How to Find Average Impressions on Instagram

Calculating your average Instagram impressions doesn't have to be a complicated process hidden behind confusing dashboards. It’s a powerful metric that tells you how much visibility your content is truly getting, and once you know how to find it, you can use it to build a much smarter content strategy. This guide will walk you through exactly what impressions are, where to find the data, how to calculate your average, and what to do with that number to grow your account.

First Things First: What Exactly Are Instagram Impressions?

Before you can measure them, you need to know what you’re looking at. In the simplest terms, Instagram impressions are the total number of times your content has been seen. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same person seeing it ten times or ten different people seeing it once - each view counts as an impression.

This is where new creators and marketers often get tripped up, confusing impressions with a similar metric: reach.

• Impressions: The total number of views on your content.
• Reach: The number of unique accounts that have seen your content.

Think of it like a billboard on a busy highway. If 1,000 different cars drive past it in a day, its reach is 1,000. But if many of those drivers commute and pass the billboard on their way to work and back home, it might get 1,800 impressions. Your reach will always be equal to or less than your impressions because one person can give your post multiple impressions, but they only count as one person reached. To learn more about this distinction, check out how to calculate reach on Instagram.

So why do impressions matter? Because they signal visibility and repetition. A high impression count suggests your content is being shown repeatedly, possibly on the Explore page, through hashtag searches, or being shared in DMs. It’s a top-of-funnel metric that tells you how effectively Instagram is distributing your content across the platform.

A Quick Prerequisite: You'll Need a Professional Account

There's one small but important step before you can access any of this data: you must have an Instagram Business or Creator account. Personal accounts don't have access to Instagram Insights. If you're still on a personal account, making the switch is free, easy, and unlocks a world of valuable analytics for your brand or business. Learn more about how to change your account type on Instagram.

Here’s how to switch:

1. Go to your Instagram profile and tap the three horizontal lines (the "hamburger menu") in the top-right corner.
2. Tap Settings and privacy.
3. Scroll down to the "For professionals" section and tap Account type and tools.
4. Tap Switch to professional account.
5. Follow the on-screen prompts to select a category that best describes what you do (e.g., Digital Creator, Entrepreneur, Artist).
6. Choose whether you’re a Creator (best for public figures, artists, and influencers) or a Business (best for brands, retailers, and service providers).

Once you’ve made the switch, you’ll see a "Professional dashboard" link on your profile. This is your new home for all things analytics.

Finding Impressions for a Single Instagram Post

Let's start with the basics: finding the impression count for an individual piece of content. This process works for feed posts, Reels, and carousels.

1. Navigate to your Instagram profile.
2. Tap on any post or Reel for which you want to see data.
3. Below the image or video and above the caption, you’ll see a button that says View insights. Tap it.

A screen will slide up showing you a variety of metrics for that specific post. You’ll see icons for likes, comments, shares, and saves at the top. Below that, under the "Reach" section, you will find Impressions listed clearly. Instagram often provides a breakdown of where those impressions came from (e.g., from Home, from Hashtags, from the Explore page, or from your Profile), which is incredibly useful for understanding how people are discovering your work.

Now, Let’s Calculate Your Average Impressions

Finding the number for one post is useful, but the real power comes from understanding your average performance over a specific period. This helps you establish a baseline, so you can easily spot high-performing content that beats the average and identify low-performing content you might want to avoid in the future. Here are two simple ways to do it.

Method 1: The Manual Calculation

This is the most direct method and doesn't require any special tools. It's perfect for a quick analysis of your last few posts.

1. Define Your Time Frame. Decide which posts you want to analyze. Do you want to know the average for your last 10 posts? Or all the posts from the last 30 days? A consistent time frame is important for accurate tracking over time.
2. Record Each Post's Impressions. Open each post within your chosen time frame, tap "View insights," and write down the impression number in a notebook or a simple text file.
3. Add Them Up. Sum the impression numbers from all the posts you recorded.
4. Divide by the Number of Posts. Divide your total impressions by the number of posts you analyzed. The result is your average impressions per post for that period.

The formula looks like this:

(Total Impressions from All Posts) / (Number of Posts) = Average Impressions per Post

For example, if you analyzed 5 posts with impressions of 2,500, 3,100, 1,900, 4,500, and 2,800, your calculation would be:

(2500 + 3100 + 1900 + 4500 + 2800) / 5 = 14,800 / 5 = 2,960 Average Impressions

Method 2: Level Up with a Spreadsheet

If you plan to track this metric regularly (which you should!), the manual brain-power method gets old fast. A simple spreadsheet is a far more efficient way to manage your data.

1. Set Up Your Spreadsheet. Open Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and create a few simple columns: Post Date, Post Type (e.g., Reel, Carousel, Image), and Impressions.
2. Enter Your Data. Go through your Instagram posts for your chosen time period and plug the numbers and details into the corresponding cells. This can seem tedious at first, but it only takes a few minutes once you get a rhythm going.
3. Let the Formula Do the Work. Once your data is entered, you can use a simple formula to calculate the average instantly. If your impression numbers are in column C from cell C2 to C21, just click an empty cell and type:

=AVERAGE(C2:C21)

The spreadsheet will automatically calculate and display your average impressions. The beauty of this method is that you can also sort your data to see which post types get the highest average impressions or track how your monthly average changes over time.

Okay, I Have the Number... What’s Considered “Good?”

This is the million-dollar question, and the answer is: it depends. There's no universal number that defines "good" average impressions, because the metric is relative to your specific account. Instead of comparing yourself to massive brands with millions of followers, benchmark against more meaningful factors:

• Your Follower Count: An account with 500 followers having 1,000 average impressions is amazing, whereas an account with 100,000 followers getting the same number would be... less impressive. A more useful comparative metric is the Impression Rate, which you can calculate with this formula: Average Impressions / Follower Count. This gives you a percentage that's easier to compare across accounts of different sizes.
• Your Niche: Highly visual niches like food, fashion, and travel tend to generate more impressions than B2B service industries simply due to the nature of the content. Look at what similar-sized accounts in your specific niche are doing to get a better feel for your performance.
• Your Content Mix: Reels are designed for discovery and will almost always gather significantly more impressions than a static image post. Because of this, it's often wise to calculate your average impressions separately for Reels and for static posts to get a more accurate picture of performance for each format.
• Your Baseline: The most important benchmark is your own past performance. Is your average impression count this month higher than it was last month? Progress is the ultimate goal.

How to Boost Your Average Instagram Impressions

Once you’ve calculated your average impressions, you can start using that information to make smarter content decisions. Here’s how to turn that data into growth.

1. Find Your Winners and Replicate Them

Sort your spreadsheet by impressions from highest to lowest. Look at your top five posts. What do they have in common? Was it the topic? The visual style? Was it a Reel with a trending audio? Was the hook in the first three seconds particularly strong? Identify the pattern and create more content based on what's already proven to work.

2. Improve Your Hashtag Strategy

If your insights show very few impressions are coming "from Hashtags," it's a sign your strategy needs a refresh. Avoid using only massive, generic hashtags like #marketing (with millions of posts) and focus on a mix of broad, community-specific, and niche tags to reach a more targeted audience.

3. Prioritize Short-Form Video

There's no getting around it: Instagram is prioritizing Reels. They are the single best tool on the platform for reaching new people and generating massive impression counts. If you’re not consistently posting Reels, you’re leaving visibility on the table. Even simple Reels filmed on your phone can dramatically lift your overall average. For tips on maximizing your video content, check out how to optimize Instagram Reels.

4. Publish When Your Audience is Online

Post your content right when your followers are most likely to see it. You can find this data in your professional dashboard. Go to Professional dashboard >,, Total followers and scroll to the bottom to find a chart showing your audience's "Most active times" broken down by day and hour. For a detailed guide on this, see how to see when your audience is most active on Instagram.

5. Spark Engagement with Shares and Saves

Instagram's algorithm pays close attention to how many people share your post to their Stories or DMs, and how many save it for later. These actions are strong indicators of high-quality content. End your captions with a call-to-action that encourages this behavior, like "Share this with a friend who needs to hear it!" or "Save this post to reference later."

Final Thoughts

Understanding and calculating your average impressions on Instagram bridges the gap between simply posting content and building a genuine strategy. By looking beyond one-off viral hits and analyzing your baseline performance, you gain the clarity needed to create content that consistently reaches a wider audience, grows your account, and helps you achieve your goals.

Once you’re in the habit of tracking these important analytics, the next challenge is managing your content workflow without getting overwhelmed. Many of us started out juggling spreadsheets, native schedulers, and a dozen different apps just to stay organized. That’s why we built Postbase - to bring planning, scheduling, engagement, and analytics into one clean, simple dashboard. Our platform is designed for the modern reality of social media, with a strong focus on the short-form video formats that fuel impressions today, letting you see what's working and plan your next move all in one place.