What are Instagram profile visits?

In Meta’s Instagram media insights documentation, profile_visits is defined as the number of times your profile was visited, and it is listed for feed posts and Stories. A related metric, profile_activity, covers the actions people take when they visit your profile after engaging with your post, and can be split by action type.

The account-level insights page we read lists metrics such as follows_and_unfollows and profile_links_taps (taps on your address, call, email and text buttons), but we did not find an account-wide profile visits metric there. If your own app shows a total for the account, it is using its own report, so read the label in your app.

To compare posts, divide profile visits by reach and multiply by 100. If a post reached 5,000 people and led to 150 profile visits, the visit rate is 3%. A second post with 90 visits from 1,500 reach is 6%, which means it moved a larger share of its viewers to look at you, even though it brought fewer people in total.

• A visit is the moment your bio, photo, highlights and link get read. Check them on a phone before you worry about posting more.
• Posts that say who you are or what you sell, in the first line, tend to send more people to your profile than posts that only entertain.
• Pair visits with follows and with taps on your contact buttons to see where people stop. Meta reports follows and unfollows as a separate metric and does not return it for accounts with fewer than 100 followers.
• Look at the trend over several weeks, not a single day. Data can arrive up to 48 hours late.

Tip: Open your own profile as a stranger would, with no context, and ask what it offers in five seconds. If you cannot tell, neither can the people who just visited.