What we track (by platform)
TikTok: views, likes, comments, shares, watch-time (where TikTok Business API exposes it — video posts on Business accounts).
Instagram Reels: plays, likes, comments, shares, saves, reach (via Instagram Graph API — requires Business or Creator account).
YouTube: views, likes, comments, watch-time (via YouTube Data API v3 — requires channel with API access enabled).
X (Twitter): impressions, likes, retweets, replies, quote-tweets (via X API v2 — Premium tier tokens for full analytics).
What we deliberately don't track
We don't track: audience demographics (age, gender, geography breakdown), competitor benchmarks, brand mention monitoring, sentiment analysis, share-of-voice, best-time-to-post ML recommendations, or 100+ metric report generation.
All of those are legitimate features in enterprise tools (Sprout Premium Analytics, Hootsuite Insights, Brand24). We chose not to build them because (1) they'd take us out of "posting tool" and into "analytics platform," (2) they'd double our price for features 80% of users don't need, and (3) the tools that do them are already good at them.
If you need those, keep Sprout Premium or add Metricool for reporting on top of us.
Refresh cadence
Analytics refresh every 6 hours by default. That's a deliberate trade-off: platform APIs rate-limit heavily, and pulling every hour would cap us at fewer connected accounts per user before we hit quota walls.
For most creators, 6-hour refresh is plenty — you're not making decisions on 30-minute-old data. If you need real-time, use each platform's native app for that view.
Per-brand rollups
Every metric is scoped to the brand that published it. Solo users have one brand and one rollup view. Automation ($59/mo) users have 3 brands with fully isolated rollups. Team ($119/mo) users have unlimited brands, each with independent analytics — good for agencies reporting per-client.
Brand-level views: total posts, total views, top-performing posts, per-platform breakdown, week-over-week trend.
CSV export for client reporting
Any dashboard view exports as CSV: per-post detail, per-brand rollup, per-platform breakdown, campaign-tag rollup. Great for agency deliverables where you need to hand a client a spreadsheet of what ran last month.
White-label PDF reports with 100+ metrics are not on our roadmap. If that's a contractual client deliverable, add Metricool or keep Sprout for the reporting layer.