the IG metric that correlates with reach for us this year is profile visits per post.
we run a cpg brand. coffee subscriptions. 11k followers on the brand IG. wrote previously about killing the carousel-heavy content strategy and going back to reels-only.
we are 11 months into reels-only and i finally have enough data to talk about which metric is actually predictive.
guru advice says watch saves and shares. we tracked saves, shares, comments, completion rate, watch time, and profile visits per post for 87 reels across the year.
the metric that correlated most strongly with the reel hitting outside our follower base was profile visits per post. specifically, profile visits divided by accounts reached.
reels with high profile visit rate hit non-follower reach of 4x to 11x our follower count. reels with low profile visit rate stayed within our follower count even when they had decent saves and shares.
the why is intuitive in retrospect. profile visits signal to the algorithm that the content is making people curious about the account. saves signal value-to-this-viewer but not necessarily distribution-worthy.
what changed in our process. we now design every reel for the question "would this make a stranger want to visit the profile." we are not optimising for value-in-the-content (saves) or value-for-the-network (shares). we are optimising for curiosity-about-the-source.
practical change: we added our face to about 60 percent of reels. people get curious about people, not products. our profile visit rate went up about 38 percent in two months.
if your reels save well but never hit non-follower reach, look at your profile visit rate.