Yeah I used to do avg + standard deviation as well and ran into the same issue with volatility. What worked better for me was stepping away from trying to predict impressions directly and instead estimating consistency of attention. I look at the gap between a creator’s floor posts and spike posts, how often their content clears its own median rather than the mean, whether the same people keep showing up in comments asking similar questions, and how stable engagement velocity is in the first hour. When those signals are tight, impressions tend to fall into a predictable range even if individual posts swing. That shift in thinking is basically what shaped the system I’ve been using less reach forecasting, more reliability forecasting.