A curated list of some of the popular Instagram Analytics tools in use today

Instagram is a great platform for artists to showcase their talent, creative work, build and draw an audience to their online portfolio or store. With a billion user base, and millions of active Instagrammers every second, it is a source pool of high engagement activity online. Today, it's no longer just a social network for scrolling through hilarious dog memes or droll over food snaps. Companies use Instagram as a medium to build brand awareness and gain a loyal following. Therefore, companies are using it as a central part of many online marketing campaigns, announce product launches and more.

However, to get the most out of Instagram, one must learn about the importance of Instagram analytics. While Instagram has its own inbuilt insights section where one can get information about number of profile and Instagram story views, likes, and follows, it also provides information on reach and impression. These metrics can help users understand their audience and how their posts perform through analysis. In other words while metrics offer individual stats, Instagram analytics tools can help in interpreting those stats and see patterns in them.

These analytics tools help brands tailor their marketing campaigns to lure potential customers. It will also enable them to gauge the success of these campaigns, figure out which posts were able to connect with audience, analyze TOP profiles in a particular niche and more. So, while Instagram's insights offer limited metrics information, leveraging analytics tools can help companies and influencers keep tabs on engagement levels.

Analytics Insight brings you a curated list of top 10 Instagram Analytics tools, used by brands and influencers alike.

• squarelovin offers the most advanced solutions for Instagram analytics, social commerce and visual marketing. Brands can use it to get a monthly analysis of the recent posts and growth, or a history of the content broken down by hour, day, month, or year. Plus, the app offers insights on one's audiences' preferences and interests, and best time to post, both for feed and stories, to maximize engagement and visibility.

• Iconosquareis a paid app providing industry-leading analytics and tools to grow your business on Instagram and Facebook. It offers more than just analytics, including post scheduling and content planning tools. It also offers a free Instagram Audit tool, which shows you more than 20 metrics relating to your account settings, account activity, audience engagement, and post-optimization.

• Hootsuite is a comprehensive tool that offers much more than just Instagram analytics. It is social media management system (SMM) that can be used to view and manage the analytics for multiple accounts on Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and more. It software ties everything into one package and lets you manage everything from the same dashboard.

• Sprout Socialis a social media management platform with some great features for Instagram marketers. This tool combines lead generation, publishing, engagement, and analytics functions into one dashboard. Brands can also organize data to measure it against custom timeframes easily. This allows them to understand their progress toward the brand goals in a detailed way.

• SocialPilot, allows users to manage and analyze multiple Instagram business accounts in one place. It provides information such as likes, impressions, shares, profile views, website clicks, gender-wise reports, location-wise reports, engagements, etc. One can view the analytics, download it as a PDF, and email the Instagram analytics report to the clients right from one's SocialPilot account.

• Keyhole offers real-time hashtag tracking for Instagram, which is highly suitable for social media contests, brand campaigns or other marketing efforts involving hashtags. It also allows tracking of mentions, keywords, URLs of previous and existing posts. In addition, one can use Keyhole to track the performance of competing Instagram profiles by tracking their activity, growth, and engagement data over a certain period.

• SocialFox is one of the popular one-stop-platform for all things related to Instagram analytics. This Instagram analytics tool tracks all of a brand's Instagram account's key data points, like follower growth, engagement, hashtag activity, competitor accounts, and click-through rates. Users can study these information to know what their audience wants to see most, when they want to see it, who they are, where they are located and other parameters to build successful campaigns.

• Socialbakers leverages its custom AI software to consolidate data points into social media analytics embedded in easy-to-read charts and graphs. It provides information about one's competitors, trends across the internet and benchmarks that reveal how one's social media presence measures up in a particular niche. Further, it uses image-identification software to understand what people are paying attention to in real time all over social media.

• io lets users track mentions of their brand in post descriptions or comments across social media. It also offers tactical insight into the content decisions made by users. It also provides analytics on ads, clicks and hashtag; and helps users learn about industry benchmarks. One can customize the exports and create individual branded reports.

• HypeAuditor is an influencer marketing manager with a variety of different analytical functions. By choosing from one of several packages, you can track down influencers, sort them by 35 different metrics, and closely monitor each relationship's performance. Doing so, helps brands find influencers who will be most effective at reaching their target market by connecting with the audience and boosting brand reach.