Instagram has emerged as one of the best platforms for brands to reach and engage with their target audiences, as evidenced by top brand posts on Instagram getting a 16x higher engagement rate compared to Facebook.
With a host of new features and monetization channels rolled out in 2020 – including brands testing out on Instagram Reels and Instagram Shops transforming ecommerce – it’s crucial that brands create and execute a social media strategy unique to Instagram in order to take advantage of everything the platform has to offer.
And the best way to do that is with the right tool.
What Makes a Good Instagram Analytics Tool?
As Instagram further differentiates itself from other social media platforms, it’s more crucial than ever for brands to adopt an Instagram analytics tool that has features tailored to measuring and tracking performance specifically on the platform.
The best Instagram analytics tools will:
Provide a clear and in-depth view into performance on Instagram at any level, for both paid and organic activity – whether it’s a specific post, an entire account, or a single campaign
Support metrics for Instagram-specific features and content types (scheduling Instagram Stories, IGTV strategy, etc.)
Be a part of a social media analytics suite that supports all utilized social media channels, so marketers can get a holistic view of social media performance across all channels without needing to switch between multiple platforms.
There are many Instagram analytics platforms to choose from, and most of them meet at least one of the three criteria mentioned above. However, most of the analytics tools that meet the second requirement and boast the Instagram-specific features you’d like to see fail to meet the third requirement, meaning they aren’t comprehensive solutions that cover every social media channel.
Our List of the Top Instagram Analytics Tools
We’ve put together a list of what we consider the best Instagram Analytics tools so you can find the solution that is right for your brand. These solutions don’t necessarily meet all three requirements listed above, but each offering is compelling enough to warrant mention:
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud (formerly Socialbakers)
Socialbakers
Get powerful Instagram analytics
The Socialbakers platform boasts an easy-to-use, yet extremely in-depth, suite of tools that let you measure, analyze, and easily report on Instagram performance (beyond the basic metrics).
For example, sentiment analysis allows users to easily analyze and report on audience sentiment towards any post, profile, or topic on Instagram. Socialbakers also provides brands with data-driven recommendations on the best posts to promote in order to maximize paid ROI, and can automatically segment Instagram audiences into distinct marketing personas with corresponding content/topic recommendations.
With powerful social listening tools and the ability to monitor, track, and analyze any Instagram account (not just those owned by the user), Socialbakers also serves as a powerful competitive benchmarking and analytics tool.
Finally, when it comes to reporting and dashboards, Socialbakers features a clean and intuitive interface that makes all of the aforementioned insights and recommendations both easy to understand and easy to present to stakeholders.
Instagram Insights
Instagram’s native analytics tool may not provide the most in-depth analytics or sport the most functionality, but it’s still a solid tool that provides an easy way to get a quick and holistic Instagram performance report with metrics such as impressions, engagement, and clicks over varying time periods.
Although the solution is fairly bare bones, this also means that the platform is extremely easy to use and the reporting functionalities are fast and responsive.
Instagram Insights is free and contained within Instagram itself, so it’s the most accessible solution by far. It’s an invaluable tool to many smaller organizations, so despite the lack of functionality it could meet some of your brand’s needs.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another social media marketing platform that seeks to manage and streamline all aspects of social media marketing for brands and organizations. When it comes to their offering of tools specifically for Instagram Analytics, their platform easily tracks all of the key metrics that matter most when it comes to performance on Instagram, with the ability to get more granular if needed.
Like Socialbakers, Sprout Social also supports story analytics and boasts an official partnership with Facebook/Instagram.
While somewhat limited in scope, Sprout’s reporting and dashboard functionalities get the job done and when exported, reports look fantastic and presentation ready.
Keyhole
Keyhole is an Instagram analytics tool hyper-focused on competitive analysis.
For competitive benchmarking against individual accounts, Keyhole is a fantastic tool that shows you what your competitors themselves are seeing on their own analytics dashboards.
Another key component of competitive analysis on Instagram is hashtag analytics, and Keyhole offers a robust set of features for monitoring hashtags at any scale (from branded campaign hashtags to global trends).
Iconosquare
Unlike Socialbakers and Sprout Social, Iconosqure is an analytics tool (with limited publishing and monitoring functionalities) that is focused entirely on Instagram and Facebook.
With an emphasis on digestible and easy-to-understand visualizations of key metrics, Iconosquare is a great solution for smaller organizations that would benefit from a cheap, no-frills analytics platform.
For basic visualizations of key metrics like follower growth, reach, and impressions, Iconosquare does everything that Instagram Insights does, but better and presented more beautifully.
Curalate
Curalate is a unique Instagram Analytics tool that focuses on attribution for D2C marketing on Instagram, whether it be via influencer campaigns or paid advertisements.
Curalate offers a suite of features for brands selling products on Instagram, but their biggest offering is “Like2Buy,” a third-party storefront that connects to Instagram and boasts more functionality than Instagram’s standard ecommerce experience without sacrificing the ability to attribute sales and traffic to campaigns and posts.
Curalate does this by generating custom links for brands to utilize on social media that track user attribution (similar to UTM links on Google Analytics).
Pixlee
An invaluable free tool for brands with smaller marketing teams, Pixlee’s free offering gives users the ability to quickly create beautiful looking reports that track key metrics for broad analysis.
While not as robust as some of the other reporting solutions on this list (like Curalate, Pixlee focuses on UGC and direct to consumer campaigns), Pixlee’s free reports are sleek, quick to create, and easily shareable.
For brands that don’t have a more comprehensive social media marketing solution, Pixlee makes it easy to create good-looking reports on a whim that can be shared with both external and internal stakeholders.
Pixlee’s paid solution also offers an influencer discovery tool, helping brands identify existing advocates and find new ones.
Owlmetrics
Owlmetrics is a niche Instagram analytics tool that focuses on demographic and audience analysis. Owlmetrics focuses on helping brands on Instagram get a clear understanding of their audience and follower base.
From simple demographic breakdowns to follower affinities and dislikes, Owlmetrics empowers brands on Instagram by helping them better understand their audience so they can deliver content that resonates and engages.
Although not as powerful as Socialbakers’ audience analytics and content inspiration featureset, Owlmetrics is a great option for smaller brands on Instagram who want to understand more about their followers so they can better tailor the content they put out.
The Takeaway
In today’s social and digital landscape, brands universally recognize that social media plays a critical role in their overall marketing and sales success. As Instagram continues to get better at audience reach and engagement (especially for the world’s largest brand accounts, where audience size on Instagram has already surpassed Facebook), it’s more important than ever for companies to invest in social media analytics tools that are specifically tailored to Instagram and its features.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
