Meta announced some changes to its Graph API, which will bring external apps and tools more into line with its focus on views as the primary performance metric.
At the end of 2024, Meta announced it was shifting away from variable content metrics, such as plays, impressions and accounts reached. Instead, the company said it was pivoting to a more uniform views count instead, and that views were taking over as the main metric for video and image content on both Facebook and Instagram.
Now, Meta is building that into its API as well.
As explained by Meta: “By the end of June 2026, we plan to introduce Page Viewer Metric in the Graph API. Viewers metric is intended to replace the legacy reach metric and provide a consistent cross-platform measurement (Facebook and Instagram) of how many people saw a piece of content.”
This will ensure measurement consistency across Meta’s products and external tools. Meta will also retire Post/Page Reach, Video Impressions, and Story Impressions metrics within the Graph API.
“These legacy metrics are no longer surfaced in our Insights tools, but they remained available via APIs until now,” Meta said in the press release.
Meta added that this will reduce confusion around performance measurement.
Meta is also implementing changes to webhook permissions within the API, and deprecating certain technical elements.
The company is also removing some of the older access points for its automated Advantage+ ads in order to ensure that third-party tools are utilizing the latest Advantage+ options.
“We are executing a phased deprecation of the legacy APIs and migration to the new Automation Unification, Advantage+ setup for Marketing API developers,” the company said. “From V25.0 (18th February 2025) Advantage+ Shopping and Advantage+ App campaigns can no longer be created or updated using the Marketing API, this will extend to all MAPI versions after 90 days (by May 19th 2026).”
The update will ensure that Meta marketers who create campaigns in third-party apps and tools will be using the latest versions of Meta’s AI tools when they use Advantage+.
This is all technical info for back-end coding, but for teams that use third-party management platforms to administer their Facebook and Instagram ads, it’s worth noting the changes.
