This article provides a high-level introduction to the Engagement Rate metric and explains why Rival IQ calculates Engagement Rate differently for public and private data.

Engagement Rate is a metric that measures how much an audience interacts with a piece of content relative to its reach or audience size.

In the Competitive Public Data section, Rival IQ uses this formula to calculate Engagement Rate for all public channels except TikTok:

Engagement Rate by Follower = Total Engagement / Followers

Where Follower Count is the the audience size at the time the post was published, correlating to the number of views and people who saw a post. The resulting Engagement Rate value is a percentage that reflects the total number of interactions with the post per follower.

This approach to calculating Engagement Rate normalizes the activity across larger and smaller accounts, allowing you to compare the engagement rate of a post by a movie star with over 100,000 followers with the engagement rate of a small brand with fewer than 10,000 followers.

For TikTok, Rival IQ calculates Engagement Rate using this formula:

Engagement Rate = Total Engagement / Views

In the Your Private Data section, Rival IQ uses multiple formulas (due to differences in the information that is available across platforms) to help you analyze the success of a post. With private data, Rival IQ has access to the actual number of people who are viewing a post and can provide a true engagement rate that helps you assess actual reach on most platforms.

For example, Instagram posts show these metrics:

Engagement Rate by Reach = Total Engagement / Unique Views

Engagement Rate by Impression = Total Engagement / Total Impressions

Learn how to automate the export and delivery of any report in Rival IQ in Exporting and Setting Up Scheduled Reports.