Instagram Reels Competitor Tracker with Apify, DeepSeek & Google Sheets

Track Competitors’ Instagram Reels Automatically—Daily, Transcribed, Analyzed, and Logged to Google Sheets

This n8n workflow automatically pulls your competitors’ latest Instagram Reels via Apify every day, transcribes them, analyzes them with DeepSeek (OpenAI-compatible), and stores structured insights in Google Sheets—while deduplicating and retrying failed items using an n8n Data Table.

What this workflow does

• Runs daily at 09:00 on a schedule.
• Loads competitor list from Google Sheets and processes only rows marked as active.
• Fetches recent Reels with Apify, normalizing each Reel into a consistent URL/key format.
• Deduplicates with an n8n Data Table registry: skips Reels already processed successfully and retries failures up to three attempts.
• Transcribes each Reel using an Apify transcript actor, then validates whether the transcript is usable.
• Generates structured analysis by sending Reel metadata, caption, and transcript to DeepSeek (OpenAI-compatible) and validating required JSON fields.
• Writes results to Google Sheets in the “Reel Intelligence” tab (append or update), and records success/failure back to the registry (optionally compiling a Telegram digest).

Use cases

• SaaS marketing teams monitoring competitor Instagram Reels content and messaging over time.
• Automation engineers building a repeatable Instagram Reels competitor intelligence pipeline in n8n.
• Operators maintaining a clean “Reel Intelligence” dataset with deduplication and robust retry handling.

Technical details

• Integrations/Nodes: Google Sheets, Apify (Reels fetch + transcript actor), DeepSeek (OpenAI-compatible), n8n Data Table, Telegram (optional digest), plus if, code, and sticky note nodes.
• Sheet setup required: ensure tabs “Competitors” and “Reel Intelligence” exist, and the output tab includes a “reel_key” column.

If you’re looking for an Instagram Reels competitor tracker automation with Apify, DeepSeek, and Google Sheets in n8n, this workflow is built for you.