Instagram in gas

The Instagram section in gas brings together in one place everything Meta reports about your profile: how many followers it has, how many times its content was shown, how people react to posts and stories, and who actually follows you. This article describes the individual pages of the section and what each of them is good for. Linking the profile itself is covered in the article about connecting an Instagram profile.

Before you start

The Instagram item is always visible in the left-hand menu. For data to appear under it, three things have to be true at the same time.

How the section is organised

Under the Instagram icon in the left-hand menu you will find these items:

• Overview
• Followers
• When they are online
• Impressions
• Reach
• Engagements
• Posts with the Posts list and Timeline pages
• Stories with the Stories list, Timeline, Impressions and Reach pages
• Audience with the Gender and age, Gender, Age, Country and City pages

The header of every page contains the period selector, the refresh button and, if you have several profiles connected, the profile switcher. Switching the profile or changing the period is reflected in the graphs and tables on the page immediately.

The preset periods (last 7 days, 14 days and so on) on the Instagram pages end with the previous day, not with today. Instagram is still calculating the figures for the current day and the value for today would be incomplete. On the When they are online page the shift is three days, because this data arrives from Meta with a longer delay. The posts list and the stories list, on the other hand, do include today, because they show published content, not a statistic that is still being calculated.

Overview

Overview is the entry page of the section. It is made up of tiles, where each tile shows one metric, either as a single large number for the selected period or as a graph. By default the overview contains Followers, Posts and Stories as numbers and Reach with Impressions as graphs.

You can adjust the layout. In the top right there is a three-dot button containing the items Add widget, Edit layout and Reset to default layout. In editing mode you can drag a tile to another place or remove it. The layout is saved to your user account, so your colleagues' overview does not change.

Profile metrics

The Followers, Impressions, Reach and Engagements pages all look the same. At the top there are three summary cards and below them a graph of the development over the selected period:

• Total is the sum for the period (for followers it is the last known value).
• Short-term trend compares the selected period with a period of the same length immediately before it.
• Long-term trend compares it with a corresponding period further back in the past.

What each metric tells you:

• Followers is the number of people who follow the profile. It is useful for tracking the growth of the profile over time.
• Impressions is the number of times the profile's content was displayed. It shows how much room the profile took up in people's feeds.
• Reach is the number of people the content got to. It shows the real size of the audience you addressed during the period.
• Engagements is the total number of interactions with the profile's content, that is likes, comments, saves, shares and replies on posts, stories and Reels during the selected period. It shows whether the content interested people enough for them to react to it.

When they are online

The When they are online page shows which hours of the day your followers are on Instagram. The data is drawn as a grid: hours from 0:00 to 23:00 horizontally, the individual days of the selected period vertically. The darker the cell, the more followers were online during that hour. Hovering over a cell shows the exact number.

It is used for planning publication times. If you can read from the grid that your audience is strongest in the early evening, it makes sense to publish posts then rather than in the morning.

Posts

Posts list is a table of all posts published in the selected period. It has the columns Post type (Image, Video, Carousel, Reels), Text, Campaigns, Profile, Impressions, Reach, Engagements, Saved and Publication time. You can sort and filter the table, hide and move columns and export it. Clicking the text of a post opens its detail in gas, the link next to it leads to the post directly on Instagram.

If you have several profiles connected, on this page you can select several profiles at once in the switcher and compare their posts in one table. The Profile column then shows which post belongs to whom.

The post detail shows a preview of the image or video, the text of the post, the publication time and cards with numbers: Reach, Impressions, Engagements, Engagement rate, Saved and, for videos and Reels, Video views. The detail has no timeline graph, because Instagram only provides summary figures for posts, not their day-by-day course.

Timeline under the Posts item is a graph of the number of published posts over time. It answers the question of how regularly the profile publishes.

Stories

Stories have their own subsection in gas, because they behave differently from posts.

Stories list is a table of the stories published in the selected period, with the columns Post type, Text, Campaigns, Profile, Impressions, Reach and Publication time. Clicking the text opens the story detail.

The story detail contains a preview, the cards Reach, Impressions, Replies and Completion rate (the share of views that did not end with the viewer leaving the story), the Development over 24 hours graph and, on a computer, an extra Story navigation panel with the values Forward (tap), Forward (swipe), Back (tap) and Exits. Those four numbers tell you whether people clicked through the story or left it.

Timeline is a graph of the number of published stories over time, and Impressions and Reach under the Stories item are graphs of story displays and of the number of people reached during the period.

The short life of stories and what follows from it

A story on Instagram lives for 24 hours, and once that time is up Instagram stops reporting statistics for it. That is why gas downloads data about running stories very often, roughly every half hour, so that it captures the final figures before they expire.

For you this means three things:

• The figures for a story that is currently running are still changing. If you open the detail an hour after publication, you will see an interim state, not the final one.
• The data on navigation and replies arrives from Meta only in the final batch after the story expires. Until then it may be zero or empty.
• Once gas has downloaded the final figures, they stay in the application permanently, even though the story disappeared from Instagram long ago. Conversely, whatever gas did not manage to collect during those 24 hours (typically because the profile was unlinked at the time or the connection was not working) cannot be added retrospectively. In that case gas writes next to the graph that Instagram does not provide story statistics after 24 hours.

Audience

The Audience subsection describes who follows the profile. It contains five views:

• Gender and age is a combination of both values (for example Women 25–34).
• Gender splits followers into Women, Men and Unknown.
• Age splits followers into age bands.
• Country shows which countries the followers come from.
• City shows the same thing by city.

Every page has the same layout: a pie chart on the left, a table with the category and the number of followers on the right. Small categories are merged into an (other) item in the chart so that it stays readable, and you will find them separately in the table. Each row has a Show graph icon that opens the development of that category over time.

The audience is not a continuous statistic but a single current snapshot. You will find the date and time the snapshot comes from below the table, next to the Timestamp label.

What it is good for: the composition of the audience helps you decide what content to create and in what tone, when to publish, and whether the profile is speaking to the group of people you want to speak to. For destination management companies the Country view is especially useful, as it shows where the interest in the destination comes from.

Two things that often come as a surprise

The audience only appears from 100 followers up

Meta states in its documentation that it only reports demographic data (age, gender, location) when data for at least 100 people is available, and that some metrics are not available for accounts with fewer than 100 followers. Specifically, according to the documentation, follower data is not returned for profiles with fewer than 100 followers.

In practice this means that for a new or small profile all the pages under the Audience item, as well as the When they are online page, stay empty even though the other metrics do have data. This is not a fault of gas or of your settings, it is privacy protection on Meta's side. Once the profile crosses the 100-follower threshold, the data starts arriving on its own and you do not have to switch anything on.

Instagram remembers a shorter history than Facebook

According to Meta's documentation, Instagram keeps profile statistics for up to 90 days back. For Facebook pages the last two years are available. The difference is therefore fundamental and it shows up in two situations:

• When you first connect a profile. gas can only pull in the history Instagram still reports, that is roughly three months back. Older periods stay empty and cannot be filled in later.
• After a longer connection outage. If the connection stops working (access expires, a colleague leaves the company) and is restored several months later, gas fills in only the part of the gap that falls within the available window. The rest stays empty permanently.

Common problems

The profile is visible in the switcher, but I cannot select it

Your customer account plan limits how many profiles per network you can use, and this profile did not fit within the limit. You will find your limit usage in Settings → Customer account → Subscription. To have the limit raised, write through the contact form.

The No profile window pops up when I open Instagram

No Instagram profile has been connected to the customer account yet. Click Connect profile and gas will take you to the Meta connection settings. If you are convinced that a profile is connected, check in the customer account switcher in the top right that you are in the correct customer account.

The pages are empty even though the profile is visible in the settings

Most often it is the selected period: try widening the range to the last 28 or 90 days. The second common cause is that the profile was connected only recently and the first data is still downloading. The third possibility is that the connection stopped working, which you can tell in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts from the alert next to the profile.

The Audience is empty while the other pages have data

The profile has fewer than 100 followers, so Meta does not report demographic data. See the section above. The empty When they are online page has the same reason.

The When they are online page is empty even for a large profile

Meta provides this metric only for the last 30 days. If you have an older period selected, there is nothing to show. Switch the period to the last 7 or 28 days.

Today is missing from the graph

The preset periods on the Instagram pages deliberately end with the previous day, and on the When they are online page three days back. Instagram is still calculating the figures for the current day and an incomplete value would distort the graph. If you need to see today, set the period manually, but expect the numbers to change further.

After connecting the profile I only see the last few weeks

Instagram reports profile statistics for a maximum of 90 days back. Older history cannot be added, because Meta no longer provides it. From the moment you connect the profile, the history is stored in gas and gradually grows.

The numbers differ from the Instagram app or from Business Suite

Meta uses different definitions for identically named indicators than its own reports do, it also recalculates figures retrospectively, and Meta's interface counts days in a different time zone. The most common source of confusion, however, is naming: labels that sound similar can refer to different values in Meta's interface and in gas. In gas, Impressions is the number of displays and Reach is the number of people. Before you start comparing numbers, make sure you are comparing the same indicators.

The Impressions or Reach column is empty in the posts list

For a very fresh post the metrics have not arrived yet, gas pulls them in several times a day. Wait and then refresh the page with the refresh button in the header.

The post preview does not show

If the post was deleted on Instagram, gas writes next to it that the preview is not available because the post was deleted from the social network. The figures gas managed to download earlier stay in the tables.

The story is in the list but has zero figures

Either the story is currently running and Instagram has not yet reported complete data, or the story expired before gas managed to download the final values (typically when the connection was not working at the time). After 24 hours Instagram no longer provides story statistics and they cannot be added.

A tile I used to have is missing from the overview

The overview layout is saved to your user account, so it follows you to the other devices you log in on. You can bring a missing tile back through the three-dot button in the top right and the Add widget item, and restore the whole default set with the Reset to default layout item.

The data stopped on a certain day and does not continue

The connection to Meta has probably expired. In Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts you will see an alert next to the profile and the Who links the account column with the e-mail address of the colleague the connection belongs to. Renewing it is described in the article about restoring an expired connection. The sooner the connection is restored, the smaller the gap in the history will be.

I see data for a different profile than I want

The page header contains the profile switcher, which remembers your last choice. Expand it and select the correct profile. On the Posts list and Stories list pages you can select several profiles at once.

On a phone the table looks different than on a computer

On a small screen the tables are shown as cards with the most important values, so that they can be read without scrolling sideways. The story detail on a phone does not show the navigation panel or the detailed graph, and gas points this out with a note that you need to open the page in a browser on a computer for the detailed graph and table.

I cannot find something here that I know from Instagram

gas shows only what Meta reports through its partner interface, and that offering changes over time. Meta discontinues some indicators and replaces them with others. If a particular indicator is missing for you, write through the contact form and we will check whether it is available at all.