Best social media analytics tools for agencies, ranked by one test

The shortlist has four tools on it and every one of them was rated on the same demo: your own agency page, connected, with three months of history. Then the retainer starts, the client wants to know how they compare to two rivals, and none of the four can see a rival. The comparison you ran measured the easy half of the work.

This is a shortlist of the best social media analytics tools for agencies ranked by a single test: what still works on the accounts a client never connects. That is prospects, competitors, and the founder who posts from their own phone.

TL;DR

The test that reorders every agency shortlist

Take your four candidates and ask one question of each: can I add an account whose owner will never sign in for me. Not will it be harder. Can it be done at all.

The answers split cleanly, because they are architectural. A tool that writes to an account has to hold that account's keys. A tool that only reads a public page has nothing to ask for. Nothing on a roadmap changes which side of that line a product sits on.

Roughly half of what a client asks an agency in a year is about accounts the client does not control.

That is the sentence to hold on to during a demo. The whole map of which products sit where, and why they get sold as one category, is in social media tools for agencies.

The shortlist, four kinds of tool

Nothing here is a ranking from one to ten, because the four do different jobs and an agency of any size runs at least two of them. Each line says what the product is built around, taken from how it positions itself.

• Agency reporting platforms. AgencyAnalytics is built for white label client reporting, pulling connected marketing channels into one branded dashboard. Strongest when the deliverable is a branded monthly document across paid, web and social together.
• Analytics suites. Iconosquare is built for analytics and reporting on connected profiles, with Instagram and TikTok as its centre of gravity. Strongest when one or two networks carry the account and you want depth rather than breadth.
• Benchmarking tools. Socialinsider is built for social media analytics, benchmarking and competitor analysis, reported network by network. Strongest when the question is comparative and the client has named rivals.
• Public profile trackers. Read a handle with no connection. Strongest for prospects, competitors, personal profiles and cadence, and weakest on anything that needs a login.

The comparison people expect between the first family and a tracker is written out in AgencyAnalytics alternative, including the parts where the reporting platform is simply the better buy.

The five questions clients actually ask

Shortlists get written from feature lists. They should be written from the questions that arrive in a Thursday email, because those are what the tool has to answer.

Four of the five never touch a login, which is why an agency that buys only for the first row spends the rest of the year exporting screenshots by hand.

Cost shape matters more than price

Two products at the same monthly figure can behave completely differently once the agency grows, because they are priced against different things.

• Per connected channel. Grows with the publishing you sell, which is at least bounded by revenue.
• Per seat. Grows with your headcount, which is the one number you do not want coupled to a software bill.
• Per tracked account. Grows with curiosity. This is the one that silently stops you benchmarking, because adding a competitor becomes a budget conversation.

Ask which of the three you are signing before you compare monthly figures. A cheap per account plan is the most expensive way to run a watch list.

How to choose, by agency shape

• You publish for clients and report monthly. Reporting platform first, tracker beside it for prospects and rivals.
• Clients publish themselves. A tracker is the whole job. A connected seat nobody can activate is dead budget.
• You pitch with benchmarks. Whatever else you buy, you need something that reads accounts nobody will connect.
• You are running it in a spreadsheet. Write down which column stopped being filled first. That is your actual requirement, and the case is made in tracking social media in a spreadsheet.

Where a public tracker is the wrong answer

A shortlist that never disqualifies its own author is marketing. Four situations where you should not buy a public profile tracker at all.

• Reach per post is the contracted KPI. Only the account owner can grant that. Take the connected route.
• Audience demographics drive the strategy. Same answer, and no public reading gets near it.
• Paid social sits in the same report. That is a reporting platform, not a tracker.
• You need to schedule and moderate. Nothing in this category publishes a post or answers a comment.

What is visible from outside and what is not, network by network, is in public social media metrics. Reading that first will disqualify half of any shortlist in ten minutes.

A scorecard you can hand to a client

Procurement goes faster with a grid nobody can argue with, because every line is a fact rather than a preference. Six rows, scored yes or no, and the answer is usually clear before the third demo.

Score your four candidates, then look at which rows the expensive one loses. In most agency shortlists it wins on depth and loses on the two rows that generate unbilled work every single month.

The first two weeks, which no pricing page describes

The retainer has started and the work has not, because somebody at the client has to grant access and they are travelling. That gap is the most expensive part of an analytics decision and it never appears in a comparison.

The last row decides more programmes than any feature. There is always one person who will not add an agency to their personal profile, and with a connected tool that person is absent from every report for the length of the contract.

One more thing about the grid: fill it in during the demo, not afterwards. A vendor answering in real time gives you a different quality of answer than a follow up email written by somebody in marketing, and the rows that get a long pause are the rows worth pushing on.

How Groowth handles this

Groowth is the tracker line of that shortlist and nothing else. One organisation per client, fully separated, with a read only seat you hand the client so the monthly deck stops being a deliverable.

Adding an account is pasting a public link, so a prospect, a competitor and a client sit on the same board with the same numbers next to each. It reads TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn once a day, counts posts against an agreed cadence, and never shows a figure it cannot source. Three accounts free with no card. The tier logic behind all of it is in best social media analytics tools.

Frequently asked questions