An advertiser buys a package that includes five Instagram Stories. Your social team posts them on Monday. By Tuesday, the Stories are gone. The campaign report is due at the end of the month.
What happens next depends entirely on your tooling.
The screenshot workflow
At most publishers, someone on the social team sets a reminder to screenshot each Story before it expires. They save the images to a shared drive. At the end of the month, someone else digs through that folder, matches each screenshot to the right campaign, and manually pairs it with metrics they pulled from Instagram's native insights.
This works until it doesn't. Someone forgets to screenshot. The file gets named wrong. The metrics don't match the screenshots because they were pulled at different times. The report goes out late, or worse, goes out missing a Story the advertiser paid for.
What should happen instead
Momently pulls in Story content and performance data automatically as soon as a Story is posted. The image, the caption overlay, the stickers, the links, all captured and stored permanently alongside impressions, reach, taps forward, taps back, exits, and replies.
When the campaign report is due three weeks later, the Stories are already there. The content and the data, in the same view, ready to include in the report. No screenshots, no shared drives, no matching.
This isn't just about Stories
The same principle applies to any content that changes or disappears:
- Instagram Stories (expire after 24 hours)
- Social posts that get edited or deleted after a campaign ends
- Newsletter placements that only exist in the send, not on the web
- Ad creatives that rotate out mid-campaign
If your analytics tool only pulls metrics and never captures the actual content, you lose the ability to report on what ran. You're left with numbers that reference content nobody can see anymore.
The broader point
Most analytics tools treat content as disposable and metrics as permanent. But for reporting, you need both. The numbers without the content are just a table of IDs. The content without the numbers is just a portfolio. The value is in having both, together, permanently, regardless of what the source platform decides to expire.
That's why we built Momently to ingest actual content, not just API metrics. Stories, posts, articles, newsletters, ads, all captured at the moment they're published, all stored alongside their performance data, all available for reporting whenever you need them.