How To Calculate Engagement Rate for Ecommerce

What good is a brilliant online ad if no one interacts with it? What value does witty social media content have for your business if it doesn’t boost your number of followers? While creating good content is a key aspect of marketing, that content must also exist to boost engagement with your brand. You want people to go from your content to visiting your profile page, shopping in your ecommerce store, and, ultimately, becoming loyal customers.

This is why many business owners and marketers turn to a metric known as engagement rate. It compares engagement (e.g., total comments, likes, and clicks) to either the total number of campaign impressions or a brand’s total followers. Your engagement rate essentially shows how effectively a post or a campaign is impacting people when adjusted for total audience size. Here are some ways to calculate your own engagement rate and identify opportunities to reach more customers.

What is engagement rate?

Engagement rate (ER) is a metric used to measure the level of interaction your content receives from your audience. It’s typically expressed in the form of a percentage. This percentage might measure customer engagement metrics such as likes, comments, video views, shares, clicks, and saves, depending on the platform or medium. It’s a common way to assess the performance of your social media profiles, website, and email marketing campaigns.

As a business owner, you may find calculating engagement rate to be essential for evaluating content performance and making data-driven decisions. A high engagement rate indicates that your content resonates with your target audience and they’re choosing to interact with that content online. All these interactions can indicate greater brand loyalty, higher conversion rates, and better visibility. Conversely, a low engagement rate may signal the need for content adjustments or a shift in your marketing strategy. By monitoring your average engagement on social media platforms and in ad campaigns, you can optimize your content strategy, improve customer retention, and allocate resources more effectively.

How to calculate engagement rate

You can calculate your engagement rate by follower count or by impressions. Both methods provide valuable insights into audience preferences, so it’s worth knowing both formulas:

By follower count

Engagement rate = (Number of engagements / Number of followers) x 100

This engagement rate formula helps measure how actively your existing audience interacts with your content. It provides a good metric for understanding overall community engagement and loyalty. It’s also useful for benchmarking performance against competitors with a similar follower size.

Here’s an example of how you can apply this engagement rate calculation: Let’s say you have 10,000 followers on Instagram. You post a photo of a new product on your page. The specific post receives 350 likes, 75 comments, and 25 shares. That adds up to 450 total engagements. Plugging this into the follower-based ER formula looks like this:

(450 / 10,000) x 100 = 4.5%

The calculation reveals that 4.5% of your followers engaged with your post on the Instagram platform. For clarity, this does not reveal your overall Instagram engagement rate; it’s the engagement for one specific post.

By impressions

Engagement rate = (Number of engagements / Number of impressions) x 100

Businesses and social media managers use this formula to calculate engagement beyond their audience of existing followers. This method is valuable for measuring the performance of paid ads, boosted posts, or email campaigns, where reach can extend beyond your existing customers.

Here’s how to apply this formula—total engagement divided by total impressions—to a real-world scenario. Let’s say you run a LinkedIn ad that generates 25,000 impressions. It elicits 600 likes, 120 comments, and 80 shares, which comes to 800 total engagements. Plugging those numbers into the formula looks like this:

(800 / 25,000) x 100 = 3.2%

The calculation reveals that 3.2% of people who saw the ad engaged with it. For clarity, it does not reveal whether those engagements were particularly meaningful connections. That would require post-engagement data such as whether the audience interaction led people to visit your website or make a purchase. Nonetheless, it’s a valuable digital marketing metric that lets you gain insights into your online ad’s resonance.

Average engagement rates

You can opt to focus on follower count or impressions when you track engagement rate percentages. Either way, a single calculation represents just a snapshot in time. If you want a better understanding of your overall engagement in a specific period of time, look at the average engagement rates of multiple campaigns or the same campaign over multiple days. Here’s what the average engagement rate formula looks like:

Average engagement rate = Total engagement rate / Total number of posts published

Businesses, marketers, and social media influencers use this metric to obtain a more accurate view of audience interaction. For example, let’s say you post on your social media page on a Friday and then track its performance over the weekend. The daily engagement rate is 4.5% for Friday, 3.2% for Saturday, and 5.8% for Sunday. We add these together and divide by three.

(4.5 + 3.2 + 5.8) / 3 = 4.5

The average daily engagement rate for this post is 4.5%. Remember, you can also use this same formula to find the average engagement rate of multiple posts, which differs from finding a different engagement rate for each day of a single post.

What is a good engagement rate?

What constitutes a good engagement rate will vary by industry, content type, and audience demographics. With that caveat, here’s a general overview based on recent trends and data as of early 2025:

Instagram

Instagram is a hub for influencer marketing, and an influencer’s engagement rate is one of the biggest factors in their ability to make money on the platform. A good engagement rate on Instagram is generally considered to be between 1% and 5%. Micro-influencers often see higher engagement rates than accounts with massive followings.

TikTok

TikTok tends to have some of the highest engagement rates on the internet. A good rate on the platform might range from 6% to 10%. 

X

X is known for comparatively low engagement rates and a dwindling user base. A good rate on this platform may range around 1%. Due to the fast-paced nature of the platform and the prevalence of bots, it can be hard to maintain and verify high engagement on X.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s algorithm evaluates the usual signals (like comments and shares) but also the professional relevance of each piece of content because most LinkedIn users are on the platform to connect with a relatively small cohort of people in their industry. With that said, any engagement above 3% is considered good for LinkedIn.

Facebook

Facebook’s engagement rates have declined in recent years, with rates between 0.09% and 1% considered average. Due to algorithm changes, Facebook posts rarely see vast organic reach. Instead, Facebook emphasizes paid advertising to boost engagement. High-quality visuals help, too.

YouTube

Anything exceeding YouTube’s average engagement rate of 3.87% is considered good. YouTube and its advertisers also focus on key metrics related to how long users watch a video, whether they watch recommended videos from the same creator, and whether they subscribe to that creator’s channel.

If you’re a content creator, you can leverage social media analytics tools to learn more about your engagement on each platform. If math isn’t your thing, you can use an online engagement rate calculator to run numbers for you. Here’s one such free calculator, but there are many to choose from.