A brand called my 3.2% Instagram engagement rate low. We were measuring different things.

Pooya · 6 Aug 2026

In June a homeware brand asked for my rates. I sent a media kit with 3.2% engagement on it, which after the May sweep I was quietly proud of.

The reply said the other creators they were talking to were "in the double digits" and asked whether I could explain the gap.

I spent an evening drafting a discount. I nearly sent it. What I should have done first, and what I did on the second evening, was ask which formula they meant.

The two formulas

They are both called engagement rate and they measure genuinely different things.

Reach and impressions are private to the account. Only someone signed into the profile can see them, which is why any tool working from outside — including the one on this site — uses the follower version. It is not a worse formula. It is the only one visible from where a stranger stands.

Why the gap is so wide in 2026

Here is what ended the argument for me. A post does not reach the whole follower list. Published benchmarks put a typical Instagram post somewhere around 10 to 20 percent of followers, and they disagree with each other — some put it lower still. For my account that is roughly 1,300 to 2,700 people, not 13,410.

Divide the same likes and comments by 2,000 instead of by 13,410 and you do not get a slightly higher number. You get one six to ten times higher. My 3.2% by followers is somewhere between 20% and 30% by reach, from exactly the same posts, with nothing changed but the denominator.

The brand's double-digit creators were not out-performing me by a factor of four. They were quoting a different fraction, and quite possibly did not know it either. Note the honest part of this: the reach benchmarks are a range rather than a figure, so the conversion is approximate in both directions. Two creators can report wildly different rates for identical performance purely through the denominator they picked.

What a follower-based rate should look like

Once you know which formula you are reading, the bands are not mysterious. Rates fall as accounts grow, because a bigger audience is a looser one and Instagram shows any single post to a smaller share of it.

At 13,410 followers my band is 2% to 4%. My 3.2% is not low. It is slightly above the middle of the band for my size, and the only reason it looked bad is that it was placed next to a number measuring something else.

Business and brand profiles sit well below these creator bands, which is its own trap — cross-industry medians for brand accounts run nearer 0.3% to 0.5%. A shop account holding itself to a creator benchmark will conclude it is failing when it is doing fine.

What I sent instead of a discount

Three lines, and I have reused them since:

The formula, named. "3.2% is likes and comments over follower count, across my last 12 posts." Naming it costs nothing and immediately tells a competent marketer that you know there is more than one.

The band. "For an account at 13,410 followers, 2% to 4% is the ordinary range." This turns a bare number into a position.

The offer to prove it. "I can screenshot reach from my insights if the by-reach figure is what you compare against." This is the part that worked. Reach is private, so I am the only person who can supply it, and offering it unprompted is the opposite of what someone padding their numbers does.

They came back at my original rate. I did not send the discount, and I have thought since about how close I came to cutting my price in half because of a denominator.

What I check before quoting anything now

I read my own rate the same way a stranger would, from outside, using the public formula — because that is the number a brand's tool will produce when they check me, and I would rather see it first.

Then I sanity-check the audience underneath it. A rate can look good for bad reasons: bought likes and engagement pods both produce a high number with very few comments under it. One to three comments per hundred likes is ordinary. Mine runs near three, which I checked precisely because I did not want to be the creator in this story from the other side. The audience quality signals are the same ones a brand will run on you, and it is better to know.

And I keep both numbers in the kit now. Follower count second, read as a band because of the rounding, and the rate first with its formula written next to it.