Instagram’s “professional” dashboards panel i.e. its insights panel for business accounts has been through many iterations. Which means not only is it difficult to track your Instagram growth or engagement year-on-year (near-on impossible given how much it changes and the lack of historical data), it can also be really difficult to define what “success” means on Instagram.
Which metrics can you track on Instagram?
It’s important to note that Instagram has two types of analytics reporting: overall account insights and individual post insights.
On overall account insights (which is what you initially see when you click the “Professional dashboard” button) you have four key insights:
- Views
- Interactions
- Total followers
- Content you shared
What do Views mean on Instagram?
In August 2024 Meta (which comprises both Instagram and what used to be called Facebook) started the move to a new universal metric called “views”- announced here on their Creators account. As of April 2025, Views was rolled out universally across all Instagram accounts and became Instagram’s number one core metric, across both paid and organic content.
A “View” on Instagram relates to both video content (reels, Lives) and static content (carousels, single-image posts) and marks how many times a piece of content is seen. This differs depending on the type of content:
For reels, a “View” is how many times a reel has been shown in-feed, in the Reels explore tab, the main explore tab or seen through a search. What used to be called a “Play” on Instagram reels is now a view, so if a user rewatches your reel four times, each watch will be considered a new View.
For static content like carousels and single image posts, a View is how many times that piece of content is seen within a user’s feed, the Explore page or via a search.
For Instagram stories, a View is how many times that story is seen, and similarly to reels, each rewatch is classed as a new View.
For Instagram Lives, both live watches and replays count as a View.
Why did Instagram swap to Views? Well, given that Instagram is made up of various different areas (reels, stories, feed and so on), Views gives a universal metric that allows you to compare the performance of your Instagram content, regardless of content type.
It does also mean you can compare your Instagram content to content you post on other platforms like YouTube and TikTok, both of which use views as a key metric.
Finally, I believe this is because of Instagram’s heavy focus on video content. Yes it supports (and even promotes) static content like images and image carousels, BUT let’s not forget that Instagram’s strategy for a long time has been to promote the creation of more video on the platform. With Views (which arguably only really make sense when it’s video content), it’s likely that users will create more video in order to garner moreVviews.
Which metrics did Instagram get rid of when it rolled out Views?
Two key metrics were phased out when Instagram repositioned Views as its key metric. These were “Plays” and “Impressions”. On Reels this meant that the Plays metric was relabelled as Views, although largely still calculated in the same way. Impressions, which were previously the key metric for non-video content, is still available as a metric in Meta Ads Manager, but doesn’t appear in the Insights panel on Instagram’s professional dashboard.
As of August 2025, Instagram also announced that it would begin to replace the metric “Accounts reached” with a new metric called “Viewers”. According to the Creators post, Viewers “measures the amount of accounts that have viewed your content”. This pivots Instagram insights from a “numbers of accounts reached” metric to a “number of accounts viewed” model.
Which other metrics can you track on Instagram?
Aside from Views you can still track various other metrics on Instagram using the insights panel and Meta’s Ads Manager such as Interactions, and Profile visits. Here’s a breakdown:
Interactions – this is the total number of times an action was taken in regards to your content. For example, someone liking, sharing or replying to your content would all be classed as a single interaction.
Accounts reached – Instagram says that this is “the number of unique Instagram accounts that have seen this story at least once”. However, as mentioned above, Accounts reached is another metric which is being removed as of August 2025. It will be replaced with “Viewers” instead, which will also be broken down into Followers vs Non-Followers.
Profile visits – As the name suggests this is how many times someone goes to your profile (and grid).
Likes, saves and sends – on individual pieces of content such as a Reel or static image you can see the breakdown of how many users have liked, commented, sent or shared your content. Sends have become particularly important to Instagram since they realised that far more conversation happens within DMs than outside of it.
Which metrics matter most on Instagram?
Which metrics matter most to your business or brand will depend on what you’re trying to achieve on Instagram. If you’re trying to achieve greater brand awareness and reach more people then you’ll likely want to track Viewers reached per piece of content. If your aim is to get engagement which hopefully leads to sales, then Views is a good metric to consider but you’ll also need to look at sales via Instagram (which you’ll probably want Google Analytics 4 Events to help you with). If you want to curate a smaller, yet highly engaged, audience on Instagram then your key metric might be Interactions in the form of likes, comments, sends and shares.
In terms of which metrics matter most to Instagram itself, as in, which metrics will help your content to be seen more by the algorithm then we need to refer to the latest insight.
Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, in a recent podcast interview to the Build Your Tribe podcast (full episode here) mentioned that there are two different algorithms on Instagram:
- Connected reach (the algorithm that prioritises content for accounts that follow you and therefore know you)
- Uncoconnected reach (the algorithm that determines which content gets shown to new accounts that don’t follow you)
For both algorithms the metrics that hold a lot of weight are watch time, then interactions including likes, comments and sends.
It goes without saying that your video content on Instagram, or your carousels for that matter, need to capture and hold attention. If they achieve this, then naturally your watch time (and the number of Views if people re-watch), will be high. If a post gets people to like it or send it to a friend, then you can almost guarantee that post is going to be pushed further out – especially to more unconnected audiences.
I hope this has been a helpful guide to Instagram metrics in 2025. If you have any questions, then as always you can get in touch on Instagram or contact me here.