What is an Instagram Competitors dashboard?
An Instagram Competitors dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Instagram Insights, third-party analytics tools) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., follower growth, engagement rate, content performance), enabling teams and agencies to monitor competitor activity and create presentations for clients and executives.
Instagram Competitors dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in an Instagram Competitors dashboard?
An actionable Instagram Competitors dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive Instagram Competitors dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show the competitive landscape's impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Competitor performance analysis: by engagement, follower growth, and content strategy.
- Market positioning analysis: share of voice, brand sentiment, and audience overlap.
- Trend analysis: emerging content trends and hashtag usage among competitors.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Instagram Competitors manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-competitor views with drill-downs to see performance by competitor, region, content type, and engagement metrics. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-competitor reporting: overall performance, content strategy, and audience engagement across competitors.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues.
- Competitive analysis for content and engagement mapping.
- Topic, hashtag, content, audience research
Operational Instagram Competitors Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and social media managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Engagement: likes, comments, shares, engagement rate.
- Follower metrics: growth rate, demographics, and retention.
- Content performance: top-performing posts, stories, and reels.
- Hashtag analysis: effectiveness and reach of hashtags used by competitors.
Operational Instagram Competitors dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build an Instagram Competitors dashboard?
To build an Instagram Competitors dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are Instagram Insights, third-party analytics tools for social media performance, and competitor analysis platforms.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of Instagram Competitors dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like engagement monitoring, content performance, and follower analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom engagement metrics, audience demographics, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "key performance indicators".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your Instagram Competitors reporting use cases, such as engagement monitoring, content performance, and follower analysis.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g., likes, comments, shares, follower growth, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g., by date, content type, hashtag, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your Instagram Competitors dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your Instagram Competitors dashboards:
Share
Share your Instagram Competitors dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an Instagram Competitors dashboard?
Instagram Competitors dashboards should include a mix of visibility, engagement, content performance, and audience metrics to fully understand the competitive landscape. They include:
Visibility metrics measure the reach and presence of competitors:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, follower count
- Engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares, engagement rate
- Content performance metrics: top posts, stories, reels
Efficiency KPIs compare your outputs to the cost, including:
- Engagement: engagement rate per post
- Content: content frequency and consistency
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Engagement: engagement rate
- Content: content virality
To analyze these KPIs, segment them by:
- Competitor: individual competitors, industry benchmarks
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Content: type, format, topic, hashtag
- Audience: demographics, interests, behavior
