How to Check Someone's Instagram Analytics

Want to see how a competitor’s Instagram is really performing, or check an influencer's stats before a potential collaboration? While you can't magically access their private backend data, you can uncover a wealth of information by analyzing the public data they share every day. This article guides you on how to check your own Instagram analytics and then uses those same principles to show you how to analyze anybody else’s account performance.

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First, Know Your Own Instagram Analytics

Before you start analyzing other accounts, it's essential to understand your own performance data. Instagram provides a powerful, free analytics tool called "Insights," but it’s only available for Professional (Business or Creator) accounts. Making the switch is free and instantly gives you access to your data.

How to Access Your Native Instagram Analytics

If you don’t have a Professional account yet, the switch is simple:

1. Go to your Instagram profile and tap the hamburger menu (three horizontal lines) in the top-right corner.
2. Select Settings and privacy.
3. Scroll down and tap on Account type and tools.
4. Tap Switch to professional account and follow the on-screen prompts to select a category that best describes what you do.

Once you're set up, you can access your data by navigating to your profile and tapping the Professional dashboard button right below your bio. This is your mission control for understanding account performance.

Key Metrics to Understand in Your Own Insights

Getting familiar with these terms will help you know what to look for when evaluating other accounts later.

• Accounts Reached: The number of unique accounts that have seen any of your content. Reach tells you the true size of your audience for a given period or post.
• Accounts Engaged: The number of unique accounts that have liked, commented, shared, saved, or otherwise interacted with your content. This metric measures your ability to spark a connection.
• Total Followers: This tracks your follower growth over time. Here you can see your total adds and unfollows, and pinpoint which days saw significant changes.
• Audience Demographics: Located under the "Total Followers" section, this shows you valuable information like the top cities and countries your followers are from, their age range, and their gender.
• Content-Specific Analytics: You can also view analytics for individual Posts, Stories, and Reels. Tap View insights on a specific piece of content to see its individual reach, plays, likes, comments, shares, and saves.

This data is your ground truth. Now, let’s use this knowledge to see what we can learn about other accounts, even without access to their dashboard.

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Why You Can't See Someone Else's Instagram Insights Directly

Instagram treats performance data like follower demographics, post reach, and story impressions as private information, and for good reason. It belongs to the account holder. There is no official feature that allows you to click a button and see a competitor’s professional dashboard.

However, every like, comment, post, and follower change happens in public. By observing and analyzing this publicly available information, you can piece together an impressively accurate picture of an account’s health and strategy. This can be done either manually or with the help of specialized tools that do the heavy lifting for you.

How to Manually Analyze Another Instagram Account

This hands-on method is completely free and requires nothing more than a keen eye and a simple calculator (or a spreadsheet). It’s perfect for quick spot-checks on a few competitors or influencers.

1. Calculate Their Engagement Rate on Posts

The engagement rate is arguably the single most important metric for understanding an account’s health. It shows how much of an account’s audience actually interacts with its content. A massive follower count is meaningless if nobody is paying attention.

How to Calculate It:

1. Pick one of their recent posts (pick a few to get an average).
2. Add the total number of likes and comments together.
3. Divide that number by their total follower count.
4. Multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.

Formula:

(Total Likes + Total Comments) / Total Followers * 100 = Engagement Rate %

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What is a "good" engagement rate?

Benchmarks vary by industry and follower size, but here’s a general guide:

• Anything below 1% is generally considered low.
• 1% to 3.5% is often seen as average or good.
• 3.5% to 6% is high engagement.
• Anything above 6% is exceptional.

An account with 10,000 followers and a 5% engagement rate is often more connected with its audience than an account with 200,000 followers and a 0.4% rate.

2. Analyze Their Content Strategy

Look through their feed for valuable patterns. Ask yourself these questions:

• What types of content are they posting? Are they heavy on Reels, photo carousels, or single images? Reels often get higher reach, while carousels can drive more engagement and saves.
• What topics get the most engagement? Scroll through their last 20-30 posts and find the ones with the highest likes and comments. Look for themes. Are tutorial-style posts, behind-the-scenes content, or company announcements performing best?
• How often are they posting? Check a few weeks’ worth of content. Are they posting multiple times a day, once a day, or a few times a week? Consistency is key on Instagram, and their cadence can give you clues about their strategy and resource levels.
• How are they using Stories? Do they use interactive stickers like polls and quizzes to drive engagement? Do they share user-generated content? Their Stories strategy can reveal a lot about their community management efforts.

3. Read the Comments for Audience Quality

Bots and "engagement pods" can inflate likes, but they rarely leave meaningful comments. Go to their top posts and actually read the comments.

• Are the comments genuine and specific to the post? ("I love that color on you!")
• Or are they generic and spammy? ("Great pic," "Awesome," or just a string of emojis)
• Do the account holders respond to comments? Genuine interaction shows they are fostering a community, not just broadcasting a message.

A few dozen thoughtful comments often tell you more about audience health than a thousand generic ones.

Using Third-Party Tools for Deeper Competitor Analysis

If you need to move beyond manual spot-checks and get more data-driven insights at scale, third-party analytics tools are your best friend. These platforms are designed to scrape and analyze all the public data available for any professional account, then present it to you in clear, organized dashboards.

While their specific features vary, most offer a suite of competitor and influencer analysis tools that can show you:

• Historical Follower Growth: Pinpoint exactly when an account saw a huge spike in followers, which can indicate a successful giveaway, viral post, or ad campaign.
• Automated Engagement Rate Calculation: Instead of doing the math yourself, these tools calculate engagement rates across all posts automatically, saving you tons of time.
• Top Performing Content: Instantly see which of your competitors' posts are generating the most likes and comments, allowing you to quickly spot what's resonating with their audience.
• Hashtag Strategy Analysis: Discover which hashtags they use most frequently and which ones are associated with their top-performing content.
• Estimated Demographics (Influencer Platforms): Some specialized influencer marketing platforms like HypeAuditor or Grin use their own massive datasets to estimate an influencer's audience demographics (age, gender, location). These are excellent for vetting potential partners.

Examples of these types of tools include Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Iconosquare, Rival IQ, and HypeAuditor. Many offer free trials, allowing you to test out their competitor analysis features without a full commitment.

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What to Focus On In Your Analysis

You’ve gathered the data, now it’s time to turn it into actionable insights. Here’s what you should be evaluating:

• Consistency vs. Viral Hits: Does the account have a consistently moderate engagement rate, or do they have a few posts that go viral while most get very little attention? Consistency is often a sign of a more loyal and stable community.
• Audience vs. Customer Persona: Based on the qualitative analysis of the comments and the style of content, does the audience seem to match your target customer persona? An influencer might have a huge, engaged following, but if their audience isn't a fit for your product, a collaboration won't be effective.
• Opportunities They’re Missing: Is a competitor neglecting Reels and seeing low engagement, creating an opportunity for you to dominate video? Are they not engaging with their comments, leaving their community an open field for you to win over? Use their weaknesses to inform your strengths.

By shifting your focus from vanity metrics like follower count to meaningful indicators like engagement rates and content quality, you can build a more effective social media strategy informed by the entire landscape, not just your own performance.

Final Thoughts

In short, while you can't view another person's private Instagram Insights, a detailed analysis of their public information can tell you nearly everything you need to know. By manually calculating engagement rates and dissecting their content strategy, or using third-party tools for a more automated overview, you can effectively benchmark your performance and spot opportunities for growth.

This process often involves jumping between different apps and spreadsheets to track your own performance across platforms - your Instagram data, your Shopify sales generated from social, data from your email marketing tools, and so on. At Graphed, we solve this by centralizing all your marketing and sales data in one place. You can use simple natural language prompts to instantly build dashboards that show you the full picture of your performance - from Instagram ad spend to website traffic and final revenue - all in one unified, real-time view.