How Agencies Can Benchmark Client Accounts Against Their Category

Benchmarking a client’s Instagram account against its category means comparing it to accounts of a similar size and niche, not just to the account’s own numbers from last month. That difference matters more than it sounds like it should. A client’s engagement rate can climb 15 percent quarter over quarter and still trail the category average, or sit flat for months while still ranking near the top of its peer set, and a report that only tracks the account against itself will never catch either case.

Agencies feel this gap first in the client call, when “we’re up from last month” gets the follow up question every account manager dreads, up compared to what. Without a category number to answer with, the conversation defaults to gut feel, and gut feel is a hard thing to defend when a client is deciding whether to renew.

This post covers how to define the right comparison set for a given client, which metrics are worth pulling into a category benchmark, where Instagram’s own tools stop being useful for the job, and how to turn the result into a report that actually changes the conversation.

Why “Better Than Last Month” Isn’t Enough for a Client Report

A month over month comparison answers one question, whether an account is moving in the right direction. It says nothing about whether that direction is fast enough, or whether a competitor is closing the same gap twice as quickly. For a brand marketing team that only reports to itself, that might be enough. For an agency, whose entire relationship with a client runs through the perceived value of its reporting, it usually isn’t.

AgencyAnalytics’ 2026 benchmarks report, based on a survey of 494 agency professionals, found that 97 percent rate accurate reporting as important or extremely important to client retention, and 76 percent call it extremely important. The same report lists a lack of perceived value over time and performance not meeting expectations among the leading reasons clients leave, cited by 32 percent and 31 percent of agencies respectively (AgencyAnalytics, 2026 Agency Benchmarks Report). Both of those reasons are, at their root, a category problem. A client who never learns what “good” looks like for an account their size has no way to judge performance except against their own last report, and once growth naturally slows, that comparison stops being flattering no matter how the account is actually doing against its real competition.

Picking the Right Comparison Set for Each Client

“Category” is doing a lot of work in that phrase, and it’s worth being specific about what belongs in it before pulling any numbers.

Category, Not Just the Two Names a Client Gives You

Ask a client who their competitors are and most will name the same one or two accounts, usually whoever they’ve noticed running an ad or getting mentioned in a meeting. That’s a real data point, but it’s a sample size of two, and it tends to overweight whichever competitor happens to be loud rather than whichever one is actually setting the pace. A category benchmark needs a wider set, built from accounts that sell to the same audience and sit in the same content niche, whether or not the client has ever heard of them.

A boutique fitness studio client might name one nearby gym as its only real rival, but the category that actually determines what a good engagement rate looks like includes every boutique studio account competing for the same local audience, not just the one with a billboard. Pulling six to ten accounts into the comparison set, rather than the two a client happens to know by name, is usually enough to smooth out the noise from any single competitor’s unusual month without turning the benchmark into a research project.

Match Account Size, Not Just Niche

Comparing a 12,000 follower client to a 400,000 follower category leader produces a number that’s technically accurate and practically useless, since engagement rate and growth rate both move with account size on their own, separate from anything the two accounts are doing differently. A comparison set works best when it’s narrowed to accounts within roughly the same follower tier as the client, in the same category, so the gap that shows up is about execution rather than scale.

What to Actually Benchmark

Two numbers do most of the work in a category benchmark, engagement rate and follower growth rate, and both vary widely enough by category and size that a single site wide average is close to meaningless for any individual client.

Engagement Rate by Category

Hootsuite’s analysis of over a million social posts, run with the data science agency Critical Truth, puts the overall Instagram engagement rate at 3 percent, with Reels averaging 2.7 percent. Broken out by industry, the spread is wide (Hootsuite, engagement rate benchmarks):

A retail client sitting at 3.2 percent is beating its category. A finance client at the same 3.2 percent is trailing one, and a report that only shows the platform wide average of 3 percent would tell the finance client they’re doing fine when their actual peer set says otherwise.

The gap between feed and Reels engagement is worth benchmarking separately too, since a client’s content mix can flatter or hide their real standing. A client posting mostly static images will show up against the lower Reels average even if their feed performance is genuinely strong, and a client leaning heavily on Reels needs their rate compared against the Reels column, not the blended feed number, or the benchmark will make a perfectly healthy account look like it’s underperforming.

Follower Growth Rate by Account Size

Socialinsider’s 2026 Instagram benchmark report, drawn from 35 million posts across 447,613 accounts over 2025, breaks annual follower growth rate down by account size instead, and shows the same pattern holding at every tier, growth slowing from 2024 to 2025 while remaining consistently higher for smaller accounts (Socialinsider, 2026 Instagram benchmarks):

This is the table that makes a client’s growth slowdown legible. A 15,000 follower account that grew 18 percent in 2025 is behind its size tier’s 17.2 percent average by less than a point, essentially keeping pace, even though 18 percent looks like a much smaller number than the 33.8 percent that same account might have posted back in 2024.

Where Instagram’s Native Insights Run Out

Instagram’s own Insights tab is built to answer one question, how is this account doing against its own history. It has no view into any other account’s engagement rate or growth curve, which means a category comparison can’t be built from Insights alone no matter how carefully it’s read. Getting the same numbers for a client’s peer set means either manually checking each competitor’s public engagement over time by hand, which doesn’t scale past two or three accounts, or using a tool built to pull those numbers for a chosen set of profiles side by side.

Hexrate’s Compete tracks engagement rate and follower growth for a client’s account next to whichever competitors and category peers an agency selects, so the comparison an agency needs for a report is already sitting there each month rather than something to reconstruct manually before every deadline. It’s also the fastest way to check the kind of question that comes up mid quarter, like whether a client really is growing faster than their named competitors once follower counts are converted into comparable rates, or whether a rival’s sudden jump is a real shift in strategy or a one off spike that will flatten out on its own.

Turning Benchmarks Into a Report Clients Actually Read

A category number is only useful in a report if it sits next to the client’s own number on the same line, not buried in an appendix. The most direct version is a single sentence at the top of the engagement section, something like “your engagement rate this month was 2.9 percent against a category average of 3.1 percent,” followed by whatever context explains the gap. That single sentence does more for a client relationship than several pages of the account’s own trend lines, because it’s the only part of the report that answers the question a client is actually asking, which is whether their spend is working as well as it could be.

It also does work outside the reporting cycle. The same AgencyAnalytics report found 22 percent of agencies say clear reporting with benchmark context helps them win new business, since a prospect can see exactly where their current results sit before signing anything (AgencyAnalytics, 2026 Agency Benchmarks Report). Getting the underlying metrics right matters just as much here as the comparison itself, since a benchmark built on the wrong idea of what counts as a good engagement rate for the account’s size or on a vanity metric that doesn’t reflect real performance will lead a client to the wrong conclusion no matter how clean the report looks.

How Often to Refresh the Comparison

A category benchmark isn’t a one time setup. Competitors change posting strategy, category wide engagement drifts as Instagram’s algorithm shifts what it rewards, and a comparison set that was accurate in January can be stale by the summer. Checking the client’s own numbers against its peer set monthly, alongside the regular report, catches most of what matters day to day. A wider check, confirming that the comparison set itself still makes sense and swapping out any competitor who has drifted into a different size tier or shut down their account, is worth doing quarterly rather than monthly, since the set itself changes more slowly than the numbers do.

It’s also worth rebuilding the comparison set the moment a client’s own account crosses into a new follower tier. An account that grows from 40,000 to 60,000 followers over a year hasn’t just gained followers, it has moved into a bracket where, per the growth rate table above, the expected pace slows from roughly 17 percent to roughly 14 percent a year. Leaving the old comparison set in place after that kind of jump means measuring the client against a bar that no longer applies to them, in either direction.

Where Hexrate Fits

Building a category benchmark by hand means tracking down public engagement and growth numbers for a handful of accounts every reporting cycle, for every client, which is the kind of work that gets skipped once an agency has more than a few accounts on its books. Hexrate’s agency tools are built around exactly that gap, keeping a client’s account and its category comparison set in one dashboard so the number that answers “up compared to what” is ready before the client asks the question.