How to Track Competitor Engagement in a Spreadsheet

You don't need access to a competitor's analytics dashboard to track their engagement. Likes, comments, views, and posting dates are all public on any open Instagram or TikTok profile — the only real problem is getting those numbers into a spreadsheet without copying them by hand. The fastest way: sort the competitor's feed with a browser extension like FeedRama, select the posts you care about, and export everything to CSV in one click.

This guide walks through the full workflow — which metrics are worth recording, how to pull them, and how to structure a tracking sheet you'll actually keep updated.

What you can (and can't) see on a competitor's account

Before building the sheet, it helps to know what's actually available. On public profiles, the platforms expose per-post likes, comments, view counts, share counts on TikTok, captions, and timestamps. What you'll never get from the outside: reach, impressions, follower demographics, click-throughs, or watch time. Those live in the account owner's private analytics.

The good news is that public metrics are enough for the questions that matter in competitive analysis: What formats are working for them? How often do they post? Is their engagement trending up or down? Which topics outperform their baseline?

Step by step: from their profile to your spreadsheet

Here's the workflow we built FeedRama around. It takes a few minutes per account once you've done it twice.

1. Install FeedRama. Grab it from the Chrome Web Store — it's free and works on instagram.com and tiktok.com in desktop Chrome.
2. Open the competitor's profile. Any public account works. No need to follow them or log into anything special.
3. Sort the feed. Use FeedRama to reorder the profile by likes, comments, or views, or just by date if you want a chronological record. Sorting first means the export arrives pre-ranked.
4. Select the posts to track. After sorting, select everything in your chosen window — the last month, the top 30 performers, whatever your sheet tracks.
5. Export to CSV. One click gives you a file with the post URL, creation date, likes, views, comments, shares, saves where the platform exposes them, and the full caption. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets.

One honest caveat: sorting is free (unlimited sorts, capped to the previous 25 posts or one week of content), but CSV export is a Pro feature. If you're tracking competitors weekly, the export alone usually pays for itself in saved copy-paste time. For the Instagram-specific details, see our guide to exporting Instagram post data to CSV.

Structuring the tracking spreadsheet

A competitor sheet fails when it tries to track too much. Start with one tab per competitor and these columns:

• Post URL and date — both come straight from the export.
• Likes, comments, views — the raw public numbers.
• Engagement rate — a formula column. For video, (likes + comments) / views works well because it normalizes for how widely a post was distributed.
• Format and topic — two quick manual tags (e.g. "talking head / pricing tips"). This is where the insights come from.

Then add a summary tab that averages engagement rate by week and by topic tag. Within a month you'll be able to answer "what should we make more of?" with numbers instead of vibes.

Two pitfalls worth designing around from day one. First, record each competitor's follower count in a separate snapshot column every time you pull data — it isn't included in per-post metrics, and without it you can't compare per-follower rates across accounts of different sizes. Second, watch for outliers before drawing conclusions: one video that got picked up by the algorithm can triple an account's weekly average and make a mediocre strategy look brilliant. A simple median column alongside the mean keeps a single viral post from skewing your read. And resist the urge to track ten competitors at once — three accounts updated reliably every week beat ten accounts updated whenever you remember. The sheet only earns its keep when the data is consistent enough to show trends.

Do the same thing on TikTok

The workflow is identical on TikTok, and arguably more useful there because view counts are public on every video. Open the competitor's TikTok profile, sort their videos by views or shares, select, and export. TikTok's share and save counts give you two extra signal columns that Instagram doesn't surface. We cover the details in how to export TikTok data to a spreadsheet.

Manual tracking vs. official tools vs. FeedRama

The official analytics tools are excellent — for your own accounts. The moment the question is "how are they doing?", you're choosing between manual copying, code, or an in-browser export.

How often should you update the sheet?

Weekly is the sweet spot for most teams. Engagement on a post mostly settles within the first several days, so a weekly pull captures near-final numbers without drowning you in bookkeeping. Set a recurring 15-minute block: open each tracked profile, sort by date, export the new week, paste into the sheet. If you only check monthly, you'll still get useful trend lines — just tag each pull with the date you collected it, since numbers keep creeping up over time.

If you haven't yet decided which competitors deserve a tab, our walkthrough on doing competitor research on Instagram covers how to pick accounts worth watching.

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