Instagram Data Range

​@nikeul - The Instagram API has two components:

• Post data, which can be pulled as far back as 2 years
• Follower data, which is limited to 28 days

I’m not familiar with what product you’re working with (direct API connection to Looker Studio, perhaps), but that’s likely why you’re hitting the issue. If you’re calling on any type of follower data, it’s going to hard limit what you can access to 28 days in the past. It’s awful, because if you start working on an account and you want to pull data historically beyond that 28-day mark, you simply can’t, and clients/brands/directors hate to hear that. The only thing you can do is find a way to solve for it by storing the data consistently moving forward.

If you’re working with the Looker Studio product, here’s a quick way to solve for the follower data problem:

1. Build a Google Sheet for follower data (columns to add: date, total followers, new followers)
2. Build a corresponding table with the Instagram Insights connector on Looker Studio that looks back 28 days
3. Export that table from Looker Studio and paste it into your new Google Sheet every day
4. When pasting the fresh table data, overwrite any dates that are similar. 
   1. For example, if you pull 2/17 data yesterday and there were 1500 followers and 5 new followers for that row, and you pull 2/17 data today and there were 1501 followers and 6 new followers for that row, delete the old row and replace it with the new data.

It’s a manual workaround that you can use to import into Looker Studio alongside your API access, and still have everything look clean. Let me know if you have any questions about setup there, and I’m sure someone on the support team could also drop in some resources on the Instagram API… there’s a lot of funky rules that Meta employs across their sources, especially for Instagram.

Hi ​@nikeul, indeed, the Instagram Insights API has historical data limitations depending on what you are trying to fetch.

To overcome this, you will need to start storing and collecting the data elsewhere. One way to automate this process is by using Supermetrics for Google Sheets with the Combine new results with old feature. This setting works by building a historical dataset and then creating a rolling window that adds new, up-to-date data each time you refresh the query. You can then connect the Google Sheet to Looker Studio for visualization, creating a fully automated report.