As a digital marketer, you may want to track your Instagram Business account’s total follower growth day by day. In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to do it!
Tracking Instagram follower growth over time is crucial for digital marketers who want to measure performance, identify trends, and optimize content strategies. However, Instagram Insights via Meta’s API provides limited follower metrics: "New Followers" and "Current Followers".
What follower data does Instagram Insights offer?
When using the Instagram Insights connector, you’ll notice that:
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"New Followers" only shows the number of new followers gained per day. This metric can only be retrieved for the past 30 days, excluding the current day.
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- "Current Followers" displays your total number of followers as of today, but it doesn't include historical data.
When visualizing data in a line graph, you may see “0” values. That’s because Instagram doesn’t offer a historical breakdown of Current Followers through its API.
These metrics do not retrieve historical follower counts. This limitation comes from Instagram's API itself — it's not something Dataslayer can control.
How to monitor daily follower growth in your spreadsheet
If you need to build a daily historical evolution of Instagram followers, you can easily do it with our Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel extension. This process starts creating a record from the day you begin — it does not pull past historical data, but helps you accumulate it going forward.
Steps to be followed:
1. Open our Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel extension.
2. Choose the Instagram account for which you would like to monitor follower growth.
3. Set the Data Table configuration using:
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Dimension: Date
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Metric: Current Followers
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Date range: Today
4. Select the "Combine new with old results" option. This option will enable you to seamlessly add new data to your existing records, ensuring that any updates, refreshes, or scheduled queries automatically integrate with the information you have previously collected.
Learn more about this option here.
5. Click on "Generate Table" to display the data.
6. Set up a daily schedule for your query to automatically update.
For detailed information on scheduling limits and best practices, please consult this guide.
7. (Optional) Connect your spreadsheet to Looker Studio for better visualization and reporting.
This method allows you to build your historical dataset of Instagram followers day by day!
As always, please contact us via our live chat on our website or via email if you still have doubts or questions. We are happy to help!