A competitor analysis is only worth having if you know what an ordinary account looks like
What a competitor analysis should tell you, and the numbers to judge it against. From 453 analysed accounts, 19 September 2026.
The honest version first
Most competitor analysis stops at counting: followers, likes, how often they post. Those are the easiest numbers to get and the least useful, because they describe the account rather than the work. The parts worth having are the ones that tell you what the account is repeatedly doing and how far it travels past the audience it already has. The table below is what to look for, what each part actually tells you, and where the number comes from.
Side by side
The benchmark figures are our own measurement across 2,166 reels from 453 accounts on 2026-09-19. The Instagram row is quoted from Instagram's published ranking explainer, read 2026-09-18.
| Part | What it tells you | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Reach relative to their following | Whether the work is doing anything, separate from audience size. The median reel across 453 accounts gets 0.51 views per follower and the top tenth clears 10.03 | Views divided by follower count, per reel, then take the median |
| Content pillars | What they are actually about, which is usually narrower than the feed suggests. The median account runs 4, and the number turns out not to affect reach | Named by the analysis from their recent posts |
| Length and pacing | The shape they have settled on. The corpus median reel runs 48.1 seconds and turns roughly every 4.5 seconds | Duration and the timestamped beat breakdown |
| Who their reels are shown to | Instagram states the majority of what you see in Reels is from accounts you do not follow, so a competitor's reach is not a measure of their follower loyalty | Instagram's published ranking explainer |
| What it cannot see | Saves, shares, watch time, follower growth and anything behind their analytics login. Any tool claiming those for an account it does not own is guessing | Stated rather than measured, because the honest answer is that the data is private |
What the numbers say
The benchmark matters more than the competitor. Across 2,166 reels from 453 accounts the median reel reaches 0.51 times its own following, 64 percent of reels do not reach the audience already there, and only 10 percent clear ten times it. Without those numbers a competitor's reel with two million views is just a big number, and you cannot tell whether it beat their audience or fell well short of it.
So run the benchmark first and the competitor second. The question is never whether they got a lot of views, it is whether they got more than their own audience would explain, and how often. An account that clears ten times its following twice in five reels is doing something repeatable. One that posts to two million followers and reaches four hundred thousand is coasting on an audience it built years ago.
Sample of 2,166, measured on 2026-09-19. Scrptly production database, queried 2026-09-19. Instagram Reels only, deduplicated by shortcode, one query run.
What that looks like end to end
Input: The handle tiffanyyysanders run through Scrptly as a creator analysis, read 2026-09-19. 90,271 followers, 5 reels held.
Four content pillars, and they are specific rather than generic: Family-Centered Fitness, Fitness Self-Awareness Comedy, Filipino Cultural Pride, and Earned Transformation Stories. The measured numbers are the striking part. Median 5,431,260 views against 90,271 followers, which is 60.17 times the following, where the median account in this corpus manages 0.51 and the top tenth starts at 10.03. Median length 6.8 seconds against a corpus median of 48.1, so the format is extremely short. Mean retention 82.8, a little above the corpus median of 82.
Score returned: 8.8. 8.8 is the mean hook score across the five reels, which is slightly below the corpus average of about 8.8 to 8.9 and well inside the band where 71 percent of all reels sit. An account reaching sixty times its following while scoring ordinary on our own hook measure is the clearest argument on this page for benchmarking reach rather than trusting a score.
What to do next
- Benchmark before you compare. Work out the median views per follower for the account you are studying, then place it against 0.51 for the median and 10.03 for the top tenth. That one step tells you whether there is anything to learn here.
- Then look for what repeats rather than what performed. The worked example runs a 6.8 second format against a corpus median of 48.1, which is a decision somebody made and kept, not an accident.
- Ignore anyone selling you a competitor's saves, shares or watch time. Those sit behind their analytics login. A tool that reports them for an account it does not own is estimating and should say so.