Late last year, Meta announced they would shift Facebook metrics from Impressions to Views. Now, more brands are seeing the impact of this change as Facebook is removing Impressions from the Page Insights API to align functionality with the Facebook app and Meta Business Suite. This means that any brand leveraging external tools like Sprinklr or Sprout Social for reporting will now rely on Views, which already exist within the system.
Views are a more impactful metric in theory, but relatively unchanged from Impressions in the current state of Meta’s user experience.
Views and Impressions are often seen as interchangeable, but are not:
- Impressions: are recorded every time a piece of content appears on a user’s screen — even if the exposure is brief. This means that as long as the post loads within someone’s feed, it counts as an impression, regardless of whether the user engages with it. For example, if someone quickly scrolls past a post without stopping, clicking, or watching any of the video, Meta will still register that momentary appearance as an impression.
- Views are similarly measured for static content: any time a piece of content is on a user’s screen, it counts as a View. However, for video (Reel) content, the video must play, for any length of time, to count as a View.
Technically, this would mean that Views would have a lower count than Impressions. However, Meta has largely shifted videos to auto-play in the feed, so it is unlikely to impact the relative count of this measurement to any great extent.
The only exception: when Facebook recommends Reels in-feed in desktop mode, there are typically 3-4 Reels that do not auto-play. Those recommended Reels may not count as a View. However, that is only going to impact a small percentage of video distribution across Meta.
Recommendations For Social Reporting
For brands that have still been using Impressions, there may be a very slight dip in count as they transition to Views.
More importantly, you’ll need to ensure you’ve appropriately migrated metrics to reflect this change. Ensure that you are reporting on Views for any Meta platforms and double-check that reports are updated to the new framework. Update any benchmarks or KPIs to align with new metrics.
It’s also important to note that the nomenclature for Impressions data before January 1, 2025, will update to Views, without a change in how the data was calculated. As a result, we recommend caution when comparing Views data from 2025 to prior years. The data is no longer directly comparable, and this could result in a lower year-over-year performance that isn’t reflective of your social channels.
