6 Instagram Analytics Tools That Will Help You Grow Your Audience

Remember the days when ‘likes’ were the gold star metric on Instagram? Now, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to the sheer volume of data available to help you measure the performance of your content. Impressions, views, comments, shares… It’s exciting — if a little overwhelming. 

Instagram analytics can be a goldmine of insights for you as a creator or small business owner. These numbers can shape your Instagram strategy, helping you pinpoint exactly what kind of content will boost your reach and help grow your audience.

But how do you get these insights? How do you spot patterns, connect the dots, and use your performance numbers to inform your strategy? And — best question yet — are there handy tools that can do the work for you?

In this article, I’ll take you through the most important Instagram analytics and share tool recommendations that can consolidate those goldmine insights for you.

At a glance: The best Instagram analytics tools

Which Instagram metrics should you care about?

There are plenty of numbers in Instagram analytics tools. Should you be monitoring all of them? You can, but it’s not essential. Prioritize tracking a few key metrics that help you determine whether or not you’re achieving your social media goals.

For most creators, and some brands, reaching as many people as possible is likely your primary goal. 

If that’s the case, Instagram head Adam Mosseri recommends keeping an eye on average watch time, like rate, and send rate. (embed post)

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A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri)

But there is more nuance involved here if your social media strategy is concerned with more than eyeballs. For example, Instagram coach, Elise Darma, shared she pays attention to the metrics that have a direct impact on her business, including:

• How many people are moving from her content into meaningful conversations in DMs
• The quality of comments and engagement on her posts
• How many non-followers are discovering her content

Here’s a table to help you understand the key Instagram metrics and when you should prioritize tracking them.

These Instagram metrics are readily available in the app itself. All Instagram analytics tools have these insights and then some.

Should you monitor Instagram analytics only for your hit posts? Or only for the posts that performed below average? Elise recommends monitoring every single post:

“Here's the thing about metrics — every post is data, even the ones that seem to "flop." Instead of getting caught up in day-to-day numbers, use each post as an experiment. What's working? What's not? Then use those insights to refine your strategy.”

How to view your Instagram analytics in the app

All core Instagram analytics are available in the app. You must have a business or creator account on Instagram to view your insights.

There are two ways to view your Instagram analytics on the app:

1. View a single Instagram post’s insight

2. View your Instagram account’s performance as a whole

To view a single post or reel’s highlight, click on ‘View insights’ attached at the bottom of every post. You’ll find likes, shares, comments, and saves for that post. You can also see how many accounts you’ve reached with a single post, where those accounts came from (home, explore, profile, etc.), and how many were new accounts.

To view your Instagram account insights as a whole, follow these steps:

1. Go to your Instagram profile

2. Click on the three horizontal lines at the top right to go to ‘Setting and activity’

3. Tap on ‘Insights’ to view Instagram insights

Inside the analytics tab, you can find your Instagram’s key metrics in one of three categories:

Views: To see your profile activity, audience demographics, top-performing posts, and ratio of followers vs. non-followers.

Interactions: To see how many Instagram accounts you’ve engaged and the number of likes, saves, replies, and shares on your posts and Instagram Stories.

Total followers: To see how your follower growth has fluctuated in a specific period (but no more than 90 days) and follower demographics.

If you have an Instagram business account, you can also view insights for Instagram and Facebook side-by-side on the Meta Business Suite.

The insights in Meta Business Suite are more comprehensive than Instagram’s app. You can add your competitors and do a thorough competitive analysis of your page vs. theirs, see all the content you’ve posted and how it performed, and get a detailed audience analysis.

But still, viewing Instagram analytics natively over using an analytics tool has many disadvantages:

1. You have to connect the dots: You have to slice and dice the data yourself to determine key Instagram insights like best times to post, ideal posting frequency, and best types of posts. You only get the surface-level analytics and have to do the math for the rest yourself.
2. You can’t brand the reports you create from Instagram insights or Meta Business Suite. Most Instagram analytics tools allow you to create white-labeled reports in a few clicks and handpick the metrics you want to display.
3. You can’t view Instagram insights beyond 90 days. This means you can’t evaluate year-long campaigns as a social media manager. Or if you're a creator experimenting with new kinds of posts every three months, you can't compare your experiments against each other.

These cons become even sharper as your social media marketing strategy evolves. For example, if you’re pursuing influencer marketing on Instagram, you can’t manually evaluate a creator’s profile on how their paid posts perform, audience demographics, overall reach, etc. 

You’ll either need to ask for each Instagram influencer’s media kit (exhausting) or add Instagram analytics tools to help you get these insights.

The gist of it: Use Instagram’s native capabilities when you need a free Instagram analytics tool. But as soon as you get some budget to work with, you’re probably going to be better off with one of the tools below.

The 6 best Instagram analytics tools in 2025

What should you look for in an Instagram analytics software? Evaluate your needs first.

Do you need a strong reporting tool to create Instagram analytics reports? Social media managers might have an extra requirement for this feature, while creators can do without it.

Are you a social media marketing agency? You might need a strong Instagram analytics dashboard to get your clients’ current metrics in a jiffy.

Solo marketer working with a tight budget? You need flexible Instagram analytics tools that also double as a social media management platform.

Creator building a personal brand? Look for more affordable Instagram analytics tools.

Your reporting needs and budget should determine which Instagram analytics tool is right for you. I’ve tried to include at least one Instagram analytics software for every use case.

1. Buffer

Best Instagram analytics tool for those who need a social media management platform

Free trial: Free plan available with few analytics

Price: Starts at $6/month

Buffer is the best Instagram analytics tool for people who need a one-stop shop for all the work that goes into social media. It’s a social media management platform, so not only does it give you detailed analytics about your Instagram account, but also helps you:

• Store content ideas
• Respond to comments
• Schedule social media posts
• Use AI to refine social media captions
• …and a host of other things.

I personally use Buffer to manage my social media efforts, and my favorite thing is how easy it is to use. There’s no ‘learning curve’ — you can just get right to work!

In terms of Instagram analytics, you get a comprehensive analytics dashboard that won’t just show you the numbers. It will give you specific, personal recommendations based on your content performance: best time to post, type of post, and posting frequency. It does all the math, and then some. 

You can also create beautiful and customized reports and white-label them (really handy if you’re a social media manager presenting to a client, or a creator pitching a brand partnership)

The best part? These social media analytics are available for most of the platforms Buffer supports, not just Instagram! There’s no better way to analyze your social media marketing strategy or creator presence as a whole.

2. SocialBlade

Best Instagram analytics tool for getting basic analytics

Free trial: Analyze one Instagram profile for free every day

Price: Starts at $3.99/month

SocialBlade is one of the best Instagram analytics apps if you want something free and basic. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles — it only tells you follower fluctuation, average likes and comments, and engagement rate.

It’s not an ideal software for someone looking for valuable insights to inform their Instagram marketing strategy. But it might be the right choice for social media managers handling influencer marketing campaigns, and to monitor an influencer’s follower growth.

It’s worth remembering that Social Blade primarily only shows follower growth. It doesn’t have charts or numbers for how an Instagram profile’s engagement rate has gone up and down. 

What is particularly helpful, though, is that Social Blade has 30-day data on follower growth or decline — helping you pinpoint which post(s) exactly helped gain or lose followers.

3. Mintor

Best Instagram analytics tool for Instagram agencies

Free trial: 14 days

Price: Starts at $9/month

Mintor is a social media analytics tool that contains insights for Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn. It’s a great analytics software for agencies managing multiple Instagram accounts. You can add multiple Instagram profiles in a single dashboard and switch between them easily to find the data you need.

Mintor also stores insights on your Instagram Stories for longer than two weeks (unlike native Instagram insights).

The Instagram analytics data isn’t anything out of the ordinary. You can find all these insights on your app directly, too, but Mintor collates them for you in a single analytics dashboard. It also tracks mentions of your account and benchmarks your analytics against similar accounts. You can also get a breakdown of your ad analytics and compare it to your organic performance if you’re running ads on Instagram.

4. Social Status

Best Instagram analytics tool for analyzing various kinds of campaigns

Free trial: Free plan available but it only has Instagram profile analytics

Price: Starts at $9/month

Social Status is an excellent Instagram analytics tool for a small business doing Instagram marketing, influencer discovery, and running ads. It provides these insights for all major social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook Pages, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

It’s one of the affordable Instagram analytics tools for social media managers who have various types of campaigns running. It has influencer analytics for influencer marketing, ad analytics if you’re running Meta ads, and competitor analysis to benchmark your performance.

All of this is in addition to the detailed Instagram analytics it already has. If you don’t want to use other Instagram analytics tools to track and monitor each campaign, Social Status is perfect.

The free version has only the Instagram profile analyzer, which will give you insights into your Instagram posts, follower growth, and Instagram audience.

5. Reportei

Best Instagram analytics tool for automated reporting

Free trial: 3 days

Price: $29/month

Reportei is a perfect reporting tool for creating customized and automated Instagram analytics reports. Social media managers have to do a lot to create customized reports and present their social media efforts in a distilled PPT.

With Reportei, the work becomes a tad easier. It specializes as a reporting tool and is AI-powered — you can chat with the AI to derive detailed insights from your raw numbers. There are various ready-to-use templates available in the tool as well.

The “timeline” feature is one of the most unique — you can record campaign milestones in a story format with dates and events. This can help you present a more accurate picture of your Instagram analytics.

6. Keyhole

Best Instagram analytics tool for social listening

Free trial: Not available

Price: Demo required

Keyhole doubles as a social media analytics tool and a social listening tool. It has all the traditional insights:

• Instagram Story analytics
• Historical data on performance
• Instagram audience demographic data
• Detailed metrics on Instagram hashtags
• …and more

Tracking key metrics like the one above will help you prove the impact of your Instagram presence to stakeholders.

But the best part of Keyhole is it doubles as an excellent social listening tool. You can spot trends, monitor competitors, and stay connected to what people are talking about in your industry. If your social media strategy’s focus is deep in social listening, Keyhole is the perfect tool.

How to use your Instagram analytics

Instagram analytics tools are great, but they can’t tell you what you should do with the raw data. Deeper insights are always contextual — so you have to find how Instagram analytics inform your strategy.

If you’ve started out by setting goals, monitor how closely you achieved your objectives. Which metrics did you achieve easily? Which KPI did you struggle to hit?

Once you’ve done this, zoom out and look at the performance data more broadly. What went unexpectedly? Maybe your Instagram audience analytics show a bigger market than you had anticipated. Perhaps the Instagram algorithm changed and your analytics shifted with it. Track engagement metrics to understand which types of Instagram posts did well. Spot patterns in what did well and why.

Dissecting your social media analytics will not only help you create more well-informed Instagram analytics reports, but also help you move your overall social strategy in the right direction.