Free and paid Instagram analytics app

Free Instagram analytics tool

1.Instagram Insights

2.Iconosquare

3.Squarelovin

4.Crowdfire

5.Pixlee

6.Union Metrics

7.Socialbakers

Paid Instagram analytics tools

1.HubSpot Social Inbox

2.Sprout Social

3.Hootsuite

4.Keyhole

5.HypeAuditor

6.Command

The use of Instagram for marketing purposes is rapidly gaining popularity, with more than 70% of companies using the platform in 2017, compared to less than 50% in 2016.

Using Instagram for your own business is important, but once you get started, it's hard to tell if you're really successful. Without the right metrics, we never know if we can do more to attract an audience or increase our followers.

There are plenty of Instagram analytics apps that help us track our progress and spot areas for improvement. Here, we're going to focus on the best free Instagram analytics apps so we can focus our money and energy on the Instagram content itself.

If we have a business account on Instagram, then we will automatically access their free analytics tool, Instagram Insights. Insights tools show when our audience is on Instagram, which posts are most popular, and the impression and reach of our accounts.

In addition, we can compare the original post with the promoted version of the post to determine if our paid work is valid. Unfortunately, we can only use the tool in the app (there is no desktop version), and it is not user-friendly, but it provides a good basic overview for our Instagram analytics for a single post and an entire account.

Iconosquare is a 3-in-1 Instagram solution for social media marketing. The platform allows for scheduling new posts, monitoring people's perceptions of the industry and, of course, tracking Instagram analytics. These analyses show how well engagement, impressions, reach of posts, and even our Instagram stories are performing.

Iconosquare also includes hashtags and competitor tracking, allowing marketers to compare themselves to people and topics they care about. The platform offers a free two-week trial, as well as various free tools such as full Instagram reviews.

3. Squarelovin

Squarelovin's free Instagram Insights tool provides most of the information we need to analyze progress over the course of a year — for example, we can get monthly analysis of posts, or post history broken down by month, day, or even an hour.

In addition, the tool provides insight into the interests of our followers and how to drive further engagement with our posts. It is even possible to determine the best time to publish based on when our followers are most likely to appear on the app.

Crowdfire allows marketers to schedule posts, measure their performance, track their brand's mentions, and curate content relevant to their industry from the internet. The product offers article and image recommendations from other websites to help marketers expand their visibility as they consider what to incorporate into their Instagram strategy.

Crowdfire's analytics tool visualizes our Instagram data in several user-friendly charts. They also delved into some of the advanced metrics that showed how we performed over a long period of time.

5. Pixlee

Used by Kenneth Cole, Sonos, and many other big brands, Pixlee offers an impressive set of free tools. It allows you to create shareable reports that you can distribute to your entire marketing team and analyze metrics to figure out how to increase engagement and attract new followers.

In addition, the tool helps us find influencers or brand advocates who promote our products, so we can create more effective influencer campaigns.

While it doesn't offer Instagram analytics tools for free, Union Metrics does offer free monthly Instagram checks. Checks tell us which hashtags increase engagement, which posts resonate most with your audience, and when your followers use the app.

While the tool can't provide analytics for more than 30 days, it can be used to look at short-term topics and patterns and learn how to quickly improve metrics.

While not the most visually appealing tool on the list, Socialbakers still provides key information, including our favorite and most commented posts, as well as the best performing filters.

In addition, Socialbakers offers Instagram reports that compare our own Instagram accounts to those of our competitors to see where we are in the industry and what we can do to improve.

With HubSpot's social inbox, it's easy to build campaigns and publish to multiple social platforms at the same time. We can also integrate the social inbox tool with blogs, allowing us to automatically share new content to LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social channels the moment it's published.

In addition, we can create custom keyword monitoring streams to track conversations about our brand to ensure that we are always communicating with potential customers and customers, no matter where they are.

Most importantly, HubSpot's social inbox tool is able to report on the success of our social strategy across each channel from a centralized location to clearly determine how our social teams are impacting the company's bottom line. This helps us keep track of the platforms that are performing best for our brand and tailor future campaigns for the best ROI.

Price: Included in Marketing Hub Professional

Sprout Social's suite of Instagram analytics tools that we can use to grow and manage our Instagram presence. Sprout Social's platform allows us to analyze key Instagram metrics, including:

Instagram Story Performance

Instagram audience growth

Instagram post performance

Instagram tag performance

We can also use Spring to analyze how our competitors are performing on Instagram to make sure you're always ahead of the curve.

We can try Spring Social for free for 30 days here and start analyzing our Instagram performance today.

Price: 30-day free trial; standard is $99 per user per month.

We can use Hootsuite to create custom dashboards that allow us to monitor analytics across multiple channels, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more. In addition, hundreds of social media posts can be scheduled simultaneously on various platforms using the tool.

We can use Hootsuit to collaborate with the entire team on social media campaigns and scale across the organization. For example, the features offered by Hootsuite allow us to assign tasks to individual team members, create reports to share key metrics and insights with the team, and even track which employees or departments have posted content with the highest ROI.

Price: 30-day free trial; the "Pro" plan after that is $29 per month (allows managing 10 different social media profiles)

This is a great tool to track the performance of individual hashtags on social posts to ensure that we use the right hashtags for the highest ROI. Used by more than 5,000 agencies and marketers, Keyhole provides key metrics such as Instagram trending hashtags by engagement, competitor activity, and follower activity. Most importantly, we can create customized hashtag reports for our clients to showcase the value of our social media campaigns.

Also, if our brands regularly hire influencers to increase brand awareness and sales, we can use Keyhole to track which influencers are most successful. This helps us tailor future influencer marketing campaigns to our own needs.

Price: 7-day free trial; $99 per month for three keywords and account trackers (usually $199 per month, but now with a 50% discount), plus 20,000 posts per month.

This is a great checking tool if we're planning any type of influencer campaign. HypeAuditor's Instagram reports analyze influencers' audience quality, engagement rates, and audience insights, including location, age, gender, and interests. These metrics help us find the influencers who engage the most with our target audience, allowing us to create stronger, more effective influencer campaigns.

In addition, the tool gives you key insights to ensure you're choosing the right influencer for your brand — for example, you can use HypeAuditor to find out which other brands influencers have worked with and analyze the performance of sponsored posts. In addition, HypeAuditor offers an Audience Quality Score to ensure you select authentic, engaging influencers for upcoming events.

Price: $299 per month for beginners

This is one of the cheaper tools on the list that offers hashtag analysis, so if we don't have a big Instagram budget, then it's a good choice. Command shows which hashtags drive the most engagement for our brand, as well as the average likes and comments we get from different hashtags.

It's a great tool to use to determine which labels can bring the highest engagement to our brand. This allows us to gain important insight into the interests of our target audience. For example, if we notice that #remotework is an exceptionally well-performed hashtag, we might consider using that insight to produce more remote content on blogs or other social channels to engage more people.

Price: Free to download; the premium version is $9.99 per month