The Iconosquare Guide to Reach & Impressions

What are Reach and Impressions?

Reach is defined by Instagram's API documentation as the total number of times the Business User's media (i.e. posts, stories, Reels and promotions) has been uniquely viewed. Includes ad activity generated through the API, Facebook ads interface, and the Promote feature.

Impressions is defined by the documentation as the total number of times the Business User's media (i.e. posts, stories, and promotions) has been viewed. Includes ad activity generated through the API, Facebook ads interface, and the Promote feature. Does not include profile visits.

We receive our Reach & Impressions data from the Instagram Insights API (run by Facebook), and thus the two statements above are how we define Reach & Impressions on Iconosquare. Please check out the articles below for further information on how Facebook defines this data - click here for Reach and here for Impressions

Our reach counts are broken down into 24hr segments added together to make a cumulative total (for example, the past 30 days). We call this daily Reach. What this means is that while we can know if the same user sees your post more than once in a day, we can't carry over knowledge of that user to the next day. So while Instagram will only count this user once (as 1 x Reach) over the 30-day time period, we will count them multiple times as 1 unique daily Reach.