Instagram provides a number of useful analytics to determine the performance of your Instagram Stories.
While you can see the total number of viewers and even the specific accounts that viewed or interacted with your story, you may be wondering – can you also see who skips it?
This is an excellent question. In this article, we’ll cover everything that you need to know!
Can You See Who Has Skipped Your Instagram Story?
No. Unfortunately, there is no way to view who exactly skipped your Instagram Story.
While you can get an idea on roughly how many people opted to skip it by swiping forward, you are currently unable to view which accounts decided to skip it. This is likely due to privacy issues, as people may feel uncomfortable if they can’t skip stories without others finding out about it.
That being said, there are things you can do to try and guess who skipped a story, using a workaround I’ll share in a moment.
Workaround – Upload 2 Stories Close Together
Although you can’t view who swiped to skip your Instagram story, there is still a little trick you can do to figure it out.
The way it works is simple. Instead of uploading one Story at a time and taking a break, you should instead upload two close together.
Then, you can compare the viewers list for the 1st Story and the 2nd Story. If somebody viewed the first one but didn’t view the second one, you can be reasonably sure that they opted to skip your Story as soon as it came up.
This can also be a good way to gauge how engaged your viewers are. If you’ve discovered that a large percentage of your Story viewers are choosing to skip your story, you may wish to take steps that can make your Story more engaging or appealing to your audience.
In an ideal scenario, almost everybody that watches your Story will view it all the way through. However, unless you work hard to capture their attention and appeal to their interests, this is rarely the case.
Are People That Rewatch Your Instagram Story Counted Twice?
No. Despite how many times somebody watches one of your Instagram Stories, their view will only be watched once.
Additionally, they will only show up one time in the viewer list if you choose to pull up the list of accounts who have viewed your Story.
This is much different than on sites like YouTube or TikTok, where the same person viewing the content multiple times has their views counted each time.
On Instagram Stories, only the first view will be counted towards the total, while all other views are ignored.
How Did Someone Skip Only One Section Of My Story?
This one’s a bit crazy!
Let’s say you posted 3 Stories that were all available at the same time. How could it be that somebody was able to view the 1st and the 3rd Story, but not the 2nd one? Instagram always shows Stories in the order in which they’re posted, so how is this possible?
On rare occasions, you may notice this happening within your Story analytics.
Typically, it comes down to issues with playback. It seems that if the viewer is having issues with a certain Story loading, they may be able to tap past it without it being registered as a view.
So if they’re tapping quickly through your story, it’s possible only the 1st and 3rd video actually loaded, while the 2nd never finished buffering before it was skipped.
This is the only explanation we’ve been able to find for this phenomenon, as there’s no other way something like this would be possible.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, there is no way to see the specific people who skipped your Story on Instagram.
However, you can view the total number of people who have skipped, as well as other useful analytics about your Story performance within the Story analytics section of your Instagram account.
I hope that you’ve found this article helpful. If you have any other questions about Instagram, please ask them using the comment form below.
Wishing you the best,
– James McAllister