The engagement rate every tool quotes is the wrong one
In short
Engagement rate by reach is engagements ÷ reach: the people who acted, over the people who were shown the post. Every tool that grades an account from the outside divides by followers instead, because reach is visible only to the account owner — and the two numbers are not comparable, since one has a denominator the numerator never met.
Two people can look at the same Instagram account on the same day and quote engagement rates of 4.6% and 6.8%. Neither is lying. They are dividing by different things, and only one of the two denominators has anything to do with the post.
To work out both for your own posts, use the engagement rate calculator — it prints the rate by reach and by followers side by side.
What is engagement rate by reach?
Engagement rate by reach is engagements ÷ reach, expressed as a percentage: of the unique accounts Instagram actually showed the post to, the share that did something about it. It is the only engagement rate whose numerator and denominator describe the same set of people.
On Instagram, engagements is the metric the API calls total_interactions — likes, comments, saves and shares added together — and reach is the count of distinct accounts that saw the post. A post reaching 8,400 accounts with 570 interactions has an engagement rate by reach of 6.8%.
| Rate | Formula | On this post |
|---|---|---|
| By reach | 570 ÷ 8,400 | 6.8% |
| By followers | 570 ÷ 12,400 | 4.6% |
| By views | 570 ÷ 11,900 | 4.8% |
The relationship between the first two is not a coincidence. Engagement rate by followers is engagement rate by reach multiplied by reach over followers — so an account whose posts reach half its followers reports half the rate, for reasons that have nothing to do with how good the post was.
Why does every tool use followers instead?
Because they cannot see reach. Reach is served only to the account holder, through an authenticated call against their own account. A tool that grades a creator from a public profile has exactly two numbers to work with: the follower count, and the likes and comments visible on posts anybody can open.
Saves and shares — two of the four things that make up engagements — are not public either. An outside-in estimate is therefore built from half the numerator and a denominator that was never the audience, and then presented to two decimal places.
This is why a benchmark quoted without its denominator is unreadable. “A good engagement rate is 3%” means one thing against followers and something entirely different against reach, and the gap between them is wider for large accounts than for small ones.
What is a good engagement rate by reach?
The honest answer is that the comparison worth making is against your own recent posts, not against a platform-wide figure. Reach depends on format, on how much of your audience is active, and on whether the post travelled beyond your followers — three things that differ more between two accounts than the rate itself does.
- Read the median, not the mean. One post that travelled unusually far drags an average upward and describes a week that did not happen.
- Split by format. Reels and feed posts are reached differently and engaged differently; a single blended rate hides which one is working.
- Give it a sample. A rate from four posts is a rumour. The report should say how many posts it came from, and so should you when a brand asks.
- Watch the direction. A rate that has held while reach doubled is a better story than a higher rate on a shrinking audience.
What about saves and shares?
They deserve a rate of their own. A like is a reflex; a save is an intention to come back and a share is a recommendation. Together they are the two actions that carry a post beyond the audience it started with, which is why they predict reach on the next post better than likes do.
Saves and shares over reach — a keep rate — is the second number worth putting in front of a brand, and it is also invisible from the outside. If a tool quotes you a save rate for an account it does not have a token for, it invented it.
Reach has one rule that catches people out
Reach counts people, so it cannot be added up. Two posts reaching 8,000 accounts each did not reach 16,000 accounts; they reached everyone who saw either, counted once. The same goes for reach across days.
This matters the moment somebody totals a month. Instagram deduplicates reach within the window it computed, and there is no arithmetic that recovers a monthly reach from thirty daily ones. Where a figure has to cover a period, it has to be asked for over that period.
How to show it to a brand
Show both rates, side by side, and say which is which. A brand that has been sent follower-based rates by every other creator will read yours as lower unless the difference is explained — and the explanation is the argument: your rate is computed against the people the post actually reached, and here is the sample it came from.
That is what the account grade prints: engagement rate by reach as the scored measure, the followers-based rate beside it as a comparison that scores nothing, and the number of posts behind each. The data underneath it comes from the Instagram connector, which records reach daily — and it has to be recorded, because Instagram does not keep a history of it for you.
Questions people ask
How do you calculate engagement rate by reach?
Divide engagements by reach and multiply by 100. On Instagram, engagements is total_interactions — likes, comments, saves and shares — and reach is the number of unique accounts that saw the post. Both come from the post’s own insights.
Is engagement rate by reach better than by followers?
It is the more meaningful of the two, because most of your followers were never shown any given post. Engagement rate by followers divides by an audience that did not see it, so it falls as an account grows regardless of the work.
What is a good engagement rate by reach on Instagram?
Compare against your own median rather than a platform-wide number, and split it by format. A single benchmark is only readable if you know its denominator, its sample and whether reels and feed posts were mixed together.
Why is my engagement rate by reach so much higher than the one a tool quoted?
Because the tool almost certainly divided by followers. If your posts reach half your followers, a followers-based rate is roughly half the reach-based one, on identical engagement.
Can a brand check my engagement rate by reach?
Only if you show them something that was computed rather than typed. Reach is private to the account, so a figure in a PDF cannot be verified — a link that recomputes from the account’s own insights and prints its sample can be.
Does engagement rate include saves and shares?
It should. Instagram’s total_interactions counts likes, comments, saves and shares, and saves and shares are the two that carry a post past its existing audience. A rate built only on public likes and comments is missing half of what happened.
Sources
- Meta — Instagram Platform insights — total_interactions and reach as the API defines them, and which metrics need the account’s own token
- Meta — Instagram Platform changelog — The deprecation of impressions and the introduction of views, which changed what a view-based rate means
Read next
- How to tell if someone bought followers or likes on InstagramOutside tools can only guess whether an Instagram account bought followers or likes. With the account’s own reach it is arithmetic. The signs, and how to check.
- Where your Instagram insights wentInstagram keeps account metrics for about 90 days, serves post insights only as a running total, and stops serving a story after 24 hours. What that costs you.