Sponsored posts in the HypeAuditor Competitor Analysis Report represent posts of the analyzed campaign that are undoubtedly made within a commercial relationship with the business partner.
Thus, posts marked using Instagram's Paid Partnership Feature are counted as sponsored.
Additionally, many influencers disclose an Instagram sponsored post by placing #sponsored or #ad or other sponsored related hashtags in their captions. This method is fully compliant with FTC and CMA guidelines, thus, at HypeAuditor, these posts are detected as sponsored too. HypeAuditor maintains a comprehensive list of such hashtags that influencers use to show that a certain post was made as part of a paid collaboration.
However, not all influencers properly disclose whether a post is sponsored, and only a few countries have a disclosure policy. Therefore, HypeAuditor also uses a machine learning-based approach that can find out if a certain post is sponsored or not. To learn more about such cases please check how HypeAuditor detects Likely Sponsored posts.
Additionally, please note: if there is a sponsored hashtag (like #promo, #ad, etc.) and the post has only one mention, then that mention is considered sponsored. If there is a sponsored hashtag and several mentions, all mentions are considered likely sponsored.
Understanding which posts are classified as Sponsored helps brands and marketers isolate confirmed paid activity from organic mentions when analyzing a competitor's influencer strategy. This makes it easier to assess how much of a competitor's influencer presence is driven by paid collaborations and to benchmark budget or reach estimates more accurately. To see how Sponsored, Likely Sponsored, and Free posts work together in the report, see Sponsored VS Free posts: How to analyze post types in the Competitor Analysis report?