You found twenty Reels that matter — from a competitor, a creator you want to sponsor, or your own campaign. Now you need the numbers: views, likes, comments, shares, saves. Opening each post and copying numbers into a spreadsheet doesn’t scale.

This tutorial shows how to turn a list of Instagram post/Reel URLs into structured engagement data in one run — no Instagram login, no browser automation.

The tool:

  • Instagram Post & Reel Details Scraper — full detail per post (up to 128 fields), bulk URLs, no login. It also returns an explicit per-URL metric-availability report, so you always know which metrics are real and which Instagram didn’t expose.

It runs on Apify — you pay per post checked, not per minute of compute.

Step 1 — Collect your URLs

Grab the post/Reel URLs (or shortcodes) you care about:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DFxYzAbCdEf/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGhIjKlMnOp/

Shortcodes and media IDs work too — paste whatever you have.

Step 2 — Run the actor with a bulk list

Open Instagram Post & Reel Details Scraper and paste your URLs into the bulk input, one per line:

{
  "postUrls": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/p/DFxYzAbCdEf/",
    "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGhIjKlMnOp/"
  ]
}

Bulk input is the recommended mode — it keeps the per-post overhead low, which matters when you process hundreds of URLs.

Click Run.

Step 3 — Read the analytics

Each URL returns a full record. The analytics-relevant fields:

{
  "like_count": 18432,
  "comment_count": 214,
  "view_count": 412907,
  "share_count": 1058,
  "save_count": 3961,
  "repost_count": 87,
  "caption": "…",
  "taken_at": "2026-09-21T16:03:00.000Z",
  "video_url": "…",
  "creator": { "username": "…", "follower_count": 128400 }
}

Notes on the numbers:

  • repost_count is included — a field Apify’s own Instagram scraper doesn’t return.
  • Views appear for Reels and videos. Shares and saves appear when Instagram exposes them for that post.
  • Need just the metrics for a batch of URLs? The same Instagram Post & Reel Details Scraper returns them with an explicit per-URL availability report — useful for benchmarking hundreds of posts cheaply.

Step 4 — Export and analyze

Export the dataset as CSV/Excel and drop it into your analytics stack, or pull it via the API:

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/<DATASET_ID>/items?format=json"

Typical analyses:

  • Engagement rate = (likes + comments) ÷ creator followers, per post.
  • Content benchmarking — median views/likes across a competitor’s last 30 Reels.
  • Sponsorship vetting — does the creator’s engagement match their follower count?

Going further

Pricing

The actor is pay-per-event — you pay per post checked, not per minute of compute. It has run 1M+ times. New Apify accounts include free platform credit for the first runs.

FAQ

Do I need an Instagram login? No. The actor works from public data without any login.

Do shares and saves always come back? Only when Instagram exposes them for that post. The actor reports metric availability explicitly per URL, so you always know what’s real and what’s missing.

Can I track the same URLs over time? Yes — schedule the run (Apify supports schedules, or use n8n/Make) and append each export to a sheet to build a time series.