In the summer of 2016, Instagram rolled out its business account option, a new feature for companies looking to market their products on social media. With that singular move, Instagram evolved from a photo-sharing app to a robust marketing platform. Ecommerce businesses gained the ability to monitor their content strategy via Instagram insights and other analytics tools.
Today, tracking your company’s Instagram analytics is an essential part of driving sales and evaluating your brand’s digital marketing strategies. Learn more about using Instagram analytics to improve your company’s overall performance on social media.
What are Instagram analytics?
Instagram analytics are data points related to your Instagram account that can help you examine the effectiveness of your published content and social campaigns. Your analytics reveal findings about how your content performs with your target audience, which you and your social team can then use to build new strategies.
Why use Instagram analytics?
The average person spends approximately 143 minutes each day on social media platforms, where they come across many ads and promotions. According to Instagram, 90% of social media users follow at least one brand directly. Tracking how your social media campaigns are performing reveals insights you can use to capitalize on these facts.
If your goal is to bring in more sales through social media marketing, you’ll need to view insights to learn which of your Instagram posts are contributing to sales conversions and which aren’t. This will help you narrow in on effective marketing moves and prevent you from wasting time and money on posts that don’t generate high engagement.
Top Instagram analytics to track
The social media analytics you’ll prioritize for your business will depend on your objectives. Here are some key metrics you or your social media managers might choose to track:
- Comments. The number of people who leave comments on your posts.
- Shares. The number of people sending your post to others.
- Saves. The number of people who save your post to their collection.
- Reach. The number of people who see your posts.
- Engagement rate. The number of people who interact with your content out of the number of people who see it (expressed as a percentage).
- Impressions. The number of times your posts appear on screens, regardless of interaction.
- Video views. The number of times people watch your video posts.
- Story views. The number of times people see your Instagram Stories.
- Following growth rate. How much your audience grows in a certain period (expressed as a percentage).
- Follower demographics. Such as the average age, gender, and location of your followers.
9 of the best Instagram analytics tools
- Instagram Insights
- Later
- Sendible
- Planable
- Cloud Campaign
- Iconosquare
- Hootsuite
- Brand24
- Sprout Social
Several tools on the market offer different key features with custom pricing for tracking your Instagram analytics. These provide access to critical insights, scheduling tools, and other key Instagram metrics to assess your social media marketing strategy.
Find the social media management platform that is right for you by choosing one that fits your budget and collects and tracks the social analytics most important to you and your brand.
Here are the most popular options, listed from lowest to highest in terms of cost:
1. Instagram insights
Instagram Insights is a built-in feature for business accounts on the Instagram mobile app. As a free tool, it’s a great option for small businesses with a limited budget. The free Instagram analytics tool shows you how many accounts your posts have reached, the number of engaged accounts, interactions with your content, ad performance, and video plays.
You also have access to data about your followers, including their locations, age ranges, and most active times, as well as your overall follower growth.
Pricing: Free.
2. Later
Later is an Instagram analytics tool that includes access to data about your post, Story, and Reel performance. This includes showing which posts have the most engagement, their impressions, and reach. Learn the exit rate (the last Story in a series viewers watch) and completion rate (how often viewers complete the full series) of your Stories and get access to hashtag and audience insights and performance-over-time reports.
Also a visual content planner that previews what your grid will look like as you build your content calendar, Later is easy to use and intuitive for beginners. Customers looking for competitive analysis and industry benchmarking, however, will not find these tools with Later.
Pricing: Plans start at $25 per person per month following a 14-day free trial.
3. Sendible
Sendible lets subscribers respond to direct messages, schedule Instagram posts, and monitor conversations on all their social platforms—not just Instagram—in one dashboard. Its reporting features include an engagement overview, audience growth by day, and “audience split,” which compares your audience growth across different social accounts.
If you manage multiple social media accounts and want to be able to analyze your Instagram performance without having to toggle between apps, this might be the tool for you.
Pricing: Plans start at $29 per month following a 15-day free trial.
4. Planable
With Planable’s Basic plan, plus the $9 analytics add-on, you can give an unlimited number of users access to the platform’s analytic tools. This makes it an attractive choice for those with multiple team members.
Planable lets you track your follower growth, reach, impressions, engagement, profile visits, followers’ locations, top countries, top cities, gender, and age distribution. With these data points, you can create reports within the tool to share with your other team members.
Pricing: There’s a free option with limited abilities. The Basic tier begins at $39 per month and allows unlimited users, though you must add on the Planable Analytics option at $9 per month to track metrics. It offers a seven-day free trial period.
5. Cloud Campaign
Cloud Campaign specifically caters to freelance social media consultants and social media management agencies. Like other platforms, this Instagram analytics tool allows you to track both your organic and paid social posts. Cloud Campaign is unique in that all of its paid plans come with unlimited user access, AI-generated captions, and post scheduling capabilities. Within the tool’s dashboard, you can create social media reports covering your post analytics, follower data, engagement data, hashtag performance analytics, and more.
The tool also offers client-facing portals so that you can automate approval workflows without giving clients access to your full suite of tools.
Pricing: Plans start at $49 per month following a 14-day free trial.
6. Iconosquare
Iconosquare provides demographic analysis, downloadable visual graphs of your data, and an easy-to-use dashboard of your overall Instagram analytics. Iconosquare notably provides users with the ability to track more than 100 key Instagram metrics related to their social media accounts. Track specific metrics like average reach by story type or average engagements per post type.
Users can build a custom dashboard around the insights most valuable to them and automate reporting emails to colleagues. The tool also offers community management features, such as unread comment alerts, that you can delete or respond to within the Iconosquare dashboard.
Pricing: Plans start at $59 per month with access for one user, following a 14-day free trial.
7. Hootsuite
Hootsuite analytics allows you to create customizable reports, report on paid and organic content, obtain a social return on investment (ROI) analysis, get publishing time suggestions, and compare your performance to competitors. Hootsuite’s AI-powered social listening tools track sentiment analysis, spot trends, and summarize insights. Each paid plan allows you to schedule an unlimited number of posts and manage Instagram ad campaigns from your dashboard.
Pricing: Plans begin at $99 per person per month following a 30-day free trial.
8. Brand24
Brand24 lets users monitor relevant keywords other accounts mention, like their brand name and product names. The tool’s anomaly detector automatically identifies upticks in your company mentions. Other key features of this Instagram analytics tool include hashtag tracking, tracking the top Instagram profiles for potential social influencers, a brand reputation analysis, and competitor analysis.
Pricing: Plans start at $149 per month, with access for one user following a 14-day free trial.
9. Sprout Social
Sprout Social gives you the ability to track more than 150 metrics and offers endless ways to organize those insights to align with your business goals. The tool has customizable reporting, engagement tracking, and dashboards, plus a customizable SproutLink that you can add to your Instagram bio. With the ability to compare follower growth and other statistics between your different Instagram profiles, you can manage multiple businesses or profiles for different aspects of your business from one dashboard.
Sprout Social also offers revenue attribution tools to help understand the ROI of Instagram posts and engagement.
Pricing: Plans start at $249 per month per person following a 30-day free trial.
Instagram analytics FAQ
How do I find insights on Instagram?
First, set up a free business account on Instagram. Then go to your profile and tap on the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines) at the top of the page. Scroll down until you reach the “For professionals” category. Under this category, select “Insights.” This page displays an overview of your social media analytics.
Why can’t I see my Instagram analytics?
Instagram insights are only available to business accounts. If the Instagram account you use for your company isn’t registered as a business, you won’t be able to access this feature.
Why is it important to track your analytics on Instagram?
If you are using Instagram to advertise your business and grow sales, tracking Instagram analytics is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy and make improvements where necessary.
