Instagram Shifts to Views as the Primary Metric: Implications for Creators, Brands & Influencer Marketing
Instagram has announced a big change to Insights: Views will now be the primary metric across all formats—photos, Carousels (which can now be up to 20 photos or videos), Reels, Stories, and Live. This update will apply to both organic and boosted posts featuring these formats.
What’s Happening
Views will be measured as the number of times a Reel has started to play or replay and the number of times non-Reel content has appeared on a person's screen.
Over the coming weeks:
Plays on Reels will be relabeled as Views, including in Meta Business Suite.
Views will also be available for Photos, Carousels, and Stories. Repeated views of content will be counted as Views. Impressions will be replaced by Views for these formats in Insights but will still be available in Meta Ads Manager.
In Insights, creators will see a Views icon instead of Plays. Metrics for Accounts Reached, Accounts Engaged, Interactions, and Watch Time will be located in different places.
Simplifying Performance Insights for Creators
The move to using Views as a standard metric across all formats provides a unified way for creators to understand their performance, regardless of the content format, and decide which formats to use based on their goals.
Additionally, creators might see stronger performance metrics as repeated Views are aggregated into the total count. However, this could potentially lower engagement rates, as creators see an influx in Views, but engagements remain the same.
How This Will Impact Influencer Marketing
This change offers brands a clearer understanding of content performance in influencer marketing campaigns. Previously, varying metrics for Reels (Plays) versus Photos and Stories (Impressions) made cross-format comparisons challenging. With Views applied uniformly, brands can now make more accurate comparisons and benchmarks, enhancing their ability to forecast performance and report to key stakeholders.
Since Instagram counts Views similarly to TikTok, brands can also evaluate creator content across both platforms, which often compete for brand dollars in influencer marketing.
Paid media will also be affected. Partnership Ads, where brands amplify creator content with their permission, are a key component of influencer marketing campaigns. The availability of Views across both organic and paid media allows for a more accurate apples-to-apples comparison and the ability to assess the lift in organic performance from paid media.
Lastly, these changes will require influencer marketing platforms and services to adapt. They need to align their reporting interfaces with the Views metric, whether they are utilizing the Instagram Insights API or relying on creators or marketers reporting content manually. This also means that the benchmarks they may be providing to clients for metrics like Impressions are going to be less relevant over time, so those will need to be refreshed.
Instagram’s Evolution: The Shift from Public Engagement to Private Consumption
This news is also noteworthy for understanding Instagram’s ongoing evolution. By now, you’ve probably heard about how important shareable content is to Instagram’s mission. This update reflects Instagram’s embrace of social media’s trend towards more private and passive consumption. People are consuming a lot of content but aren’t always engaging with it publicly.
As a result, Instagram is redefining what constitutes strong content — focusing on content that is viewed frequently and shared with friends, rather than just content that accumulates a lot of likes or comments.
