You cannot see a competitor's retention, and you do not need it

What you can and cannot see

Competitor analysis on Instagram is constrained by what the platform shows publicly, and most tools in this space are vaguer about that boundary than they should be. The honest version is short.

Anyone offering you a competitor's retention curve is modelling it, not measuring it. That can still be useful, but it should be labelled, and the same applies to our own estimates.

The comparison that works

With views, likes, comments and follower count you can build the one metric that survives comparison between accounts of different sizes: views per follower. A reel at three times follower count is an outlier; ten times is exceptional. In our sample 488 of 2,518 Reels clear three times and 235 clear ten.

Raw views cannot do this job. Comparing your 40,000 view reel against a competitor's 900,000 tells you their audience is bigger, which you already knew from their follower count.

Benchmarks to compare against

A method you can run on any account

1. Record follower count first. Every number afterwards gets divided by it.
2. Take their last 20 to 30 Reels, not their best three. The best three are survivorship bias.
3. Compute views per follower for each, and find their median.
4. Mark every reel at three times their own median. Those are the ones worth studying.
5. For those only, write down the first three seconds in plain language. This is the actual deliverable.
6. Check the length of the outliers against the rest. In our sample the under 15 second band is far the weakest.
7. Compare their median like and comment rates to the benchmarks above to see whether their audience is engaged or just large.

Step five is where the value is, and it is the step every dashboard skips, because it cannot be automated into a chart. The output is a sentence describing how someone opened a video, which you can then use.

Figures on this page come from 2,518 Instagram Reels across 528 accounts, analysed by Scrptly. The source table holds 3,554 rows; it is deduplicated to 2,518 unique Reels so no reel is counted twice. Read 2026-10-08.