How to Approach Instagram Views and Impressions Data

Views refer to the total number of times a post appears on someone's screen - there is no deduplication of views by the same user. As long as the post appears on someone's screen it is counted as 1 view.

Impressions refer to the number of times the post appears on someone's screen - however, if the post appears on the user's screen several times within a short period f time, it will only be counted as 1 impression.

In other words, impressions group views that occur in a short span of time as a single impression. Reach counts the unique accounts who have seen your post at least once.

Example:

John scrolls past the photo until the photo is completely out of the screen. Later that day he scrolls up and sees the photo again. He then revisits the photo in one week's time. It will be counted as

• 3 views

• 2 impressions

Keep that in mind when using the Instagram views and impression widgets in Unified Analytics, Dashboard, and elsewhere.

Do not compare old impressions and new media views metric. Following Meta’s deprecation from April 2025, Instagram started to provide the views metric on both the post and the profile level. We integrated the new metric as Media views within Emplifi analytics products as a part of our Instagram metric deprecation efforts.

For more information, see Instagram Insights Metrics Deprecation (April 21, 2025) and Views Integration - Updated