Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator & Audit

What is Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator & Audit?

You have a shortlist of creators and a budget to split between them. A follower count doesn't tell you whether anyone still engages, and checking by hand means opening two dozen posts per account and copying numbers into a sheet.

Paste Instagram and Threads profiles and get one row per creator, ready to sort:

Example (illustrative accounts, simplified; the real columns are listed below):

Creator	Followers	Typical post (likes + comments)	Engagement rate	Posts per week	Last post
@creator_a	820,000	3,280	0.4%	1.2	19 days ago
@creator_b	95,000	2,945	3.1%	3.5	1 day ago
@creator_c	41,000	2,296	5.6%	4.0	2 days ago

The 820,000-follower account gets about the same engagement per post as the 95,000 one, and it has gone quiet. You can see that in one run, before you pay anyone.

No login needed. It reads what any visitor can see on a public profile, and the normal Start flow never asks for your account.

What it doesn't do: audience demographics, fake-follower scores or brand-safety checks. Those need data that isn't public. It measures how a creator's public posts perform.

Why agencies and brands use it

• Shortlist creators in minutes. Paste 30 candidates and sort by engagement rate. For 30 Instagram accounts that costs $0.45.
• See past a big follower count. The engagement rate uses the typical post, not the average, so one viral post can't make a quiet account look busy.
• Negotiate with numbers. Bring median likes, comments and views to the rate conversation, not the follower count alone.
• Keep your roster honest. Schedule a monthly re-check of your ambassadors and see who has stopped posting.

You also get each account's standout posts, average figures for comparison with other tools, and a plain-language note whenever a number is missing.

Price: $0.015 per Instagram account, $0.005 per Threads account. Apify's free plan includes $5 a month, which is about 330 Instagram accounts, so your first shortlist is effectively free.

It checks accounts you have already found. To find creators by hashtag, niche or location, use a discovery tool. You can schedule runs, call the API, connect Make, Zapier or Google Sheets, and export to CSV, Excel or JSON.

How to audit Instagram and Threads accounts

1. In the Input tab, paste profile URLs or handles into Accounts, one per line. https://www.instagram.com/nasa/, https://www.threads.com/@nasa, ig:nasa and threads:nasa all work.
2. Set Recent posts per account. The default is 24, and you can go up to 50.
3. Click Start. A Threads account takes a few seconds. An Instagram account with 24 posts takes about 30 seconds.
4. Open the Output tab, or export the dataset. Accounts that could not be read are still listed, with a status and a reason.

What data does it return?

Field	Notes
status	success, or the reason the account could not be fully read (see below)
platform, username, profileUrl
followerCount	Exact
postsAnalyzed, postsRequested	Pinned posts are skipped
windowStart, windowEnd	Dates of the oldest and newest post analysed
likesMedian, likesMean
commentsMedian, commentsMean	Replies on Threads
viewsMedian, viewsMean, postsWithViews	Instagram videos and reels only. Threads doesn't show views in the profile feed
engagementRate	Already a percentage: 2.0 means 2%, and 0.0167 means 0.0167%, not 1.67%. See the definition below
engagementRateMean	The same, calculated with the mean, to compare with tools that use it
postingFrequency	Posts per week
lastPostAt, daysSinceLastPost
topPosts	The three posts with the most likes plus comments
outlierPosts	Posts with at least 3× the median engagement
repostsMedian, quotesMedian	Threads only
pinnedPostsSkipped, postsByOthersSkipped, postsFailed, postsWithoutLikes	What was left out, so you can tell a small sample from a quiet account
authMode	How the account was read: logged_out, graph_api or cookie
notes, error	Plain-language reasons whenever a number is missing or the sample is small

What each status means:

• success: the account was read.
• partial: only some of the posts could be read.
• no_posts: the account has no posts in the period you asked for.
• not_found, private, login_required: the account doesn't exist, is private, or needs a login.
• cookie_expired: the session cookie you gave no longer works.
• parse_failed: the account could not be read.
• unsupported_input, unsupported_platform: not an Instagram or Threads profile.
• not_processed: the run stopped before reaching this account.

How is engagement rate calculated?

A post's engagement is its likes plus comments.

engagementRate is the typical (median) post's engagement divided by followers, times 100. An account with 100,000 followers whose typical post gets 2,000 likes and comments has an engagement rate of 2.0. The median is used because one viral post can double the average and tell you nothing about the next post you pay for.

postingFrequency is how many posts a week the account published over the posts analysed. Check daysSinceLastPost next to it: an account that posted twice a week until four months ago still shows 2.0.

Pinned posts are skipped, so an old pinned post doesn't stretch the time window.

Collab posts on Instagram are skipped by default when the partner owns them, because their likes come from both audiences. Turn on includeCollabPosts to count them. Reposts on Threads are always skipped.

Unknown is null, never 0. A post with a hidden like count is left out of the like median rather than counted as zero.

How much does it cost?

You pay per account.

Event	Charged for	Price	Per 1,000 accounts
account-audited-instagram	An Instagram account read (success, partial or no_posts)	$0.015	$15
account-audited-threads	A Threads account read (same statuses)	$0.005	$5
account-unavailable	An account that could not be read	$0.0005	$0.50

Instagram costs more because each post has to be read separately. On Threads, the profile feed already shows the counts.

You are not charged for:

• inputs that are not profiles;
• Facebook pages;
• accounts the run didn't reach because it stopped early.

Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month. That covers about 330 Instagram accounts or about 1,000 Threads accounts.

To cap what a run can spend, set a maximum cost per run. The run stops when the next account would go over it, and the accounts it didn't reach come back as not_processed. One run takes up to 1,000 accounts.

Input example

{
  "accounts": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
    "threads:nasa"
  ],
  "postsPerAccount": 12
}

Output example

{
  "platform": "Threads",
  "username": "nasa",
  "status": "success",
  "authMode": "logged_out",
  "followerCount": 12781695,
  "postsAnalyzed": 12,
  "windowStart": "2026-09-25T20:17:28.000Z",
  "windowEnd": "2026-10-16T17:10:38.000Z",
  "likesMedian": 2076.5,
  "commentsMedian": 56.5,
  "viewsMedian": null,
  "engagementRate": 0.0167,
  "postingFrequency": 3.69,
  "daysSinceLastPost": 1.1,
  "outlierPosts": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.threads.com/@nasa/post/Decc755lYhC",
      "likes": 41038,
      "comments": 586,
      "timesMedian": 19.5
    }
  ],
  "notes": ["Threads does not publish view counts in the profile feed; viewsMedian is null"]
}

Three ways to read an account

Logged out (default)

Nothing to set up. It reads up to 50 recent posts per account on both platforms.

Official Instagram API (optional, for business and creator accounts)

If you have an Instagram professional account, you can use Meta's official Business Discovery API to read other professional accounts.

1. Your Instagram account must be a business or creator account linked to a Facebook Page.
2. Create an app at developers.facebook.com and add the Instagram product with Facebook Login.
3. In the Graph API Explorer, generate a user access token with instagram_basic, instagram_manage_insights and pages_read_engagement. Exchange it for a long-lived token, which lasts about 60 days.
4. Find your Instagram user ID with GET /me/accounts?fields=instagram_business_account.
5. Paste the token into igGraphAccessToken and the ID into igGraphUserId.

The API can't read personal accounts. Those, and any account the API fails on, are read logged out instead, with the reason in notes.

Your session cookie (optional, at your own risk)

Read this before pasting a cookie.

• The account can be restricted or banned. Meta acts against accounts used for automated access. Use a spare account you can afford to lose, never your own or a client's.
• Logging in means accepting Meta's terms, which prohibit automated collection.
• Cookies expire. An expired cookie is reported in notes, and the run carries on logged out.

Most people don't need this. A cookie only helps with accounts that show nothing to logged-out visitors. The cookie is stored as a secret input and is never written to the log or the results. This mode is experimental.

Before, during and after a campaign

Stage	Actor	What you get
Before: choosing creators	This audit	Followers, median engagement rate and posting frequency per account
During: while the posts are live	Instagram, Facebook & Threads Post Metrics Tracker	The creators' posts re-read on a schedule, with growth since the last run and since tracking started, and deleted posts flagged
After: the wrap report	Instagram, Facebook, Threads & YouTube Post Metrics	One table of every delivered post's likes, comments, shares and views, across Instagram, Facebook, Threads and YouTube, plus TikTok from November 1, 2026

FAQ

Is it legal to audit Instagram and Threads accounts?

The default mode reads only what any logged-out visitor can see on a public profile, and it uses no account. The cookie mode is different: see the warning above. This is not legal advice, so check the rules that apply to you.

What can it not return?

• Facebook pages. Facebook shows too little to logged-out visitors to audit an account. These rows come back unsupported_platform and are not charged.
• Reach, impressions, saves and audience demographics. Only the account itself can see these.
• Fake-follower scores. Those need the follower list, which isn't public. A low engagement rate on a large account is the honest signal here.
• Threads view counts. Threads doesn't show them in the profile feed.
• Private accounts, unless you use the cookie mode with an account that is already allowed to see them. A cookie doesn't unlock a private account it couldn't see anyway.

Why did an account come back login_required?

Instagram and Threads send logged-out visitors to the login page both for handles that don't exist and for accounts that need a login. Check the spelling first. If many correctly spelled accounts come back this way, the platform is limiting access for now, so try again later.

Something broke or a number looks wrong

Open an issue in the Issues tab with the account and the run link.