The Best Instagram Analytics Tools to Use Right Now to Grow your Account

If you want to make it big on Instagram, having a good understanding of your profile and audience stats is an important task. Many users find it daunting with all of the numbers to study. To help you with the work, we present five Instagram analytics tools you should use.

Instagram Insights

When reviewing your user statistics, Instagram’s own Insights is the first tool you should use. It presents your metrics in a simple format, making it easy to navigate. You can organize the data by content type, either photos or videos, and break them down into several components like:

• Impressions
• Likes
• Comments
• Profile visits
• Reach

These different sections give you an idea of how well your posts are performing and how people are responding to them.

Insights also lets you see your traffic data up to two years back. This gives a clearer picture of your Instagram page’s success. You can also find recurring trends that would be useful for planning future posts.

More functionality

Aside from regular posts, you can use insights to review your Stories statistics. The tool displays data for up to 14 days back.

You will be able to see:

• How people interact with your stories, such as whether they tap forward to view your other content or exit.
• An individual Story stat by opening it and tapping on the Seen by icon in the bottom left corner. The stat page displays the actions made by people who viewed the Story.
• Who viewed the content, which gives you the opportunity to target them directly.
• Comparisons of regular and promoted posts. The tool displays the statistics for the original post and the promoted one side by side.

All of these features are designed to let you quickly figure out important data at a glance, rather than struggling to try to compile it on your own.

Insights’ limitations

One of Instagram Insights’ drawbacks is that it can only be used by business profile users. This isn’t much of a problem, as you can easily switch from a personal profile to a business one. Be aware that Instagram erases your current analytics if you switch back to a personal profile later.

Insights is also available only within the mobile app and does not support data exporting. If you plan on analyzing your data externally, you will have to either manually copy it or use a third-party tool to extract it.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social lets you do in-depth Instagram analytics and use the information to plan and schedule your posts.

It tracks a large assortment of Instagram metrics, including Engagements Per Follower. This particular metric is the total number of engagements divided by the number of your followers. Sprout Social says this gives a more accurate representation of the engagement level you get.

The software program presents all this data as different reports, such as:

• Profile report
• Sent Messages report
• Competitor Analysis report
• Tags report

You can customize the reports to display only select profiles. They can also be downloaded either as PDF or CSV files for different uses.

Learning more about your Instagram stats

Sprout Social comes with several advanced Instagram analytics tools to give you greater insights about your account’s performance. Smart Inbox is a feature which lets you track engagement elements like keywords and hashtags within the messages you receive.

You can use the feature to plan your conversation strategy and get people interacting more.

The management suite also has a variety of listening tools. These include hashtag trackers and brand monitoring tools for keeping tabs of the conversations about you. They are powered by Simply Measured, a major data analytics firm Sprout Social acquired in 2017.

Sprout Social has also released a new Paid Performance Report feature that tracks paid promotion campaign data in real-time and presents this in an easy-to-follow visual format. It displays data for different platforms aside from Instagram, giving you a clearer picture of your overall campaign’s performance.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a general social management platform like Sprout Social. Its biggest strength for doing Instagram analytics is its easy-to-use dashboards. The dashboard integrates all the metrics from different platforms, including Instagram, giving you a good view of your entire social media statistics.

You can further customize the dashboard to show only specific metrics and save them for later use. By getting the Team plan, you can export these dashboards as reports, which is useful for coordinating your campaigns.

Getting better insights into your performance

One of the great things about Hootsuite’s Instagram analytics tools is that they can look further back into your post history than the Insights app. This gives you a better picture of the effectiveness of your long-term campaigns, which you can use to improve your engagement strategy.

Another useful feature for tracking and studying your audience engagement is Inbound Messages by Sentiment.

This feature tracks mentions, direct messages, and quotes, and determines whether they are positive or negative, giving you an idea of the general audience perception of your page.

Instagram account management

Being a general social media management platform, Hootsuite readily integrates its analytics tools with its team management tools. By signing up for their Team plan, you can manage up to 20 different social media accounts and compare their performances easily.

You are also able to share analytics data with your members in real-time and assign tasks to them based on your data. This is helpful if you are running an ongoing campaign. Members can then send feedback about their particular assignments and update your analytics dashboard data.

Pixlee

Pixlee is a user-generated content management platform that also has a free Instagram analytics tool. This tool comes in the form of weekly reports that summarize your Instagram activity, including your follower growth and most popular content.

It also delivers reports from as far back as several years, useful for doing a historical study of your Instagram performance.

The reports are available for both personal and business accounts, making it handy for those just starting to establish themselves on the platform. To get the reports, you sign up and link to your Instagram account.

Using Pixlee for collaboration

Besides monitoring your basic Instagram metrics, Pixlee also tracks content that mentions your brand. The feature is handy for finding what your fans are saying about you or discovering other parties interested in your brand.

Another use for Pixlee’s Instagram analytics tools is for finding and connecting with influencers to promote your brand. The tool lets you study the accounts mentioning your brand and find out which ones have a large number of followers. You can then reach out to these influencers and offer a deal.

Pixlee helps facilitate these collaborations with its shareable reports. You can quickly send these reports to your team members or influencers for their use. Another strategy is to share these reports as part of your collaboration pitch to other users.

Keyhole

Keyhole is one of the popular paid services for doing Instagram analytics. The site offers three main services:

• Account tracking
• Hashtag and keyword tracking
• Historical Data Reports

You can use the above tools right from their homepage as part of the free trial. The trial provides Instagram analytics insights for up to the last year, which is a considerable length.

Keyhole presents the data in easy-to-read graphs, breaking the information down into several sections. The graphs themselves are interactive as you can get additional information about a particular stat by hovering your pointer over that part of the graph.

The tool lets you save your tracking results, which is useful if you want to review them later.

Getting deeper insights

Keyhole can deliver greater insights about your Instagram audience’s behavior. It has a Sentiments section that displays the percentage of positive and negative comments you receive. The data is shown as a pie graph, giving you a visual cue on how people feel about you.

It also lets you create a feed to track your competitors’ Instagram posts. This will give you an idea of what content works for them and respond accordingly. You can even customize your competitor reports to track only specific key performance indicators and give a more focused picture of their activities.

Use Instagram analytics tools to track your performance

Having the right set of Instagram analytics tools makes reviewing your performance metrics easier. Here are the five that we recommend you use:

• Instagram Insights: The site’s own analytics tool presents all the essential metrics in an easy-to-use format.
• Sprout Social: Its large collection of tools allows you to both track and run your Instagram account from a single dashboard.
• Hootsuite: Hootsuite lets you review your Instagram metrics farther back and easily manage multiple accounts.
• Pixlee: Pixlee’s free weekly reports are useful for finding and connecting with Instagram influencers.
• Keyhole: The site delivers extensive real-time and historical data and gives you an effective means of tracking competitors.

Take advantage of these tools’ features to have a better picture of your Instagram performance. Use that knowledge to plan your marketing strategy and become the next Instagram hit.

Date: November 29, 2018 / Categories: Apps, / Author: Rich Drees