Analytics

Once a newsroom has published to Instagram, two surfaces appear: a Performance column on the dashboard, and an Analytics button beside Distribution.

Both are hidden until at least one series has an Instagram account attached.

The Performance column

Per row: views, likes, comments, shares and saves, linking to the post. Or one of these states:

Scheduled	Queued to publish
Publish failed	Open the video to retry
Awaiting data	Published; Instagram is still counting. First numbers usually arrive within ~10 minutes

A dash is not a zero

A dash (-) means Instagram didn’t report that metric. 0 means it reported zero. The distinction is preserved everywhere, which is also why a freshly-published post shows Awaiting data rather than five zeros that would read as a flop.

Stories have no likes metric at all, so that one is always a dash for them.

The Analytics modal

Two tabs: Top performers and All posts.

Ranking against yourself

Posts are scored against your own account’s normal performance, not against anyone else’s benchmark. The display is always a multiplier:

2.4× your median views

1.8× usual engagement

Both are computed from absolute counts. Engagement rate isn’t scored, because it falls as reach rises by construction: scoring it would make a post with 5× your usual views read as below average. It’s still reported, and still fed to the explanation.

Refusing to rank is the feature working

Below 5 posts over 24 hours old, nothing is ranked:

Ranking needs a few more posts. Comparing a post against your usual performance takes at least 5 posts that are over 24h old. You have 2. The posts below are listed newest first, with their raw numbers.

Stories are excluded from the comparison entirely: they expire in 24 hours and report a different metric set.

Why a post won

Top performers get an explanation: a headline sentence plus factors, each tagged by kind: Hook, Topic, Structure, Call to action, Pacing, Visuals, Caption, Hashtags, Timing, Format, Voice, Length.

Full breakdown expands to each factor’s evidence, a confidence level, a vs usual line and a Do again line, plus two lists kept deliberately apart:

• Repeatable pattern: what to do again
• Probably won’t repeat: because “this won because the topic was in the news that week” is exactly what you must not try to reproduce

A comparison table shows this post against your usual on duration, spoken words, pace, graphics, b-roll cuts, caption words and hashtags.

Refresh

Re-ranking is arithmetic and happens every time you press it. Explanations cost an LLM call, so they’re queued only for top performers that don’t already have one, and run one at a time in rank order.

A post already explained is never re-explained.

You’ll see a queue position (“Queued · 3 ahead of it”), which is relative, because the queue is shared across accounts.

Per-post detail

Every video’s own page carries an Instagram performance section once published, with tiles for Views, Reach, Plays per account, Likes, Comments, Shares and Saves. Reels add Avg watch time, Total watch time and Avg. view-through.

Avg. view-through is not a retention curve

Instagram publishes no second-by-second retention data. This is average watch time divided by the video’s length: a single average across all views, and the panel says so on screen.

It is deliberately not capped at 100%. Replays legitimately push it past, and >100% · viewers re-watched is the most interesting signal the API returns.

A growth chart appears once there are a few hours of data. If Instagram refused a metric, the panel names which.

Two things about the cohort

The comparison is the Instagram account, not the newsroom

Two newsrooms publishing to one account are compared against the same pool, which is why the handle is always on screen. Series is carried along as a factor, so “quizzes beat horoscopes here” can surface as a finding rather than being hidden by splitting the data.

A post removed from Instagram keeps its last recorded numbers, labelled as such.

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