Do you know if your Instagram marketing strategy is working? Can you tell which post or story generated the most engagement over the course of a week? If you don’t have the answer to any of these questions, you need a healthy dose of Instagram analytics.
For those unfamiliar with their role, Instagram analytics is how you assess the performance of your content and your profile overall. Savvy businesses utilize IG analytics to track a variety of metrics and evaluate the potential of their posts. By paying close attention to your analytics data, you can gain useful insights to help you improve your Instagram marketing.
Now, how do you get analytics on Instagram, especially since the platform doesn’t have its own analytics dashboard? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to look at.
In this post, we’ll discuss the two main ways you can access analytics on Instagram, including the best tools to track Instagram metrics specific to your goals.
Let’s get started.
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How to Get Instagram Analytics
You can track Instagram follower stats and other key metrics through:
- An Instagram business profile
- An Instagram analytics tool
If you’ve already created an Instagram profile for your business, you can see your analytics via the “Insights” tab in the Instagram app on your smartphone.
If you’re using the normal profile, you can easily convert it into a business one by following the steps here.
How to Get Insights on Instagram
When viewing the main page of your Instagram profile, you’ll see four vertical lines at the top right corner of your mobile’s screen.
Tap on them, and Instagram will take you to the Insights screen.
You should now be able to access a variety of metrics for your posts, activity, and audience demographics.
Note: If you’ve created or made the switch to an Instagram business profile very recently, it can take a while for the platform to present data for your profile. Also, Instagram will only display insights for stories and content that you’ve posted after converting to a business profile.
The advantage of using Instagram Insights is that the data is pretty easy to comprehend. You don’t need to possess any previous data analytics experience, and you might even be able to draw out some valuable insights by tapping into the knowledge you already have.
But if you’re not keen on trying to cobble together data from the native Instagram app, you should consider trying an Instagram analytics app.
The Best Instagram Analytics Apps
Given the size of Instagram and the diversity of its metrics, it’s often best to have various types of analytics tools available at your disposal. Here, we’ll introduce the 15 best Instagram analytics apps out there to help you improve your overall performance.
Let’s take a look at the apps!
1. Squarelovin
Squarelovin is one of the few tools that offer Instagram analytics free of charge. You can use it to get a monthly analysis of your recent posts and growth, or a history of your content broken down by hour, day, month, or year. Additionally, the app offers insights on your audience’s preferences and interests, and which times are the best or worst for posting.
You can even figure out the best hashtags and filters to use, depending on which posts are best received by your followers.
Price: Free to use.
2. Pixlee
This is another free Instagram analytics tool to help monitor your top-performing posts and generate ideas for new content. Pixlee also has an intuitive reporting feature that delivers performance reports on a weekly basis. Plus, you can use its data to find social media influencers, as well as connect with advocates posting about your business.
It also offers hashtag tracking and stats, an option to identify your most engaging content, and a way to track growth in Instagram followers.
Price: Free to use.
3. Crowdfire
Crowdfire’s Instagram stats offer a detailed view of how your Instagram business account has performed until a specific date. You can choose a range: yesterday, 7 days, 30 days, ir 90 days. The alternative option is to pick a custom date range for a maximum of 90 days. In addition to this, the platform allows you to choose any Instagram metrics you’d want to compare, including the posts, likes, reach, followers, comments, profile views, bio email link clicks, and text message clicks.
You can even compare your performance in the existing period with that of the previous one, just by toggling the tiny switch on the top of your Crowdfire dashboard to “ON”.
Price: Free for viewing data for the past day.
4. Later
Later is another Instagram analytics tool that will help you grow your business by improving your IG marketing strategy. What makes this platform unique is its Linkin-bio feature that allows you to link your Instagram posts to specific URLs, such as product pages. You can then track website clicks, page views, and click-through rates from your Instagram profile and see how many sales a specific post generated.
Though Later offers a free plan for individuals, its paid packages will give you access to various useful IG analytics such as Instagram Story insights.
Price: From as little as $9 a month.
5. Minter.io
Another Instagram analytics tool you could use is Minter.io. It creates PDF reports that can give you insights on metrics such as the growth of your followers, post and profile engagement rates, most popular photo filters, and more. You also get an option to export your data in a beautiful format that helps you keep other stakeholders in the loop about your Instagram marketing efforts.
Minter.io also offers a 14-day free trial that can be extended on your request. This ensures that you can try it for free to make sure that it’s the right Instagram stats app for you
Price: Starts at a mere $9 per month.
6. Smartmetrics
Smartmetrics gathers insights on an hourly basis to provide you with more than 30 Instagram metrics about your stories, posts, and Instagram account. You can use it to track interaction with your followers, see hashtag engagement by the day, and even monitor the replies you get on your stories. In addition, the tool offers a way to monitor activity around your brand by tracking and replying to mentions on Instagram.
You can export Smartmetrics’s reports as CSV or PDF documents and share via email with a single click.
Price: Begins at $9 per month.
7. Hootsuite
With its social listening and analytics tools, Hootsuite allows you to review your Instagram metrics more extensively. You get the option to create an unlimited number of reports and compare historical data to analyze your overall performance. In addition, the platform enables you to easily share reports with different team members straight from your Hootsuite dashboard.
Price: Starts from $19 per month.
8. Iconosquare
This is the ideal tool for agencies or brands that have multiple accounts on social media. It provides you with advanced insights to help you optimize your overall social media strategy. A few of its unique features include Instagram Stories analytics, engagement metrics, and hashtag and competitor tracking.
Its Community Analytics tool will also assist you in understanding Instagram insights such as the age, gender, and preferred language of your followers.
Price: Begins at $29 per month.
9. Union Metrics
This tool offers a free monthly Instagram account checkup that will give you some insight into which hashtags you can use to increase engagement, and which posts your audience react to most. It will even tell you on which times your followers are the most active. However, if you want to access premium Instagram analytics through this platform, you’ll need to get a paid subscription.
As a paid subscriber, you’ll be able to capture and archive important data about your brand. You’ll also be able to identify your top fans and receive detailed insights from their Graph API. What’s more, you can create customized reports and save your data as a PDF at any time.
Price: Starts at $49 per month.
10. Keyhole
Keyhole is one of the best Instagram analytics apps available for viewing the historical and real-time performance of your account. It allows you to track hashtags, mentions, keywords, URLs of your previous and existing posts. You’ll not only discover how many times a hashtag was used – the app also allows you to see trending hashtags and how your content is performing.
In addition, you can use Keyhole to track the performance of competing Instagram profiles. You can track their activity, growth, and engagement data over a certain period. You can then use these insights to inform your own KPIs (key performance indicators).
Price: Starts from $99 a month.
11. Sprout Social
Sprout Sprout has everything you need to track, evaluate, and improve your Instagram marketing performance. You can use it to track trends in hashtag usage, content performance, competitor and engagement data. Customizable reports allow you to choose a certain reporting period, while competitor analysis lets1 you keep tabs on Instagram trends and audience groups across a portfolio of competing brands.
Besides all of that, Sprout offers Instagram Story analytics to help you measure the long-term impact of your stories via clicks, replies, and other important KPIs.
Price: From $99 a month.
12. Whatagraph
If you’re looking for an easy-to-read Instagram Insights report to share with your team, virtual assistant, or social media manager, Whatagraph will come in handy. It provides brilliant visualization of data with detailed reports that show the rate at which your followers are growing, identify top feed stories, and measure interaction and engagement generated by your Instagram content. Moreover, you can create a cross-channel social media performance report to compare performance across various channels.
There’s even an option to customize the report. Whatagraph lets you put your logo, apply your color scheme, and send the report from your own email ID.
Price: Begins from $119 each month.
13. Rival IQ
Rival IQ is tailored to help you keep track of the most important Instagram metrics. You can use it to monitor Story taps forward and exit rates, when your audience is the most active online, profile link clicks, follower removes and adds, and so much more for better performance. And with loads of demographic information (age group, gender ratio, and so on) at your fingertips, you can see what’s resonating well with your followers.
Moreover, the tool allows you to analyze preferred post types, hashtag performance, and best posting times to help create top content in your industry.
Price: From $199 a month.
14. Socialbakers
Socialbakers has a free Instagram analytics tool that provides you with stats on your most popular posts, allowing you to track your performance, and learn what type of content resonates well with your followers. If you want more advanced analytics like Instagram Story insights, then you’ll need to sign up for Socialbakers’ AI-powered marketing suite.
The AI suite lets you manage your Instagram account smarter by using predictive analytics to identify what stories and posts to promote, when to post them, and which follower segments to prioritize.
Price: Starts at $200 a month.
15. HypeAuditor
If you’re looking for an in-depth analysis of the quality of an Instagram influencer’s followers or a way to find fake or ghost followers stats, HyperAuditor’s got you covered. It digs deep into influencer profiles to calculate their Engagement Rate (percentage of followers that engage with the influencer’s posts) and how it compares to the engagement rate of similar experts. You even get an AQS (Audience Quality Score) that analyzes an influencer’s real worth on a scale of 1-100, with a score higher than 70 indicating that the influencer has good value.
Moreover, the platform can be used to check whether or not an influencer’s comments come from a loyal and engaged audience.
Price: Basic plan costs $299 per month.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are several Instagram analytics tools available to cater for a variety of needs. Whether you wish to increase your engagement, grow your follower count, or discover the top trending hashtags for likes, using these platforms will help you achieve your goal. By monitoring and learning from the insights that these tools provide, you’ll be able to see what’s working, what isn’t, and how to bridge the gaps.
Did we miss any important Instagram analytics app? Which Instagram analytics app do you prefer? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
