Connecting a profile is the second step of linking Instagram. In the first step you log in to Meta, the company that runs both Facebook and Instagram, and gas thereby gets the list of profiles you have access to. Only in this second step do you pick a specific profile and assign it to a customer account. That is how you decide whose data will actually show up in gas and for whom it will start being downloaded.
Before you start
- A linked Meta account. Logging in to Meta is described in the article Connecting a Meta account. Without it gas has no list of profiles for you to choose from.
- A professional Instagram profile. Instagram distinguishes a personal profile, a business profile and a creator profile. Business and creator profiles together are called a professional profile, and only for those does Instagram provide statistics. A personal profile therefore cannot be connected to gas.
- A profile paired with a Facebook page. gas logs in to Meta with a Facebook account, and along this route Meta only releases Instagram data for profiles that are paired with a page. That is why gas offers only those. Pairing is set up in the Instagram app in the profile settings, not in gas.
- Access to the statistics of the paired page. For pages, Meta does not work with a single role but with tasks, that is partial permissions granted one by one. For the page the profile is paired with, you need the Insights task (Statistiky in the Czech interface), or Full control outright. Tasks for content, messages, community activity or ads are not enough for statistics. They are granted by the page administrator on the Facebook side, it cannot be set up from gas.
- A role in the customer account. A profile may be assigned to a customer account by a user account with the Administrator or User role. Only an Administrator may remove an assignment.
- Free capacity in your plan. The number of connected profiles per network is limited by the plan for each customer account.
A personal Instagram profile cannot be connected. The list will only show professional profiles paired with one of the pages your Meta account manages. If a profile is missing from the list, switch it to professional in the Instagram app and pair it with a Facebook page. The list is loaded every time the window is opened, so the change takes effect on your next attempt to link.
How to do it
- In the left menu, click Settings right at the bottom. A dashboard with three cards opens.
- On the Connected services card, click I want to set up. Tiles for the individual platforms appear.
- Click the Meta accounts tile. A table of the Meta accounts you have linked opens.
- Click the name of your linked Meta account in the Account name column. Its detail opens and three tabs appear above the content: Meta Ads, Facebook and Instagram.
- Click the Instagram tab. You will see a table of profiles that are already connected. If none is connected yet, the table is empty.
- Click the Connect Instagram button. The Instagram connection window opens.
- Expand the Profile field, which is still empty with the hint "Select a profile", and click the profile you want to connect. gas loads the profiles paired with the pages your Meta account manages. Profiles already connected earlier under this account are unavailable in the list.
- Optionally fill in Profile name. This is the name you will see the profile under in gas. If you leave the field empty, the name from Instagram is used. If you do fill it in, it must have at least three characters.
- Leave the Filtering by destination checkbox empty. It concerns the tourism module only: when it is on, users only see data for the destinations their customer account has access to.
- In the Customer account field, select the accounts the profile will be made available to. The form of the selection differs depending on how many customer accounts you have: with a single account the field is not shown at all and gas fills it in itself, with two to four there are checkboxes, and with five or more there are two columns, Accounts to select and Assigned accounts, between which items are moved by clicking and which can be searched.
- Click the Connect profile button. The window closes.
How you know it worked: the profile is added as a new row to the table on the Instagram tab, and among the notifications (the bell in the top bar) a message New profile added appears saying the profile was linked successfully.
The profile and customer accounts
One profile can be connected to several customer accounts at the same time. The data is downloaded once and every assigned customer account sees it in its own environment.
You change the assignment later on the Instagram tab: either by clicking in the Customers column on the relevant row, or with the Change customer action among the icons in the Actions column. The column and the action are only shown if you belong to more than one customer account.
The selection always replaces the previous assignment. A customer account you leave unchecked in the window loses the profile and its users stop seeing its data.
Some customer accounts may be greyed out and cannot be selected. The reason is stated right next to them:
- Limit reached: the plan of this customer account has a limited number of profiles per network and it is already used up.
- No permission: you do not have the Administrator or User role in this customer account.
- Feature not in plan: the plan does not include that network.
- Invalid licence: the customer account does not have a valid subscription.
Who connected the profile
The service link belongs to the user account of whoever logged in to Meta, but the connected profile belongs to the customer account. That is why it happens that you see no Meta account in Settings → Connected services even though Instagram data is present in gas. It means someone else on the team connected the profile, and there is no need to create a second link for the same profile.
The full overview is in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts, which customer account administrators have access to. The Who links the account column shows the e-mail of the link owner as a link, so you can write to them straight away. The value Nobody means the profile has no live link and needs to be connected again; the row is also highlighted as an error.
Agree on connecting profiles with the customer account administrator. In the Customer account section they can see what is connected, who connected it and what state it is in, so they can advise whether a new link is needed at all. This is described in detail in the article Who linked the account.
What happens next
If you have regular reports in the customer account, gas asks right after connecting whether to add the profile to them. It opens the Add profile to report? window with a list of reports. Select the ones the profile belongs to and confirm with the Add to selected button. If you want to deal with it later, click Not now.
For the connected profile, gas starts downloading the daily profile overviews (Followers, Impressions, Reach, Engagements, When they are online), then Posts and Stories including their performance, and the Audience section broken down by gender, age, country and city. You will find everything in the left menu in the Instagram section. If you have more profiles connected, you switch between them in the page header.
The first numbers usually appear within hours. Daily profile overviews and posts are refreshed several times a day, stories roughly every half hour, because on Instagram they disappear after 24 hours. If you do not see any data immediately after connecting, that is not a fault; the first download happens at the next update. On top of that, Meta releases daily figures with a delay, so yesterday's numbers only settle during the following day.
gas fetches history in the background and not all at once. Its range is determined by Meta and of all three Meta services it is the shortest for Instagram: daily profile overviews go back 90 days and older periods are not made available to anyone. The follower count is a cumulative figure, which Meta only provides for the current day and does not backfill at all, so its series in gas starts on the day of connecting.
The connected profile also appears in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts. There the administrator sets the order of profiles and the default profile, that is the one offered first on the network's pages. This is described in the article Linked accounts of the customer account.
Editing a connected profile
You can change the profile name and the Filtering by destination option at any time directly in the table on the Instagram tab.
- On the relevant row, click the pencil icon labelled Edit row in the Actions column. The row switches to editing mode.
- Overwrite the Name and, if needed, change the tick in the Filtering by destination column.
- Click the tick icon labelled Finish editing. The change is saved and the table is reloaded. If you want to discard the edit, click the cross Cancel editing instead.
The name change takes effect across the whole application, nothing changes on Instagram. On a phone the table is not shown as a grid but as cards one below another.
Unlinking a profile
A profile can be unlinked in two places and each has a different effect.
- Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts, the Unlink account action. The profile disappears from this customer account and remains for the other assigned ones. If any regular report uses it, gas opens the Unlink profile window with a list of the affected reports and the checkbox Remove the profile from these reports as well. Without ticking it, the report stays configured but the profile stops being loaded into it.
- Meta account detail → Instagram tab, the Delete profile action. This removes the profile completely, including the data downloaded in gas. The data on Meta's servers remains untouched. Deletion is scheduled with a 30 day delay, so if you change your mind and connect the profile again within that time, the history comes back. However, you select the customer accounts again when reconnecting.
Common problems
The profile is missing from the list
There are four causes. The profile is personal and not professional. The profile is not paired with a Facebook page. The page it is paired with was unchecked in the Meta window during login, that is the window where Facebook lists the pages and asks which of them gas may read. Or you do not have the Insights task or Full control for that page, that is the access that allows statistics to be read.
- Check the profile type and its pairing with a page.
- In Meta accounts, click Connect Meta account.
- In the Meta window, leave all pages enabled. The new consent overwrites the original one and no second account is created.
The window says all profiles are already linked
The message reads "All profiles are already linked. Select a different account." There is no free profile left under this Meta account, all the available ones are connected. The remaining profiles are most likely managed under a different Facebook account, so link that one as well.
The window says the profile is already linked
The selected profile is already connected under this account. Close the window and find it in the table on the Instagram tab. If you do not see it there, it is connected under a different Meta account or a colleague connected it, see the section Who connected the profile.
gas says the profile was linked by another user
Someone has already connected the profile under their own link. gas offers the Take ownership button. If you use it, the profile moves under your link and you take over its settings as well as its availability for customer accounts. The history is preserved. The same offer also appears when the profile was linked by another user under a different platform account. If your colleague's link works, there is no need to take ownership of anything, agree it with the customer account administrator.
Data stopped arriving after a colleague left the company
This is the most common cause of suddenly missing data. They connected the profile back then, and as soon as their permissions on the platform were taken away or their account was cancelled, the link stopped working, even though you still see the profile in gas. Do not remove the profile and do not create a second one next to it.
- An active colleague who has access on both Facebook and Instagram goes through the connecting procedure.
- In the Instagram connection window, gas tells them the profile was linked by another user.
- They choose Take ownership. The profile moves under their link, the history and settings are preserved and data starts arriving again.
gas says you linked the profile yourself under a different account
This happens when you have several Meta accounts linked in gas and the profile is already attached to one of them. gas offers the Relink button, which moves the profile under the account you are currently working with. The data is preserved.
A Missing permission label is shown next to the profile name
Access to Meta as a whole works, but you have lost the permission for that specific profile, so data has stopped arriving. Click the label and an explanation opens with the date from which data is missing and with the Reconnect button. After you click it, you log in to Meta and in the Meta window allow the profile and its page again. After the first successful download the label disappears on its own and the missing days are filled in.
A Paused label is shown next to the profile
The whole link with the Meta account is not working, not just one profile. Typically after changing your Facebook password or after access was removed. Click the label, then Reconnect, and log in to Meta again. gas also sends a notification with the date by which the link needs to be restored, the deadline is 14 days from pausing. If you make it, the data is preserved; after it passes, the related data is deleted.
Only some of the missing days were filled in after reconnecting
Meta makes Instagram daily overviews available 90 days back. If the outage lasted longer, only the part that falls within this window is filled in, and older days can no longer be obtained retroactively. The follower count is not filled in at all, Meta only provides it as today's value.
Older periods are missing from the graphs
From Instagram, gas only has what Meta releases, and that is 90 days back. You will therefore only see a longer history for the time when the profile was already connected in gas and data was being downloaded day by day. This applies even to a newly connected profile that has been running on Instagram for years.
The Audience section stays empty
Demographic audience data, that is gender, age, country and city, is not provided by Meta to profiles with fewer than one hundred followers. For smaller profiles the section stays empty until they pass that threshold, and the missing periods are not filled in retroactively either. The other data is downloaded normally.
The numbers in gas do not match what the Instagram app shows
The overviews in the mobile app and the data Meta releases to third party applications are not the same thing. They differ in how the period is defined and in the definitions of individual figures, and Meta also states some values as approximate. Add to that the recalculation of the most recent days. So compare closed days and the same period.
Another profile cannot be added, the customer account shows Limit reached
The plan has a limited number of profiles per network. Unlink a profile you no longer follow, or ask for an upgrade of the plan in Settings → Customer account → Subscription.
I deleted the profile by mistake
Within 30 days of deletion, go through the connecting procedure again and select the profile. gas will revive it together with the downloaded history and a message appears among the notifications saying the profile was relinked successfully. After that period the data is deleted irreversibly and the profile starts from zero.
The Instagram tab is not visible at all
You are not in the Meta account detail but in the list of accounts. Go back to Settings → Connected services → Meta accounts and click the account name in the Account name column. If the list is empty and gas says you have no Meta account linked, start with the article Connecting a Meta account.