You can maximize the incredible potential of Instagram for your business with its 2.4 billion monthly active users, 500 million daily Instagram story viewers, and 200 million daily business profile visits. Though it brings opportunities, it also brings competition. This is why monitoring your Instagram account is so essential.
When it comes to measuring brand reach and audience engagement, evaluating data and campaign results, or finding the best times to post, Instagram analytics remains a mystery to many.
To help you build your business in 2024 here is the essential Instagram analytics guide you need.
Keep in mind that Instagram Insights is only for professional accounts. Simply turn your profile into a business or creator account to take advantage of Instagram analytics.

What Are Instagram Analytics Tools?

Instagram analytics tools are applications or services created for analyzing and interpreting data about Instagram accounts and activities. Among the features offered by Instagram analytics tools are:

Content Strategy Optimization

These tools provide metrics that help you refine your content strategy based on your post’s performance. By gaining insights, businesses can make informed decisions, whether it involves diversifying content or maintaining a consistent strategy.

Optimal Posting Times

Instagram analytics tools help determine the best times to post based on follower activity across various time zones and geographical locations. By posting at these optimal times, you can maximize your exposure and engagement.

Audience Sentiment Analysis

Maintaining a positive brand image on social media requires understanding public perception. Analytics tools help gauge audience sentiment through reactions, comments, messages, and brand mentions, giving you insight you can’t get from Instagram’s free analytics.

Integrated Campaign Management

These tools provide real-time data collection and analytics on Instagram ad campaigns. Monitoring paid ads, clicks, and views makes it easier to assess return on investment (ROI).

Audience Segmentation

Analytics tools let you segment your followers based on demographics such as gender, age, location, profession, and industry. Segmentation lets marketers better understand audience preferences and refine marketing strategies.

Competitive Analysis

Monitoring the activities of competitors is as important as evaluating your own performance. They help you analyze trends, content strategies, follower profiles, and engagement levels of competitors to maintain a competitive edge.

Centralized Reporting

Several top-tier Instagram analytics tools offer centralized reporting, allowing users to easily share comprehensive performance reports among team members and clients. It streamlines the reporting process by eliminating the need for separate reports for each social media channel.

What Do Instagram Analytics Tools Measure?

Instagram analytics tools measure a wide range of analytics you can use to track your performance and improve your marketing. We have divided these measurements into 3 sections:

Account Analytics

Account analytics give you insight into an account’s overall activity and performance. By assessing these metrics comprehensively, you can pinpoint areas of improvement in your Instagram strategy.
You can track follower growth, monitor profile views, measure reach, evaluate impressions, calculate engagement rates, and quantify website clicks. By analyzing these metrics, you can gain a holistic understanding of your Instagram account’s performance.

Follower Analytics

Follower analytics focus on the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of your audience. It involves analyzing follower demographics like age, gender, location, and language, as well as interests, follower growth rates, engagement (likes, comments, shares), and activity patterns.
Using follower data, you can tailor your content and engagement strategies to resonate better with your audience, nurturing stronger relationships and boosting engagement.

Content Analytics

Content analytics are used to see how individual posts and content types perform. The key metrics include post engagement, reach, impressions, click-through rates, and hashtag activity per post.
You can analyze the effectiveness of different formats (e.g., photos, videos, reels, carousels). Analyzing your content will help you identify what content resonates most with your audience, refine your content strategy accordingly, and maximize engagement and reach.
Together these 3 elements of Instagram analytics make analyzing easier. But regularly monitoring and analyzing them will help you optimize your Instagram presence, drive engagement, and reach your marketing goals.

How to Use Instagram Analytics

Follow a few best practices to get the most out of Instagram analytics.
First, make sure you take advantage of Instagram Insights. It gives you detailed stats on your followers, profile visits, post popularity, and ads. It also has an engagement tab that tracks likes, comments, and shares.
Second, use it regularly to monitor progress and track changes in performance. It’ll give you an idea of how your account is doing and help you make adjustments.
Third, use third-party analytics tools to gain a deeper understanding of your performance. Your followers, posts, and overall engagement can be better tracked by these platforms, letting you tweak your content more effectively.
These tools provide insights into follower demographics for better targeting, and external link tracking helps optimize content. To get the best engagement from your content, you must understand your audience preferences.
Finally, be sure to check out your competition. By keeping an eye on what your competitors do, you can stay ahead of the curve and improve your performance.
By following these best practices, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your Instagram account performs and make more informed decisions.

How to Create Instagram Analytics Reports

You can create Instagram analytics reports in several steps.
First, choose the metrics you want to track, such as follower growth, engagement rates, reach, impressions, top-performing posts, and audience demographics. Decide whether you want weekly, monthly, quarterly, or custom reporting periods, and it’s done.
There are 2 ways to create analytics reports–with Instagram Insights or third-party tools.
With Instagram Insights, you can create reports from recent highlights showing significant increases in performance. The overview section includes a summary of your followers, interactions, estimated earnings, and the total number of accounts you’ve reached. You can also get reports on individual post types and demographic-based data.
Third-party analytics tools allow more customized reporting. They provide extensive metrics, customizable layouts, visual data representations, smooth export options, comparative analysis, trend identification, and integration with other marketing tools. This means you can make more informed decisions compared to using Instagram Insights alone.
Whichever method you choose, carefully analyze the data to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities for improvement. Using these insights, optimize your Instagram strategy by adjusting content, posting times, audience targeting, and ad campaigns as needed.

The Difference Between Free and Paid Instagram Analytics Tools

The difference between free and paid Instagram analytics tools is primarily in the depth of insights and features they offer. Free tools usually give you basic metrics like follower count, post reach, and engagement.
Although these insights provide a good starting point on account performance, they may lack in-depth information about audience demographics, content optimization, and competitor analysis.
In contrast, paid analytics tools offer more features, including advanced metrics, custom reporting, competitor benchmarking, and integration with other marketing tools. Businesses and marketers looking to maximize their Instagram presence and drive meaningful results often consider paid analytics tools an essential part of the process.

Getting Instagram Analytics for Other Accounts

Instagram Insights does not offer analytics for other accounts.
Some third-party tools designed specifically for monitoring and analytics on Instagram allow you to track other account’s performance. These tools allow you to track Instagram accounts you don’t directly manage.
All you have to do is enter the username or URL of the intended Instagram account into the tool to gather data and insights such as demographics, engagement rates, popular content, frequency of posts, and audience behavior data.
However, you should be aware that other accounts analytics may be limited and must be viewed ethically. Many tools require the owner’s permission or only provide limited data depending on the privacy settings. Also, unauthorized access to analytics data may violate Instagram’s terms of service. Be sure to respect privacy and comply with all legal and ethical guidelines.

The Best Free Instagram Analytics Tools

Here are the best free Instagram analytics tools to get you started.

Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights is a popular free tool for analyzing Instagram data. It provides a single place to track basic Instagram metrics like impressions or follower demographics, and Instagram-specific metrics, such as Reel metrics or Story engagement.
You can get a visual representation of each relevant metric in a chart that is easy to read and understand. Using it, you can analyze your audience’s behavior, track your performance, and optimize posting times and content strategy for better engagement.
Despite its strengths, the tool lacks competitor analysis and historical data, and exporting reports isn’t possible.

Iconosquare Instagram Audit

Iconosquare is great for measuring real-time engagement on Instagram and brand mentions. It collects insights by tracking hashtags, comments, tags, user behavior, and over 100 metrics.
It shows you how many brand mentions you’ve received on Instagram in captions or posts and your hashtag performance, audience, and competitors. It offers easy-to-read analytical reports to determine your campaign performance.
It also offers two free Instagram marketing tools: Twinsta and Instant Instagram Audit. With Twinsta, you can easily share tweet screenshots on Instagram and other social media channels, and the auditing tool tells you how well your business account is performing.

Crowdfire

Crowdfire offers a comprehensive set of analytics, such as follower demographics, engagement rates, post-performance analysis, hashtag analysis, and competitor insights. It can help you track growth trends, optimize your content strategy, and schedule posts for maximum traffic. Using data analysis, the platform provides actionable recommendations to enhance your presence. It also allows you to build custom reports, which can be quite useful if you’re working with a team.

The Best Instagram Analytics Tools

Although free analytics tools are useful, they have their shortcomings. Here are the 3 best advanced Instagram analytics tools to drive your business forward.

SocialDog

SocialDog is a robust social media management tool with strong analytics features for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Its intuitive interface shines with its analytics dashboard displaying stats about followers, accounts you follow, and account activity at a glance.
It also provides engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and reposts for each post type, along with metrics related to follower acquisition. Using its media analytics, you can track posts with images or videos conveniently.
SocialDog helps determine when to post for best engagement by analyzing time of day analytics. You can schedule unlimited posts with ease, gain insights over time, access historical data, and manage up to 10 social media profiles effortlessly.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a great Instagram analytics tool for more than just scheduling and engagement tracking. It gives you insight into your posts and profiles through interactive data visualizations. With Instagram analytics, you can track follower growth, engagement, hashtag performance, and promoted post conversions.
You can create customizable reports and measure performance across a bunch of metrics, like follower growth, engagement rate, etc. Aside from analytics, this tool also includes publishing, inbox management, and social listening tools.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is an effective Instagram and social media management tool. The tool offers a social listening tool, a social CRM, a custom dashboard, and other advanced features. It helps you identify your top content, find fans, and get real-time Instagram insights.
With Brandwatch’s consumer intelligence tool, you can get social media reports based on your customers’ comments, what your target audience is looking for, and which topics and tags get the most responses.

Conclusion: Try SocialDog for Free and Put Instagram Analytics to Work

There you have it—a quick guide to using Instagram analytics. As the world of social media can change rapidly, you must have the latest and most advanced analytics tools in your marketing arsenal.
With the right tools at your fingertips, you can turn social media posts into powerful business strategies. Get all of SocialDog’s premium features by trying the Enterprise plan free for 7 days.