Instagram analytics provides data and information about how well your Instagram posts and profile are doing. This data reveals whether your posts are resonating with your audience, who that audience actually is, and more.
Using Instagram analytics tools, you can answer essential strategic and business questions such as:
- Are my reels driving my target audience’s engagement?
- Should I increase my posting frequency?
- What type of content is getting more reach?
And many others!
Instagram is the 4th most popular social media platform. It’s important for your brand’s growth to do well on this channel. Especially if you’re targeting Gen Z and Millennials, two generations that count for 76,8% of the platform’s user base.
So, analytics on Instagram can help fuel your brand’s growth on the platform by providing real numbers to show whether your strategy is working or not.
In this article, we make analytics on Instagram a lot more comprehensive.
Table of Contents
Basic Instagram Analytics for Free
We’re getting started with the Instagram free native tool — Instagram Insights. This is highly reliable and ideal for marketers like you who want to start exploring Instagram data analytics.
But remember, you need an Instagram Business or Creator account to use it. And you can only use it on your phone, not on a computer.
Now, let’s see how you can find analytics in the Instagram app.
How to see Instagram analytics (Insights)?
Here’s how to view Insights on Instagram:
- Open the app on your smartphone.
- Tap your brand’s profile picture in the bottom right corner.
- Tap the menu icon in the upper-right corner of your brand’s profile.
- Right next to the graph icon, tap “Insights”.
Ta-da! You’ve reached Instagram Insights!
All you have to do now is dive into this free Instagram analytics and get a helicopter view of your account’s performance.
Now, it’s time to explain what metrics you can find in your free Instagram report and what they mean.
What metrics can you track in Instagram Insights?
Accounts Reached
This metric is the number of unique accounts that have seen your content (posts, stories, reels, videos, and live videos) at least once, including in ads.
Metrics included:
- Accounts reached, divided into followers and non-followers
- Impressions
- Reach by content type
- Top content
- Profile activity (visits and external link taps)
Accounts Engaged
This is the number of accounts that have liked, commented on, replied to, or saved your content including ads.
Metrics included:
- Accounts engaged, divided into followers and non-followers
- Engagement by content type
- Content interactions
- Post interactions (likes and saves)
- Top posts
- Audience demographics
Total Followers
This is the total number of followers your account has.
Metrics included:
- Follower growth (follows and unfollows)
- Top locations
- Age range
- Gender
- Most active times
Must Read: Learn 5 Confirmed Ways to Get More Instagram Followers
Content You Shared
This is the number of posts, stories, reels, videos, live videos, and active promotions you shared from your account in a selected period.
What are the limitations of Instagram Insights analytics?
Business Instagram analytics are highly accurate but there are some limitations you should consider to narrow your expectations from the tool.
Limited Analytical Capabilities
While Insights provides essential metrics, it lacks advanced features found in other Instagram analytics tools, making it difficult to perform in-depth analysis.
For example, you can’t track the untagged social mentions of your account on Instagram, as it provides analytics only to your account’s activity, ignoring what’s happening externally. Also, you can’t track top Instagram hashtags, not even your branded ones.
No Data Export
Sharing your data with other platforms or creating custom reports isn’t possible since you can’t export data directly from the native dashboard.
This poses a huge challenge to large marketing teams as many colleagues have to individually track analytics on Instagram and collaborate.
Blind Spot on Competition
Since Instagram Insights analyzes only your Instagram account activity, you can’t conduct competitor analysis.
You can’t see what’s working and what isn’t for your Instagram competitors to compare your performance and spot hits and misses in their strategies.
Fading Insights
Unfortunately, your performance data becomes unavailable after 90 days in Instagram Insights.
Thus, you can’t compare past performance with your current results, so you can’t see your growth.
Mobile-Only Access
You can’t access Instagram analytics on desktop, making the whole process a lot more difficult.
Switching between your laptop and smartphone during social media reporting surely isn’t either convenient or fun.
So, taking all these limitations into account, you reach only one conclusion: You can’t rely solely on Insights for Instagram tracking.
Various Instagram analytics tools will make your life easier. In the next section, we explain why you should pick a third-party tool.
Advanced Analytics Using Instagram Trackers (Free & Paid)
With a third-party Instagram tool, you get in-depth insights not only into your performance but also have a holistic view of your brand’s presence on Instagram.
For example, what other users post about your brand without tagging it.
From searching multiple hashtags to keeping a closer look into your competition, Instagram tools help social media managers, like you, improve their brand’s presence on this popular channel.
What are the advantages of using Instagram analytics tools?
Deeper insights into audience behavior
An Instagram analytics tracker offers you reliable data on what your audience wants to see from your brand. These tools use behavioral analytics, enabling you to understand when and how your audience interacts with your content.
They reveal not only who your followers are but also their engagement patterns, preferences, and peak activity times. Whether your followers engage more during weekdays or prefer certain posts, this data-driven approach helps you get the most out of Instagram.
Content optimization
Using Instagram business analytics tools is truly helpful to refine your content strategy. With this data, you can uncover what resonates the most with your target audience and identify high-performing content types.
That way you know what type of content to produce more to connect better with your followers.
What’s more, these tools often include Instagram hashtag analytics as well, so you get to see which hashtags are worth a place in your captions to maximize reach and engagement, without the guesswork.
Instagram analytics reports
There’s no better way to streamline your Instagram reporting than using an Instagram tool.
It automatically collects and organizes data into easy-to-understand social media dashboards and reports. These reports offer customizable insights, gathering specific metrics relevant to your goals. For example, brand awareness metrics.
Moreover, these analytics tools provide historical data and trend analysis, facilitating comparison periods to assess your growth. This makes it easier to share your Instagram performance with your team and illustrate the impact of your social media efforts on your overall marketing strategy.
Custom alerts and monitoring
Most Instagram analytics tools are actually social media monitoring tools that track Instagram as well as the other platforms. And the key feature of these tools is their excellent alerting systems.
Namely, they notify you when there are new mentions of your brand on Instagram. Or of the other important keywords you monitor with them.
That way you can have a look at who’s talking about you and what’s the context to prevent negative comments from spreading like wildfire.
Automation and efficiency
Instagram analytics tools bring automation to streamline repetitive tasks, freeing up your time for strategic content creation.
For example, you can have your monthly performance reports automatically ready to be presented to your team.
Usually, these tools offer other automation features such as scheduling posts in advance for consistent content delivery, even during busy periods.
So, are you convinced that using such a tool is the best way to track Instagram data?
If so, keep reading to find out all the key Instagram metrics you can track through these tools.
What metrics can you track using Instagram trackers?
Just a note before we begin. These metrics below are additional to the basic ones we have already analyzed as they give you a complete overview of your Instagram marketing strategy.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is a crucial metric for your brand because it helps you understand the tone and emotions behind your audience interactions, e.g. comments or brand mentions.
Essentially, it reveals if your audience’s reactions to your content are positive, negative, or neutral. This helps you gauge the overall mood regarding your brand and specific campaigns.
Furthermore, negative sentiment can be an early warning for you, highlighting potential customer dissatisfaction or emerging PR crises to address before they escalate.
On the other hand, you get to pinpoint what causes positive reactions from your audience like endorsements or UGC, and inform your content strategy.
Mentionlytics can help you analyze the sentiment of all your Instagram mentions automatically in any language and keep track of your audience’s feelings toward your brand effortlessly.
In short, sentiment analysis helps you refine your brand’s messaging and build better connections with your Instagram audience.
Must Read: Best Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools in 2024 – Free & Paid
Hashtags tracking
Hashtag tracking is basically measuring the performance of hashtags to identify if they’re trending or not. By monitoring hashtag performance you can reveal which ones generate the most reach and engagement for your content. This helps you identify those that truly resonate with your audience.
This is advanced analytics on Instagram, however important for your brand’s performance. Especially if we’re talking about branded or campaign hashtags for which you must keep track of their performance closely.
Moreover, by tracking your competitors’ branded keywords or hashtags you can monitor their performance on Instagram or see which industry-related hashtags are working better for them to use them more in your own posts.
Our platform can help you with that as well. Through our Top Keywords feature, you can track important hashtags, relevant to your brand and industry and measure their mentions, reach, and engagement. So, you can use the most impactful ones in your posts.
Overall, hashtag tracking allows you to optimize hashtag usage, expand your reach, and ultimately drive greater engagement and awareness.
Share of Voice (Competitor Analysis)
Share of Voice (SOV) is another essential metric because it reveals your brand’s visibility and popularity on the platform compared to your competitors.
Specifically, SOV helps you quantify how much of the conversation about your industry, niche, or specific topics is dominated by your brand. This gives you a realistic benchmark against your competitors.
If your SOV is higher than your competitors, it highlights where you differentiate and excel in terms of content, messaging, or engagement. Otherwise, low SOV can indicate areas where your competitors outperform you.
So, you have to analyze their strategies and identify opportunities for improvement in your own Instagram presence.
Also, we shall mention that SOV is a way to track the impact of digital marketing campaigns. A noticeable increase in SOV following a campaign indicates its effectiveness in generating buzz and conversation around your brand.
Mentionlytics automatically calculates your SOV. All you have to do is take a look and see if you’re ahead of the competition.
In short, Share of Voice acts as a competitive compass, helping you gauge your brand’s position on Instagram and steer your strategy to increase your visibility within your target market.
Follower growth rate
While follower count shows your current audience size, follower growth rate offers a clearer picture of your account’s health.
So, you should track your follower growth rate weekly, monthly, and yearly to understand the acceleration of your audience expansion. More followers means more brand awareness and better chances for lead generation.
A steadily increasing follower growth rate suggests your strategy is on track, while a declining rate indicates you need to pivot. Importantly, a negative rate signifies active follower loss and requires your immediate attention.
With our platform, you can keep track of your follower growth easily through the Follower Growth Chart.
Engagement rate
The engagement rate is the ultimate Instagram metric.
Firstly, high Instagram engagement improves your content, placing it prominently in your followers’ feeds thanks to the algorithm’s preference for engaging posts.
Then, engagement reveals the true power of your content. High engagement rates signify content that resonates deeply with your audience, offering valuable feedback for refining your strategy.
Also, engagement goes beyond simply users seeing your content. It unveils its impact, showcasing how many users were actively drawn to interact.
This distinction is crucial, as high reach with low engagement highlights potential disconnect. In contrast, a low-reach post with a high engagement rate surpasses a high-reach post with a low engagement rate, indicating a greater connection with those who saw it.
Engagement rate is no vanity metric. It offers a comprehensive picture of your content’s performance and the depth of your audience’s interaction.
You can have your engagement rate automatically calculated for Instagram and all the main social media channels by using our social media analytics tool.
Best posting time
Well, this is not an actual metric but it’s important to know the best time to post based on your audience. This is also a popular feature in many third-party Instagram tools.
By scheduling your content to be posted on the days and times when your target audience is most active, you increase the likelihood of them seeing and interacting with your posts.
This translates to greater visibility, increasing brand awareness and community engagement.
Just remember that while general trends exist, the optimal timing can vary based on your specific audience and niche.
So, examining closely your data and experimenting with different times will help you refine your strategy and post when your audience is most likely to respond.
Audience Demographics
Knowing your audience demographics is crucial for your Instagram growth because it allows you to tailor content, messaging, and even your brand voice to align with people’s interests, needs, and preferences.
Although Instagram Insights gives you pretty good audience demographics, you can use a third-party Instagram tool to get more information than the standard top locations that the native tool provides.
For example, with our platform you can have a whole world map with the distribution of your Instagram mentions to get specific on which regions you have more publicity.
Plus, you can see in which languages your mentions are written to consider creating multilingual content!
Industry Trends
Certainly, industry trends aren’t a metric to assess your Instagram performance. Nonetheless, you should keep track of what’s trending in your industry and niche through your Instagram tracker to keep your content fresh and relevant.
In our tool you can monitor any industry keyword you like for web and social mentions and the platform will have them all gathered and organized in your dashboard.
To wrap it up, there are numerous essential metrics that Instagram Insights doesn’t offer you. That’s exactly why you need an analytics tool to measure your performance completely and avoid vanity metrics.
We propose some of the best tools below.
4 Best Instagram Analytics Tools
1. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is the best Instagram analytics app to track your brand’s performance. Our platform helps you collect and analyze all your Instagram mentions, not just your posts, and calculate your overall reach and engagement to see how your brand awareness is growing.
With this tool, you can also understand the users’ sentiments behind your mentions to see in what areas your target audience is satisfied with you and where there’s room for improvement.
Also, through our Keyword Cloud, you can find trending hashtags on Instagram that aren’t generic but only relevant to your keywords and brand. Thus, you can use them more in your posts to increase engagement and impressions.
On top of that, with its robust reporting feature, you can have a highly accurate analytics report with actionable insights ready in no time.
In fact, you can tailor your reports to match your brand colors and include everything important to your team, from metrics to in-depth analyses.
Customizable dashboards, influencer identification through Top Mentioners, and our Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA) are also some of the key features you need to explore to boost your Instagram performance.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social stands out as a top Instagram tool due to its powerful features.
Beyond scheduling and engagement features, Sprout allows for in-depth analysis at both post and profile levels, with interactive data visualizations for deeper understanding.
It provides both basic and premium analytics options, catering to different needs. Users can create customizable reports and measure performance across various metrics, including follower growth, engagement rate, and more.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite shines as one of the best analytics tools. It offers a centralized dashboard to track performance across all major social networks, including Instagram, making it convenient to monitor overall social media efforts in one place.
Hootsuite provides a wide range of metrics for both posts and profiles, allowing users to analyze everything from clicks and comments to reach and engagement rates.
Beyond Instagram, Hootsuite supports competitor analysis, benchmarking, and social media team performance tracking, making it a valuable tool for managing and optimizing a brand’s social media presence.
4. Statusbrew
Statusbrew provides comprehensive features for managing Instagram profiles.
The platform allows you to plan and schedule all types of Instagram posts. A link-in-bio tool is also available. Apart from publishing, you can engage with your audience from the unified inbox, which lets you set up AI automations to auto-hide, delete, or reply to conversations based on sentiment and keywords.
Statusbrew also enables you to monitor hashtags associated with your brands and services. In the reporting section, you can find all data and insights in a single dashboard. This helps you monitor and improve your Instagram marketing strategy with metrics like top-performing posts, competitor benchmarking, hashtag monitoring, and more.
Try Instagram Analytics for Free
Now, are you ready to start improving your brand’s Instagram presence?
Get free Instagram analytics for 14 days with Mentionlytics and dive into its highly reliable insights!
FAQs
Does Instagram offer analytics for tracking post performance?
Yes, Instagram offers posts’ performance metrics like engagement and reach.
Does Instagram Insights show who viewed your profile?
No, Instagram native analytics does not show who viewed your profile. This information is not available due to privacy considerations.
Does Instagram analytics show location?
Instagram Insights shows your audience’s top locations but not the specific location of individual users.
What’s the most important insight on Instagram?
Determining the “most important” insight on Instagram is challenging as its value depends on your goals and audience. However, understanding what resonates with your audience is highly valuable.
What is the best analytics tool for Instagram?
The best Instagram analytics software depends on specific needs. However, Mentionlytics is well-known for its detailed analytics and excellent reporting system.
Is there a free Instagram Analyzer?
Yes, there are some free Instagram analytics tools available online. However, Instagram Insights is the best option to start with.
What is the AI tool for Instagram analytics?
There are various Instagram tools that use AI technologies to offer their users actionable insights. Mentionlytics is one of them with its AI-powered Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA) and AI Mentions Clustering.
Can you see another Instagram account’s insights/analytics?
Viewing data analytics for other accounts isn’t possible through Instagram Insights. However, you can keep track of other accounts’ performance on Instagram through third-party social media monitoring tools, like Mentionlytics.
How do you save your Instagram metrics?
To save Instagram metrics, take screenshots of them directly from Instagram Insights. Otherwise, you can use third-party analytics tools with reporting features.
How can I export my Instagram analytics data?
To export Instagram performance data, use third-party tools, which offer data export features for detailed analysis.
Can you see Instagram Insights on your desktop?
According to Meta, you can’t access Instagram Insights from your desktop as this feature is only available in the mobile app.
What does “exited” mean on Instagram Insights?
“Exited” on Instagram Insights refers to the number of times users left your Instagram stories before they finished, indicating potential disengagement.
Gather and analyze all Web & Social mentions of your brand
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