Instagram Marketing API Updates Announced by Meta

Highlights

• New Metrics: Meta has introduced four new metrics to the Instagram Marketing API, enhancing data collection for marketers.
• Reels Insights: The Reels Skip Rate measures viewer engagement by tracking skips in the first three seconds.
• Profile Visits: The Instagram Profile Visits metric helps advertisers understand user interactions following ad engagement.
• Enhanced Tools: New API endpoints will improve content management and collaboration capabilities for third-party platforms.

Here’s one for all the developers out there looking to get the most out of the various Meta marketing API tools.

Today, Meta has announced several updates to the Instagram Marketing API, which will enable third-party management platforms to add in more options to gather relevant engagement data, in order to help inform marketing and measurement approaches for your IG management.

Meta’s rolling out four new metrics to the Insights endpoint, along with an update to the existing views metric.

The new metric options are:

• Reels Skip Rate – The percentage of views where viewers skip a Reel within the first 3 seconds, which can indicate how engaging the beginning of a Reel is.
• Repost Counts for Media – Track how often your individual media is reposted, providing insight into the reach of specific content.
• Repost Counts at Account Level – Track how often your media is reposted at the overall account level for a more comprehensive view.
• Instagram Profile Visits (Marketing API) – Track the number of times users visit an advertiser’s Instagram profile after interacting with an ad. This metric aligns with Ads Manager reporting and helps measure the impact of advertising efforts on Instagram.

In addition, Meta’s also updating the views data for crossposted Reels

“We’ve added additional ‘views’ metric for Reels in the Instagram Insights Graph API. For Reels crossposted to Facebook, the ‘crossposted_views’ metric reflects the total number of reels views across both Instagram and Facebook. The ‘facebook_views’ metric reflects the number of views seen from users on Facebook.”

For regular users and non-technical-minded marketers (i.e. the majority of us), this won’t mean much, but basically, it means that third-party platforms will be able to access more information that can be integrated into their tools via Meta’s API options. That will give you access to more insight within your CRM tools, which will help to power improved analytics.

Meta’s also expanding its content management and publishing flexibility, including support for Trial Reels and the ability to delete media, while it’s also launching two new API endpoints to help manage partnerships and content co-creation.

All of these will eventually give you more options within your social management tools, though all of this capacity is already available within Meta’s Business Suite and other management options.

As such, the value of these updates is relative, but essentially, if you do use a centralized CRM platform to manage your social media activity, you may well be getting more IG data to explore soon.