Instagram Competitor & Creator Intelligence

Turn public Instagram profiles, posts, and reels into decision-ready competitor and creator intelligence.

Instagram Competitor & Creator Intelligence helps brands, agencies, marketers, researchers, and creator teams compare public Instagram performance without manually collecting metrics or building spreadsheets.

The Actor produces three layers of output:

• Media intelligence for individual posts and reels
• Profile intelligence with audience and performance benchmarks
• Competitor comparisons for side-by-side ranking of multiple profiles

What you can analyze

Profile intelligence

For each requested public profile, the Actor can return:

• Username and profile URL
• Full name
• Followers and following
• Total profile post count
• Biography and external website
• Verification/private status when available
• Number of media items analyzed
• Content format mix
• Average and median likes
• Average comments
• Average and median engagement rate
• Average video plays
• Estimated posting interval and posts per week
• CTA post rate
• Sponsorship-signal rate
• Top hashtags and mentions
• Top-performing media

Post and reel intelligence

Each media record can include:

• Requested competitor profile
• Actual content owner
• Post/reel URL and shortcode
• Media type and publication timestamp
• Caption, hashtags, and mentions
• Likes and comments
• Total engagement and engagement rate
• Video views and plays
• View rate and play rate
• Video duration
• Paid-partnership and sponsorship signals
• CTA detection
• Coauthors and tagged users
• Available recent comments

Competitor comparison

When two or more profiles are analyzed, the Actor also produces a comparison record ranking profiles by:

• Followers
• Average engagement rate
• Estimated posting frequency
• Average likes

Input

Provide Instagram usernames or public profile URLs.

Example:

{
  "profiles": ["nike", "adidas"],
  "maxMediaPerProfile": 6,
  "skipPinnedPosts": true
}

profiles

Instagram usernames or full public profile URLs. Up to 20 profiles can be analyzed in one run.

maxMediaPerProfile

Maximum media items analyzed for each profile.

• Minimum: 1
• Maximum: 30
• Default: 6

skipPinnedPosts

When enabled, pinned posts are excluded from source collection so older pinned content does not distort current-performance analysis.

Default: true

Output

Results are stored in the default Apify dataset and use three recordType values.

media

One analyzed post or reel.

Example:

{
  "recordType": "media",
  "username": "nike",
  "ownerUsername": "nike",
  "mediaType": "Video",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-16T16:09:43.000Z",
  "likes": 40000,
  "comments": 446,
  "engagementTotal": 40446,
  "engagementRatePct": 0.0139,
  "videoViews": 85000,
  "videoPlays": 2500000,
  "hasCTA": false,
  "sponsorSignal": false
}

profile_summary

One intelligence summary for each requested profile.

competitor_comparison

Generated only when at least two profiles are analyzed.

Requested profile vs. content owner

Collaborative and cross-posted Instagram content may be owned by an account other than the profile requested.

The Actor preserves both:

• username — the requested competitor/profile
• ownerUsername — the actual content owner returned for the media item

This keeps collaborative posts in the analysis without misattributing ownership.

Common use cases

• Competitor benchmarking — compare audience size, engagement, posting frequency, and content performance.
• Creator research — evaluate public creators using engagement, views, plays, sponsorship signals, and posting behavior.
• Social strategy — identify high-performing formats, CTAs, hashtags, mentions, and posting patterns.
• Agency reporting — feed structured Instagram intelligence into spreadsheets, dashboards, APIs, and automated reports.
• Sponsorship research — surface paid-partnership indicators, sponsorship wording, tagged users, coauthors, and mentions.
• Content research — compare posts and reels using point-in-time performance metrics.

Pricing

This Actor uses Pay per event pricing with platform usage included.

Event	Price
Profile intelligence	$0.05 per profile
Media analysis	$0.01 per media item
Competitor comparison	$0.12 per comparison
Actor start	$0.00005 per run

A competitor comparison is generated only when at least two profiles are analyzed.

Data availability and limitations

This Actor is designed for public Instagram profiles and publicly available content.

Instagram data changes continuously as accounts publish content and engagement grows. Some fields may be unavailable for certain media types, accounts, or posts. Private, restricted, deleted, unavailable, or otherwise inaccessible content may return limited or no results.

Engagement rates are calculated from metrics available at run time and should be treated as point-in-time competitive intelligence.

CTA and sponsorship indicators are deterministic signals based on available metadata and caption content. They are research indicators, not legal or contractual determinations.

Tips for better comparisons

1. Compare profiles from the same niche or market.
2. Use the same maxMediaPerProfile value for every competitor.
3. Keep skipPinnedPosts enabled for current-content benchmarking.
4. Increase the media sample when you need a broader performance view.
5. Re-run the same competitor set periodically to monitor changes.

Automation

Results are structured Apify dataset records and can be used with the Apify API, schedules, webhooks, integrations, downstream Actors, dashboards, and automated reporting workflows.

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Built by DataVault Labs for scalable social-media competitor and creator intelligence.