Meta has unified content metrics across Instagram and Facebook, making views the new standard. Here’s what this means for influencer campaigns, KPIs, and private sharing trends.
Meta has rolled out a major update to how content performance is measured on Facebook and Instagram — and influencer marketers need to take note.
Where once creators and marketers had multiple metrics across different formats to take into account, as of April 2025, impressions and plays have been downgraded and renamed views.
Whether you're a brand, creator, or strategist, this move could impact how you plan, execute, and measure the success of your influencer campaigns. So what exactly has changed? And what should you do about it?
Let’s break it down.
Meta has deprecated format-specific metrics like impressions and plays in favour of a unified “views” metric across all content types. This includes Reels, videos, stories, carousels, photos, and lives on both Facebook and Instagram.
The move to views as the primary performance metric for content aligns with the broader shift across social media platforms that sees content driven to feeds by the algorithm. More than 50% of what people see in their Instagram feeds is AI-recommended, according to Meta.
In this way, renaming impressions and plays as views also aligns Meta platforms with TikTok, which has long used views — the number of times a video appears in feeds — as its primary performance metric.
For video content, Meta now counts a view each time a video starts playing in a feed. This includes replays and is regardless of how long a video is actually watched.
For Reels, what was once counted as a play has been renamed a view.
For non-video content like photos, carousels, and stories, a view is counted every time the content appears on a user’s screen — including multiple appearances in the same feed.
It’s important to remember that a view is different from reach, which counts unique users only.
Metrics like accounts reached, accounts engaged and interactions will still be available to creators to help determine performance on Instagram.
Meta’s update to a unified views metric reflects a deeper shift in how users engage with content and how its platforms reward that engagement.
The change from impressions to views aims to simplify content performance tracking across formats and platforms. As Meta continues to prioritise Reels and AI-driven content recommendations, the change to views is a boon for brands and creators operating multi-format and/or multi-platform strategies.
From now on, it should be easier to compare content performance across both Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok and YouTube. This offers creators and marketers new insights into what appeals to different audiences.
Analysts say the change should also encourage a stronger focus on content quality and driving engagement, such as repeat views, likes, comments, shares/sends, and saves.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri notes that from here on out, creators’ key performance metrics should be views, reach, and sends.
“If you’re trying to figure out how your content is doing, what you should be doing is look at sends per reach,” Mosessri says.
The focus on sends per reach underscores a shift toward private, meaningful interactions and positions views not as a vanity metric but as a gateway to deeper engagement.
Early last year, Meta revealed that people reshare Reels over 3.5 billion times a day across its platforms— making private sharing one of the primary interaction methods on Instagram.
“The biggest opportunity going forward is unifying our recommendations systems across Reels and other types of video,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors at the time. “That will help people discover the best content across our systems no matter what format it’s in.”
Since then, Meta has doubled down on its sends and shares, developing features like Blend, a shared Reels feed curated within chat threads. Shares — especially in DMs — have been elevated as a top engagement signal in its ranking algorithm.
In this new model, success is less about exposure and more about sparking action:
Campaign performance should now be tracked using views instead of impressions or plays. Brands should also think about updating internal KPIs, dashboards, and client reports accordingly.
Expect higher view counts than before, as repeat viewings are counted multiple times.
Yes. Meta has removed "impressions" and "plays" from its analytics and replaced them with "views".
1,000 impressions means that a piece of content appeared 1,000 times on users' screens, including repeat appearances for the same user. For example, if a post is shown on 200 users' feeds 5 times, it would have generated 1,000 impressions.
You can no longer see impressions on Meta Business Suite. Instead, you can see views, which include both impressions and plays.
Impressions are the number of times a piece of content is shown on users' feeds. An impression is counted whenever a post or video appears in a user’s feed, even if the user doesn’t interact with it. If the same person sees the content multiple times, each appearance counts as a separate impression.
But there's a catch. Meta has recently shifted reporting toward a unified “views” metric. For non-video content, views effectively replace impressions and count each time the content appears on screen. For video content, views count the number of plays.
Users can no longer access impressions for Facebook content because Meta has replaced impressions with "views".
Here's a definition of each term:
Reach, impressions, and views are all key performance indicators. They can be useful analytics for influencer marketing campaigns that tell you how much awareness the content generated.
These metrics can be found on an influencer marketing platform like Kolsquare, along with other key data for tracking content performance, including audiences engaged, engagement rates, reach, and more.
While Meta has removed impressions for social media content, businesses running ads can still see ad impressions.
On Meta ads, reach is the number of individuals who saw the ad, while impressions are the number of times it was shown to users, including repeat views by the same user.
It's impossible to say how much each impression costs to generate on Meta. You will need to check your own analytics to judge cost per impression.
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