An example:
Scenario 1: John sees your post once each day for 3 days.
Iconosquare shows: 3 reach, 3 impressions.
Instagram shows: 1 reach, 3 impressions.
Scenario 2: John sees your post twice a day for 3 days.
Iconosquare shows: 3 reach, 6 impressions.
Instagram shows: 1 reach, 6 impressions.
Other things to note about differences in Reach:
All Reach & Impressions are sent to us in the PST timezone (straight from Silicon Valley!) We have to make some adjustments that you can view your analytics in your own timezone, and unfortunately, this can sometimes mean small discrepancies. This is more common with Stories, where the analytics are only available in the API for 24 hours, and can allow for 1-3% difference between Reach & Impressions on Iconosquare & Instagram.
It is not possible to compare impressions between the Iconosquare platform and Facebook Ads Manager. This is because Facebook Ads Manager only takes into consideration those impressions from Ads used in a campaign and not from old posts. We are currently getting impressions this way directly from the Facebook API.
A user can see 3 of your posts and 3 of your Stories in one day and they will still only be counted as one unique viewer, which means one Reach. However, they have viewed your content 6 times so you will have 6 Impressions from this user. This means there can sometimes be quite a large difference between Reach & Impressions (1:6 in this case).
Yes.
The global Reach KPI (at the top of the Overview page and the Reach page) does include reach generated by Reels. However, Impressions for Reels are not included in the global KPI since we do not get Impressions from Reels in general. Confusing, we know!
No. Profile Visits are counted in the Profile Visits metric, which you can find in the Profile Activity section on Iconosquare.
The global Reach & Impressions KPIs refer to Reach & Impressions you've got on any of your posts & Stories during that time period, regardless of whether they were posted during that time period. You are likely still getting Reach & Impressions from older posts, and the newer Reach & Impressions of your latest posts & Stories may also fall outside of the time period you're analyzing.
The summed-up Reach at post level might also be higher than the global Reach KPI, this is because of the way Instagram calculates Reach. They calculate Reach as UNIQUE accounts that have viewed your content during that time. So in the global Reach, no matter how many times they've seen your content, they'll be counted as 1. But if they've seen, say, 10 of your posts, they'll be counted as 1 in each individual post's Reach.
Please note from this that it is impossible to sum up your post/Stories Reach & Impressions from your media reports and have them match the global Reach/Impressions KPI.
As of 28th May 2019, ADVANCED and ENTERPRISE users are now able to view both paid and organic reach and impressions for promoted Instagram posts! Find out more about this here! Please note, this relates to promoted posts only, not Ads that do not appear on your Instagram feed.
We recommend that when reporting, you use one set of data and stick to that. Please remember that our data is pulled directly from the Instagram and Facebook APIs and we report what they send to us, and trust that their APIs are correct.
Please refer to this FAQ for information relating to Twitter impressions on Iconosquare.