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Question

Facebook videos and reels still have separate metrics

  • January 15, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 39 views

delainamac
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So it seems that sometime around September, Facebook integrated reels into the posts endpoint. So we can now get reels metrics along with the rest of our posts. Yay! (Although it doesn’t seem to get historical reels data before that change. And now I need to freeze my separated reels queries since I don’t need them to import reels from after that date.)

But… Videos and reels are now all one thing, except placement. Apparently the reels vs video post metrics are different things. For example, for the same reel/video I have:

Reels avg. time watched: 9.19
Avg. video view time (s): 4.46

I asked ChatGPT to research and it suggested because reels and videos are different placements for the same media item, so essentially you could average those two items to get the real overall average.

Similarly, for the same exact post that was posted as a reel:

  • Shares on posts: 0, Reels shares: 4
  • Total post reactions: 12, Reels total reactions: 269
  • Comments on posts: 0, Reels comments: 10
  • Post reach: 3402, Reels reach: 19674
  • Post views: 4423, Video views: 1087
  • Total video view time (s): 17628.51, Reels total view time: 226104.02

So now I have to ensure that all my Facebook queries going forward have both sets of metrics included. Or create custom fields to consolidate each.

Anyone else notice this?!?

2 replies

delainamac
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  • Author
  • Newbie
  • February 17, 2026

Bumping. Anyone have any idea what is going on with this?

The number for one reel is 200+ difference between those two metrics (632 Total post reactions, 885 Reels total reactions).


jessiebrock
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  • Community Moderator
  • March 3, 2026

The reason is technical - the Meta Graph API still treats videos separately from posts, and reels are a subset of videos which still have their own specific metrics. That’s why we still have them separated out, as you can’t request them any other way (and treating them like posts leads to data disappearing for the reels).

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/video/video_insights/

Meta has been taking steps over the past years to unify and remove redundancy in the API (and have already done this reels/videos merge to some extent in the Instagram APIs), so I expect they will address this at some point. We just don’t know when it may happen.

I hope this helps.

Jessica