ig-audit

The only honest source of what works for an account is that account. Every rule in every Instagram guide, including the ones in this pack, is a prior. The user's own last 30 posts are the evidence.

Input

Ask for whichever the user has:

• Insights per post: views, reach, interactions, watch time, saves, shares, follows, and the non-follower share of reach. Screenshots are fine.
• Or the retention graph for their best and worst recent reels. This one screenshot is worth more than the rest combined.
• Or just the posts and their view counts, which is enough for a first pass.

Also read ~/.instagram-agent/log.md if it exists, since it records which hook formula each post used.

Pulling it yourself through PostZen

If the PostZen MCP tools are in this session, most of the numbers come from there and the user only screenshots what the API does not carry.

1. listAccounts({ platform: "instagram" }) for the account _id.
2. getAnalytics({ platform: "instagram", accountId, source: "all", fromDate, toDate, limit: 100, sortBy: "date" }). Per post you get content, publishedAt, mediaType (image, video, carousel), platformAnalytics[].platformPostUrl, and analytics with views, reach, likes, comments, shares, saves, engagementRate. Page with page if pagination says there is more. source: "all" includes posts published by hand, which PostZen imports going back up to 366 days from when the account was connected. Date ranges are clamped to 366 days. If the last month looks thin, syncExternalPosts({ accountId }) pulls the latest 20 posts from the last 30 days on demand.
3. getDailyMetrics({ platform: "instagram", accountId, fromDate, toDate }) for the week-by-week shape. These are post metrics summed by publish date, not account insights. attribution: "received" puts the numbers on the day they were observed instead.
4. getFollowerStats({ accountIds: "<_id>", fromDate, toDate }) for the follower curve. accountIds is a comma-separated string, not an array. PostZen reads only the current follower count from Instagram and builds the history from its own snapshots, so expect the curve to start at the connection date. A week-old connection has a week of points.
5. getPostTimeline({ postId }) for one post's day-by-day numbers when the question is how long a reel kept travelling.

Three things about these numbers:

• impressions is a copy of views; Instagram retired impressions.
• clicks is always 0 for Instagram. It is not reported, so it is not a real zero.
• engagementRate is (likes + comments + shares + saves) / views × 100. Useful for ranking, but it is not the Instagram app's number.

What still needs a screenshot, because the API does not expose it to anyone: the retention graph and hold at 3 seconds, average watch time, non-follower share of reach, follows per post, profile visits, link taps, and every story metric (story insights expire after 24 hours and PostZen skips them). Ask for the retention graphs of the best and worst three; that is still the most valuable input on the page.

What to actually measure

Raw views is the least useful number on the page, because it is mostly a function of how many people already follow the account. Compute these instead and show the working:

Rank by outlier multiple and sends per reach, not views. A reel with 4,000 views and 90 sends beat the one with 60,000 views and 11. With PostZen data alone you can rank every post on the first, fifth and sixth rows and the engagement rate, which is enough for a first pass. Say which rows are missing rather than filling them in.

Then find the pattern

With the top five and bottom five side by side, look for what separates them, and be willing to conclude something the user will not like:

• Hold at 3 seconds. If the top and bottom differ here, it is the hook and nothing else, and everything downstream is a distraction.
• Hook formula. Which ids from ig-reel/hooks.json are in the top five?
• Format. Reel, carousel, single image.
• Length. Group into under 15s, 15 to 30s, 30 to 60s, over 60s.
• Theme.
• Whether the user replied to comments in the first hour.
• Day and time. Check this last and only if the others show nothing. It is almost never the cause and it is where people want it to be.

State the finding as a claim with the evidence attached, and say how confident it is. With 30 posts you can see a pattern. With 6 you cannot, and saying so is better than inventing one.

The distinction that saves people months

A reel that gets views and no follows is not a failed reel, it is a profile problem. A reel that gets no views is a hook problem. Separate the two before recommending anything. If non-follower reach is high and follows per reach is low, stop rewriting hooks and go to /ig-profile.

Output

AUDIT  ·  31 posts  ·  Jun 12 - Sep 5  ·  median views 4,100

TOP 5 BY OUTLIER MULTIPLE
  18.2x  #3  Nobody Tells You   74,600 views  62% non-follower  hold@3s 71%  128 sends
   6.4x  #1  Cost Confession    26,300 views  48% non-follower  hold@3s 64%   71 sends
  ...

BOTTOM 5
   0.3x  #11 Numbered            1,200 views  9% non-follower   hold@3s 31%    2 sends
  ...

WHAT THE DATA SAYS
1. Hold at 3 seconds is the whole story. Top five average 66%, bottom five 33%.
   Everything else you are worried about is downstream of the first two seconds.
2. The posts where you were the one who looked bad: mean 8.1x vs 0.9x for
   everything else. n=5. Strongest signal here and it is not close.
3. Tool listicles get views and nothing else. High reach, no sends, no follows.
   Three of your bottom five.
4. Day of week shows nothing. Your Tuesday and Friday means are inside the
   noise. Stop optimising it.

STOP: listicles.
DO MORE: the ones with a cost you paid and a number attached.

Then hand the conclusions to /ig-plan so next week is built on the user's own evidence rather than on defaults, and to /ig-viral so the swipe file gets filtered to the formulas that work for this account specifically.