Deduplicated Reach (Instagram) — the unique-account number that matches what the client sees inside the app.

How it works.

Instagram's Graph API exposes reach two ways. The first is a per-day series — ask for the last 28 days and you get 28 daily reach numbers, each one the count of unique accounts reached on that calendar day. If you sum those 28 numbers, every account that saw the profile on more than one day is counted more than once. In healthcare accounts — where a follower often sees a Reel one day and a story two days later — the summed number can be 1.6x to 2.4x the true unique-account figure. The second is a single-value call with a period parameter — ask for period=days_28 and the API returns one number: the count of unique accounts reached across the whole window. That single number is deduplicated reach, and it matches, to the last digit, what a client sees on their own Professional Dashboard.

1. Choose the reporting window. 7, 14, 28, 30, 60 or 90 days — whatever the client's monthly or weekly report is scoped to.
2. Call the single-value reach endpoint. Not the daily series. One request per account per window returns the deduplicated figure.
3. Reconcile against the app. The number the API returns should equal the number in Meta Business Suite Overview for the same window. If it doesn't, the API window boundary is off by one day — the most common integration bug.
4. Store both figures. Deduplicated for the client-facing number; naive-sum only for internal debug — never on a client report.
5. Show the delta explicitly. When a client has previously seen a dashboard with the summed number, publishing only the deduplicated figure looks like a drop. The gap has to be labelled — "previous tool summed daily reach; this is the app-verified unique-account figure."

Where agency dashboards get this wrong.

1. Summing 28 daily reach values. The most common failure. Produces a figure 1.6x-2.4x the app-verified number.
2. Off-by-one window boundaries. API "last 28 days" is not the same as calendar-month; if the report is monthly, the call has to be scoped to the month exactly.
3. Mixing post-level and account-level reach. Post reach can exceed follower count; summing post reach across a month is not account reach. Two different metrics.
4. Ignoring the "no data" gap. If the profile switched from Personal to Business mid-window, the API returns partial data. A dashboard that shows a clean number without flagging the gap is misreporting silently.
5. Copy-pasting last month's figure format. If the previous dashboard summed daily and the new one deduplicates, the month-on-month comparison is meaningless until a re-baseline pass is done.

Frequently asked questions.