How to track sponsored post performance on Instagram comes down to two sources: your own Insights, which show the post's views and interactions, and the brand's view, which Instagram opens to them once you tag them with the paid partnership label. Add a tagged link or code for sales, and report only what the brand cannot already see.

What do I see in Instagram Insights for a sponsored post?

Open the post and tap View insights. Instagram's Help Center (read 23 October 2026) says any public account, personal or professional, can view Insights, and what you see depends on the format.

  • A post: views (the number of times it was displayed), interactions (such as likes, comments, saves and shares) and profile activity (what people did on your profile after engaging with the post).
  • A reel: views, watch time, viewers, average watch time and follows.
  • A story: views, viewers, interactions (including replies, sticker taps and link taps), accounts engaged, and profile activity such as profile visits, follows or website clicks.

For posts, stories and Live, Instagram splits accounts engaged into followers and non-followers, and shows audience details such as top countries and cities when you reach or engage over 100 accounts on a preset time frame. Instagram marks some of these metrics as estimated and in development. What each Insights number means defines them in plain words.

Post and reel insights stay available for up to two years, and so do story insights even though the story disappears after 24 hours. Account insights cover any period within the past 90 days.

What do Instagram branded content insights show the brand?

The paid partnership label is what opens the door. Meta's Business Help Center (read 23 October 2026) says Instagram's Branded Content Policies require the label on organic branded content. The first time you tag a brand, a request goes to them, and the label shows without their name until they approve. After you publish, the brand gets a notification and access to the content's insights. Remove the brand from the label and they lose that access.

What the brand sees, according to Meta's page on branded content insights:

  • Feed posts: reach and engagement.
  • Stories: reach, taps forward, taps back, replies and exits, for a 14-day window. You keep seeing your own story metrics in Instagram Insights.
  • Live: insights for two years or until the live is deleted.

The brand opens these in Meta Business Suite under All tools, then Analyse and report, then Insights. If they boost your post as a partnership ad, they can open the ad's insights in the Instagram app under Professional dashboard, then Partnership ads.

So before you build a report, ask which numbers the brand already looks at. Sending them their own reach back in a screenshot adds nothing.

How do I track brand deal results that Insights cannot show?

Give the deal a link or a code of its own, because none of the Insights metrics above is a sale or a signup.

  • If the brand gives you a tracked link, send exactly that one, and do not add tags of your own to it. Their attribution depends on it. Ask in writing whether it may pass through a tap-counting redirect, because program rules differ. A retailer's affiliate link is a different case: read that program's own link rules before it goes into any DM, as with Amazon's rules. Our brand deal contract checklist has the clauses worth settling before you post.
  • If you link to the brand's page yourself, tag the link. Google's Analytics Help (read 23 October 2026) says to always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, and warns that values are case sensitive, so Meta and meta count as different sources. Use lowercase. Our UTM link generator builds the link, for example utm_source=instagram, utm_medium=dm and utm_campaign=brandname-october.
  • If the brand can issue a code, ask for one that only you use. Their sales report then shows your result without any link at all.

What goes in a sponsored post report for brands?

One page, in a fixed order, with only the parts the brand cannot see for itself:

Section What to put in it Where it comes from
The post Date, format, and a note that the paid partnership label was on Your post
What Instagram shows Views and interactions, or for a reel watch time and follows, or for a story replies and link taps View insights
Who responded The split of accounts engaged between followers and non-followers Accounts engaged
What your link shows Clicks, and where the people were, if the link was tagged or tracked Your analytics or your DM tool
What the brand reports Sales, code uses or signups. Ask them for these The brand's own dashboard
Your read Two sentences: what worked, and one change for the next post You

If the deal included stories, send the report while the brand can still see your story numbers, since their window is 14 days, so both sets of figures describe the same days.

Where do comments and DMs fit?

If the post asks people to comment a word for the link or the code, those comments become a count of people who asked for it. inDM's analytics, on every plan, are kept by automation, so a campaign with its own keyword has its own numbers. Growth adds seeing who clicks your links and where they are. Build the automation and check its preview before you publish. Setup takes a few minutes in the comment-to-DM guide.

The click counts come from inDM's own redirect, which counts each tap before passing the person on (how click tracking works). That matters for a sponsored post. Ask the brand first, send a test message to yourself, and open the link on your phone. The page that loads should still carry the brand's tracking text exactly as they gave it. If anything is missing, tell the brand before the post goes live.

Where this stops working

  • Insights count the post, not the sale. None of the Insights definitions we read mentions a sale, and none gives a list of who viewed.
  • The brand's story window is short. It is 14 days, and some metrics are marked estimated and in development.
  • We have not tested any brand's tracking link through inDM. The check above is yours to run, and the brand's attribution rules are theirs.
  • We found no official benchmark for clicks or sales on sponsored posts, so we print none.
  • We did not cover regulator rules on disclosure. Instagram's label is Meta's requirement. Laws on advertising disclosure differ by country, so read those separately.
  • The label is mobile only. Meta's page says the paid partnership label is available only in the Instagram app, and menu names can differ in your version.

Bring the brand the parts Instagram cannot show them, and the next conversation starts from your numbers.

Sources

All read on 23 October 2026:

What's ours and what isn't. The metrics, windows and paths are Instagram's, Meta's and Google's, read on the date above. The report layout, the code idea and the link checks are our suggestions.