Understanding your data

Most support questions are really questions about this page.

Numbers come from scheduled crawls

InsightsRN does not call platform APIs when you open a page. Background jobs crawl each platform on a schedule and store what they find. Every figure you see is as of the last successful crawl for that deliverable — not live.

The dashboard states this openly: under its title is a Data as of timestamp telling you when the figures were last refreshed.

Consequences:

• A deliverable added just now shows no data until a crawl runs.
• A campaign’s totals can mix deliverables crawled at different times.
• A post that went viral in the last hour will not reflect that yet.

How often crawls run

The automatic crawl interval depends on your plan:

Plan	Metrics refresh automatically
Free	Every 48 hours
Pro	Every 24 hours
Max	Every 24 hours

Refreshing on demand — Max plan only

This is a Max plan feature

The Refresh Metrics control is available on the Max plan only. On Free and Pro the button is not shown, and metrics update on the automatic schedule above.

On the Max plan, each deliverable on a campaign has a Refresh Metrics control that fetches its numbers again immediately instead of waiting for the next scheduled crawl. Use it when you are about to share a report, or to check whether a fix has taken effect.

Your dashboard states which applies to you: a Manual Metrics Refresh indicator, and a Metric Refresh Time note giving the automatic interval. See Subscription and billing for what each plan includes.

Metrics belong to the platforms, not to InsightsRN

This is worth understanding before comparing any two numbers.

Each platform defines its own metrics. “Reach”, “views” and “impressions” do not mean the same thing on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. One platform may count a view after three seconds, another after one; one may count a person once per day, another once per post. InsightsRN reports what each platform’s API returns, under that platform’s own definition.

That is why a deliverable’s card shows the metrics its platform actually reports, rather than forcing every platform into one shared set of tiles. Adding a Facebook number to a TikTok number of the same name rarely gives you something meaningful.

Those definitions change, and the platforms decide when. Meta, Google and TikTok revise how their metrics are calculated, rename them, and sometimes retire them altogether — usually on their own schedule and occasionally with little notice. When that happens:

• A metric may start returning different figures because its definition changed, not because performance changed.
• A metric may stop updating, or disappear from a card entirely, if the platform deprecates it.
• Figures already collected stay as they were — InsightsRN does not retroactively rewrite history when a definition moves.

This is not hypothetical

InsightsRN has already had to replace a Facebook metric in place after Meta stopped providing it. When a change like that lands, an in-app notice explains what was replaced and what to read instead.

Use the ⓘ icons. Every metric tile and column carries an information icon explaining what that platform means by it. If a figure is not what you expect, read the tooltip before concluding something is wrong — the two most common answers are “that platform counts it differently” and “that is as of the last crawl”.

Why our number differs from the platform’s

Common and usually benign reasons:

• Timing. The platform is live; InsightsRN is as of the last crawl.
• Metric definitions differ, as above.
• Permissions. Some metrics are only exposed to an account with the right access level.
• Deleted or private content stops reporting, but figures already collected remain.

When data genuinely stops

Work through these in order:

1. Is the publisher still connected? This is the most common cause by a wide margin. On the publisher list, a greyed-out platform icon means that account is not connected — so nothing on it can be crawled. Reconnecting resumes crawling; data already collected is not lost.
2. Is the deliverable’s identifying detail still correct?
3. Does the content still exist and is it still public?
4. On the Max plan, try Refresh Metrics before concluding something is broken. On Free or Pro, check when the last automatic crawl was due — the figure may simply not be stale yet.
5. If all of that is fine, raise it with InsightsRN support, quoting the deliverable and the date its numbers stopped moving.

Check the connection first

Lapsed credentials fail quietly — there is no error, the numbers simply stop moving. Checking the Socials column on the publisher list takes seconds and resolves most cases.

Related

• Publishers — connection status
• Dashboard — the data-as-of timestamp
• Deliverables