Where to find your Instagram analytics, and the one thing Insights will not tell you
Where every Instagram number actually lives, what Insights will not show you, and what 340 accounts reveal about reading your own. 22 September 2026.
What the numbers say
Instagram Insights shows you your own averages. The thing it cannot show you is your spread, and the spread is where the information is. Across 340 accounts with at least five analysed Reels each, covering 1,984 Reels, the median account's single best Reel was seen 4.2 times as often as that same account's median Reel. For 89 of those 340 accounts the best Reel was at least 10 times the median. So the average Reel on an account is not a description of what that account can do. It is a description of what it usually does, which is a different question, and the gap between the two is the only part worth studying.
When you open Insights, do not read the average. Sort by views, find the gap between your best Reel and your typical one, and then go and work out what the best one did differently. That comparison is the whole exercise.
Sample of 340, measured on 2026-09-22. Scrptly production database, queried 2026-09-22. 340 Instagram accounts holding 1,984 Reels deduplicated by shortcode, restricted to accounts with at least 5 analysed Reels so that a median means something.
The measurement
Each account's best Reel divided by its own median Reel, both measured in views. Only accounts with at least 5 analysed Reels are included, because a median across three Reels is not a median. The five bands below cover all 340 accounts: 120 plus 85 plus 46 plus 53 plus 36. Find the band you are in before you decide whether your account has a reach problem or a consistency problem.
| Best reel versus your median | Accounts in this band | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Under 3 times | 120 | Flat. Every Reel performs about the same, which usually means nothing has broken out yet |
| 3 to 6 times | 85 | Normal. The median account sits here, at 4.2 times |
| 6 to 10 times | 46 | Something is working. One format is clearly outrunning the rest |
| 10 to 25 times | 53 | A real outlier. Worth taking apart beat by beat before posting anything else |
| 25 times or more | 36 | One Reel found an audience far outside the following. The job is working out whether it can be repeated |
One Reel, beat by beat
This is what taking an outlier apart looks like. One real Reel from the corpus, not a composite: 430,006 followers, seen 18,918,907 times, which is 44 times the following. It runs 32 seconds and scored 10 for hook strength. Instagram Insights would tell you this Reel did well. It would not tell you why, and the why is the part you can use again.
| At | What happens |
|---|---|
| 0:00 to 0:04 | Hook: day number, the secret, and who must not find out. The stakes are stated before anything else |
| 0:04 to 0:14 | Show yesterday's engagement numbers on screen, explain the conversion, reveal today's figure |
| 0:14 to 0:18 | Add the unexpected extra and announce the new total |
| 0:18 to 0:22 | Proof: the actual payment confirmation on screen, then the cover-up detail that makes it funny |
| 0:22 to 0:27 | Restate the mechanic plainly, to camera, so a new viewer knows what their like does |
| 0:28 to 0:32 | Hard cut to a black scoreboard: total so far, amount remaining, and a reason to come back tomorrow |
What to do next
- Open the Instagram app, go to your profile and tap the three lines, then Insights. That is the account level view: reach, interactions and followers, with a date range selector at the top that defaults to the last 7 days.
- For a single Reel, open the Reel itself and tap View Insights underneath it. This is the only place that shows watch time and replays for that Reel, and it is the number that matters most.
- For the desktop version, go to Meta Business Suite and open Insights there. It holds a longer history than the app does and lets you export, which the app will not do.
- Now do the part Insights cannot: sort your Reels by views, take the top one and the median one, and write down what is different about the first three seconds of each. That difference is your actual finding.
- If you would rather not do that by hand, run your handle through Scrptly. It scores the hook on every Reel and returns the beat-by-beat structure shown above for the ones that broke out. The first analysis does not need an account.