018-05-05
token.get(f'{insta_id}?fields=insights.metric(impressions).period(day).since(2018-05-01).until(2018-05-05)')

Importantly, from a data collection point of view:

• we really only need to collect they day-level data for the metrics with multiple period types (week and days_28 can be aggregated from there, right?)
• we can request multiple metrics at once, but it seems only at one specified period type, so day-level and lifetime-level metrics must be collected separately

Day-Level Account/User Insights

day_level_metrics = [
  'impressions', 'reach', 'follower_count', 
  'email_contacts', 'phone_call_clicks', 'text_message_clicks',
  'get_directions_clicks', 'website_clicks', 'profile_views'
]

token.get(f'{insta_id}?fields=insights'
  '.metric({''.join(day_level_metrics)})'
  '.period(day)')

Lifetime-Level Account/User Insights

lifetime_level_metrics = [
'audience_gender_age', 'audience_locale', 'audience_country',
'audience_city', 'online_followers'
]

token.get(f'{insta_id}?fields=insights'
  '.metric({''.join(lifetime_level_metrics)})'
  '.period(lifetime)')

Media Insights

There are 3 major types of Instagram media:

1. IMAGE
2. VIDEO
3. CAROUSEL_ALBUM

Image & Video Insights

An image has some insights within its fields, such as comment_count and like_count.

impressions, reach, taps_forward, taps_back, exits, replies, engagement, saved, video_views

carousel_album_impressions, carousel_album_reach, carousel_album_engagement, carousel_album_saved, carousel_album_video_views,

If you try to use the exits, replies, taps_forward, taps_back, or any of the carousel-specific metrics on a Video or Image node, you will receive an error response that looks something like the following:

{
  "error": {
    "message": "(#100) Incompatible metrics (metric_name) with single post media",
    "type": "OAuthException",
    "code": 100,
    "fbtrace_id": "EPVy9v0N2ZN"
  }
}

Carousel Insights

There are exclusive metric names for carousels, which exactly mirror the general metric names for Instagram Media nodes:

• carousel_album_engagement
• carousel_album_impressions
• carousel_album_reach
• carousel_album_saved
• carousel_album_video_views

Oddly, these exclusive names are not necessary: I have found that simply using the regular media metric names returns the same exact numbers for these objects (i.e., no need to write out “carousel_album_”).

Try it yourself:

token.get(f'{carousel_id}/insights?metric=engagement,carousel_album_engagement')
token.get(f'{carousel_id}/insights?metric=impressions,carousel_album_impressions')
token.get(f'{carousel_id}/insights?metric=reach,carousel_album_reach')
# etc...

Carousel Children: No Insights!

It’s important to note that not all Instagram photos and videos are created equal: if they are the children of a carousel, they do not have their own insights.

token.get(f'{carousel_id}/children?fields=insights.metric(engagement)')
{
  "error": {
    "message": "(#100) Field is not available for Carousel children media.",
    "type": "OAuthException",
    "code": 100,
    "fbtrace_id": "AQL7CQTiv+s"
  }
}

Story Insights

• exits
• impressions
• reach
• replies
• taps_forward
• taps_back

Next Up: Instagraph Data Collection Strategy

I almost wish I started learning and strategizing Graph API data collection with Instagram: so many fewer node types, fields, edges, and insights! Very simple to really set up in a reasonable way (except possibly for stories since I still have never set up a webhook).

A Few Extra Notes…

As a sanity check, I made sure to perform node introspection (metadata=1) on each type of media node to make sure I was not missing some node-specific fields or edges. It seems that I was not… The reason I checked is because I’m curious if Video nodes have any info about duration/length.

• Image Fields: id, caption, comments_count, ig_id, is_comment_enabled, like_count, media_type, media_url, owner, permalink, shortcode, thumbnail_url, timestamp, username

• Image Edges: children, comments, insights

• Video Fields: id, caption, comments_count, ig_id, is_comment_enabled, like_count, media_type, media_url, owner, permalink, shortcode, thumbnail_url, timestamp, username

• Video Edges: children, comments, insights

• Carousel Fields: id, caption, comments_count, ig_id, is_comment_enabled, like_count, media_type, media_url, owner, permalink, shortcode, thumbnail_url, timestamp, username
• Carousel Edges: children, comments, insights

Some References

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/reference/user/insights
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/reference/media/insights