How does Rival IQ calculate Competitor Average, Landscape Average, and Post Average?

The sections below detail how Rival IQ calculates these metrics.

In the Overview and Leaderboard dashboards, Rival IQ compares your company's numbers (Audience, Post/Week, and Engagement Total) against the Competitor Average.

Competitor Average is the average for all companies in the current landscape excluding the focus company. In a Cross-Channel Audience chart, Rival IQ uses the same Competitor Average of 640K as a reference line.

In the Overview, Leaderboard, and Custom Dashboards, you can change the benchmark to Landscape Average.

Landscape Average is the average for all companies in the current landscape including the focus company. Landscape Average is useful for analyzing a set of handles you manage, a set of collaborating handles, or are working to describe an industry in general.

In contrast to the graph in the previous section, when viewing the full set of companies using Landscape Average, New Belgium pulls the benchmark up to 705K.

The Social Posts tab displays Post Average as the comparison metric.

Post Average represents the weighted average of all posts matching the current search criteria (such as keyword, channel, tag, and company filter). Rival IQ weights engagement rates by follower count (for example, larger handles affect the calculation in proportion to their follower counts). Rival IQ weights Engagement Total per Post by the number of posts.

In addition to the At-a-Glance panel, Rival IQ calculates the engagement rate (by follower) and engagement total per post metrics throughout the Social Posts dashboard in a similar manner.

For example, in the hashtags report above, Rival IQ does not compute the Engagement Total / Post at the company level (by adding up the value for all companies and dividing by the number of companies). Instead, Rival IQ computes at the post level, adding up the total engagement earned by each of post and dividing by the number of posts.