How it works

Where your data comes from

Every number on your media kit is pulled directly from official platform APIs. No screenshots, no manual entry.

Official APIs only

Connect via each platform's own login. Creato gets read-only access. We never see your password and you can revoke access at any time.

Automatic sync

Connected accounts refresh at least once a day. You can also trigger a manual refresh from the app. We only read analytics, never post on your behalf.

Why recent days may be missing

Platforms take 48-72 hours to finalize daily numbers. We exclude the last two days until they're complete, so you never see zeros or half-finished totals. Your connection is fine; this is normal platform-side processing.

Views vs reach

Views count how many times content was watched. Reach counts unique people who saw it. Headlines and growth charts always use views.

Engagement rate

Interactions (likes + comments + shares, plus saves on Instagram) divided by views. Calculated the same way across all platforms.

Followers vs viewers: two different audiences

Followers are people who subscribe to your account. Viewers are people who watched your content in the selected time period. They may or may not follow you. A single viral post can shift your viewer demographics significantly without changing your follower base at all.

Instagram

TikTok

YouTube

Platform specifics

Anything to know per platform?

Most of the time we simply show what the platform gives us. A few things are worth knowing.

Instagram·Straightforward: we show what Meta provides.

Engagement rate is calculated by us

Meta doesn't publish account-level engagement rate through the API, so we compute it ourselves: (likes + comments + shares + saves) ÷ views. Everything else is shown exactly as Meta reports it.

TikTok·A few metrics work differently than in TikTok Studio.

No period comparison for total viewers & new viewers

Under the Viewers tab in TikTok Studio, you see total viewers and new viewers for the period, along with a comparison to the previous period. We don't show this comparison. TikTok's API doesn't provide this data to third parties, so we simply can't display it.

Viewer insights (gender & location) may differ slightly

The gender and location percentages under Viewer Insights may be off by around 5% compared to TikTok Studio. This comes down to how the data is calculated.

	TikTok Studio	Creato
Source	All users who actually viewed your content in the selected period	Demographics of videos posted during the period, weighted and aggregated
How	TikTok knows exactly who watched and calculates demographics directly from that pool	We take each video's audience breakdown and aggregate across all videos in the window
Accuracy	Exact	~±5% approximate

TikTok doesn't share period-level viewer demographics through the API. Aggregating from video-level data is the closest available approach.

No period comparison at 60 days

Period comparison works for 7, 14, and 28-day windows. At 60 days, TikTok's API only holds ~60 days of history. There's no earlier 60-day block to compare against, so we don't show a delta.

Creator Fund & earnings not available

Estimated earnings aren't accessible through the organic Business API. They won't appear on your kit.

YouTube·Same API as Studio, with a short finalization delay.

Numbers may differ from what Studio shows today

We use the official YouTube Analytics API, the same backend that powers YouTube Studio. The difference: Studio shows estimated figures for recent days, while the API returns finalized numbers with a 48-72 hour delay. If Studio looks higher for yesterday, it typically catches up within a few days.

Still have a question? Contact support

How your media kit works

Understanding your numbers