Meta has made the decision to deprecate several Instagram-specific metrics on April 21st, 2025. In accordance with the change, Meta will introduce a new metric, Views, for both content and user related reports. This change represents a continuation of Meta's efforts to align the Instagram API with their application and will affect all third-party Meta partners (including Agorapulse).
You can read more about Meta's announcement here.
In this article we will outline:
What is the Views metric?
"On reels and videos, Plays will now be called Views. How Views are calculated will not change, so you should not see any meaningful changes to this metric other than the new name.
As part of this update, we’re removing the separate replays metric. For Stories, photo or text posts, Views will replace Impressions. For these non-video formats, Views are calculated as the number of times they appear on a person’s screen, including repeat views.
So for example, a person viewing a photo three separate times in the same day would count as three Views for that photo instead of one Impression. This means you may notice your Views are higher than your previous impression counts."
Timeline of Metric Deprecation
Retroactive Update: From April 15th, 2025, Views will replace Impressions in all Instagram reports for Instagram content from January 2025 onward.
Plays and Replays Removal: The "Plays and Replays" metric will be removed from Instagram content reports at the end of Q2 2025.
Discontinuity: Due to the difference in calculation methods, you may notice a discontinuity between the Impressions/Views data from December 2024 and January 2025.
What metrics will change in Agorapulse?
Agorapulse will stop collecting data for the deprecated metrics on April 15th, 2025.
We will use the new Views metric in place of the current Impression metric for all forms of Instagram content that have been published after December 31st, 2024. Deprecated metrics will be available in-app temporarily for historical reporting purposes and will be removed at the end of Q2 2025.
The deprecation of the Impressions metric will also impact the Engagement Rate per Impressions calculation. This metric will now be calculated using Views .
Please Note: As Views will include repeat views, we anticipate this Engagement Rate per Impression metric to be lower moving forward.
On April 21st, 2025, Meta will stop providing the Impressions metric on all content created after July 1st, 2024.
Note: If content needs to be re-synced after April 21st, 2025, the Impressions metric will be replaced by the Views metric for all content created after July 1st, 2024.
What Agorapulse metrics are impacted by the change?
In the table below, we will outline the specific metrics that have been deprecated from the Instagram API and what metrics/reports will be affected in Agorapulse:
Deprecated Metric (Instagram API) | Definition | Agorapulse Metrics Impacted | Agorapulse Reports Affected | Additional Notes |
Impressions | Total number of times the Instagram media object has been seen. | Instagram Impressions (Organic, Paid, Total), | Audience > Engagement rate | Impressions will be replaced by the Views metric. As views will include repeat views, we anticipate this metric will be higher than previous impression counts. |
Plays | Number of times the reels start to play after an impression is already counted. | Instagram Reel Plays | Content > Performance | This will be kept for historical reporting purposes until Q2 2025. |
Replays | The number of times a reel starts to play again after an initial play is recorded. This is defined as replays of 1ms or more in the same reel session. | Instagram Reel Replays | Content > Performance | This will be kept for historical reporting purposes until Q2 2025. |
ig_reels_aggregated_all_plays_count | The number of times your reel starts to play or replay after an impression is already counted. | Instagram Reels - Total Plays | Content > Performance | This will be kept for historical reporting purposes until Q2 2025. |