Enter your actual campaign numbers to instantly see how they compare to India 2026 benchmarks for your creator tier and niche.
Nia measures real campaign performance and compares it to benchmarks — without any manual data entry. Free on iOS & Android.
Download Nia FreeTwo sets of India 2026 bands. Engagement rate is scored against the creator tier: Nano (1K–10K) 5–8%, Micro (10K–100K) 3–5%, Mid-tier (100K–500K) 2–3%, Macro (500K–1M) 1.5–2%, Mega (1M+) 1–1.5%. Cost per engagement is scored against the niche, because a finance audience costs several times what a gaming one does to reach.
Total campaign spend divided by total engagements — likes, comments and shares. The bands this tool uses are gaming ₹5–15, food ₹6–18, lifestyle ₹6–20, fitness ₹7–22, beauty ₹8–25, fashion ₹10–30, tech ₹12–40 and finance ₹15–50. The spread reflects what an engagement is worth: a finance follower may be worth thousands in lifetime value, so creators price accordingly and brands still pay it.
Usually, but check why before celebrating. A genuinely low CPE means you found an underpriced creator with a well-matched audience. It can also mean the engagements are low-quality — bought likes and pod comments cost the creator nothing and will drag CPE down while delivering no buyers. Cross-check the audience quality before treating a very low CPE as a win.
Because engagement measures attention and sales measure intent, and the two come apart in specific ways. The usual causes are an audience that follows the creator for entertainment rather than recommendations, a mismatch between the product and what that audience buys, a call to action buried in a caption nobody reads, or a landing page that does not match what the post promised. Engagement being fine is what tells you the problem is downstream of the creator.
At least three to five posts from a creator, and ideally the same across two or three creators. A single post is dominated by whether the algorithm picked it up that day, which has little to do with the partnership. Benchmarking one post tells you about that post; benchmarking five tells you about the creator.
Your own, wherever you have them. Market benchmarks are a starting point for a brand with no history and a sanity check for one that has drifted, but your category, price point and creative style shift the numbers enough that your own baseline is always the better comparison. Use these bands until you have twenty campaigns of your own, then trust yours.
Work through it in order rather than blaming the creator first. Was the audience actually relevant, or bought on follower count? Was the brief specific enough to produce content the audience recognised as genuine? Was the format right — a Story for a considered purchase rarely works? Was there a clear next step? Most below-par campaigns fail at the brief, and the brief is the part you control.
No, and that is a real limitation. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and static posts have very different reach profiles for the same audience, and the bands here are broad enough to cover all of them rather than tuned to each. If you are comparing a Reel campaign against a static-post campaign, expect the Reel to look better on reach and worse on cost per engagement, largely because of the format.