Glossary of metrics

In gas you will come across dozens of indicators on cards, in graphs and in tables. Most of them have a name that sounds clear but means something different from what you would expect. This article is a glossary: for every term you will learn what it measures and, above all, how it differs from the term it gets confused with. The last chapter explains the most important thing, namely why an identically named metric means something different on Facebook than on TikTok, and why numbers from different networks cannot be added up.

Where to find metrics in gas

Each network has its own items in the left-hand menu named directly after the metrics, so one click takes you to a graph of one specific metric over time. The Overview page holds summary cards that add selected metrics up across all connected networks. Detailed numbers are then in tables (posts list, campaign list, ads list) and on the detail page of a single item.

How many people saw the content

Reach

Reach counts people, not displays. If one person sees your post five times, reach counts them once. Think of a shop window: reach is the number of different people who walked past it during a week, even if some of them walked past every day. That is exactly why you should never add reach up across days or across networks; you would count the same person several times.

Impressions

Impressions in gas means the number of times the content appeared on someone's screen. The same person who sees the post five times counts five times in impressions. With the shop window, impressions are the number of glances into it, while reach is the number of different passers-by. Impressions are therefore always the same number as reach or higher.

Stories reach and Stories impressions

The same thing, only counted separately for stories on Facebook and Instagram. Stories have their own numbers because they behave differently from ordinary posts: they disappear after 24 hours and people tap through them quickly one after another.

Visits and Profile visits

How many times someone opened your profile or page as such, not an individual post. On Facebook the item is called Visits, on Instagram Profile visits. This is a completely different number from reach: a person can see ten of your posts in their feed and never visit your profile at all.

Who follows you

Followers

People who have subscribed to your content, so your posts can appear in their feed. Facebook describes it as the number of people who follow the page, minus those who have unfollowed it during the page's lifetime. The number is not added up across days: on a given day it is a state, not an increase.

Fans

A term only Facebook uses. Fans are people who like your page, meaning they clicked Like on it. Followers and fans are not the same thing: you can follow a page without liking it, and conversely you can like a page and hide its posts from your feed. That is why for Facebook you will find both items in gas, and the numbers commonly differ.

Subscribers, Subscribers gained, Subscribers lost

Subscribers are the same as followers, only YouTube calls them this. Besides the total count you will also find Subscribers gained and Subscribers lost, that is how many people subscribed and how many unsubscribed in the given period. The difference between those two numbers shows whether the channel grew or shrank during the period.

When they are online

An Instagram item showing what time of day your followers tend to be on the network. It is not a performance metric but a planning aid: content published during the hours when the audience is awake has a better chance of being noticed.

Reactions to your content

Engagements

A summary of the fact that someone did something with your content: likes and reactions, comments, shares, saves and so on. gas shows it for Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. It is a single combined number, so on its own it does not tell you whether people were commenting or rather sharing. You will find the individual components separately.

Interactions

The same idea, a different name. It is used in the advertising sections: both Meta Ads and Google Ads have an Interactions item instead of engagements. Be careful, each of those two counts something different; the difference is described in the last chapter.

Engagement rate

The share of interactions in the number of displays, expressed as a percentage. It answers the question of how often the people who were shown the content actually did something. One hundred thousand impressions and a thousand reactions means an engagement rate of one percent. However, each network uses different numbers in the calculation; there is an overview in the last chapter.

Likes and Reactions

Likes are clicks on Like. Besides that, Facebook also offers other reactions (Love, Wow, Haha, Sad, Angry, Care) and gas shows them both together under the Reactions item and broken down by individual type. On YouTube, Dislikes are added to likes, and on the video detail you will also find the ratio between them.

Comments and Shares

Comments are the posts someone wrote under your content. A share means a person passed the content on, either to their own profile or to someone in a message. Shares are usually far rarer than a like because they take more effort, which is why they are a stronger signal that the content really caught someone's interest.

Saved

The user set the content aside so they can come back to it. On Instagram they save it among their saved posts, on Pinterest they save the pin to their board. Pinterest treats saves as the main sign of interest, which is why it has its own item in the Pinterest menu.

Rating

A Facebook item: the average score people gave the page in reviews. It does not concern the performance of posts but the reputation of the page as such.

How much content you published

Posts, Stories, Videos and Pins

The number of pieces of content you published in the given period. It is not a performance metric, but without it the other numbers are easy to misread: a drop in reach or engagements may simply mean you published less that month.

Clicks and click-throughs

Clicks

How many times people clicked on the content or the ad. For ads this is a broad term: besides clicks on the link, it also includes other clicks inside the ad that do not take the user anywhere outside the network. So if you care about traffic to your website, look at link clicks, not total clicks.

Link clicks

A narrower and, for most people, more useful number: how many times someone clicked a link that took them to the destination, typically your website. It tends to be considerably lower than total clicks, and it is exactly the number that makes sense to compare with website traffic.

Click-through rate (CTR)

The share of clicks in the number of displays, as a percentage. In most tables the column is called CTR and hovering the mouse shows the label Click-through rate. A thousand impressions and ten clicks is one percent. For Meta Ads the value is averaged over the days on which the ad ran; days with no measured value are not included in the average.

Money and ad performance

Spend

How much money the ad account spent in the given period. It is displayed converted into Czech crowns even if the ad account is billed in another currency, so it may differ by a small amount from the number in the platform's interface. Details are in the article on currency and expense conversion.

CPC, cost per click

How much one click cost on average: spend divided by the number of clicks. In Google Ads and Sklik the same thing is called Average cost per click. A lower number is cheaper, but on its own it says nothing about whether the clicks led anywhere.

CPM, cost per thousand impressions

How much a thousand ad displays cost. It is used to compare how expensive it is just to get onto people's screens. For awareness campaigns it is the main price measure; for campaigns aimed at website visits, CPC matters more.

Conversions

An action you have marked as a goal on your website: a submitted order, a completed form, a phone call, a downloaded file. Conversions do not appear by themselves; someone has to set them up in the advertising system and place a measurement code on the website. When conversions are zero, it usually does not mean nothing happened, but that conversions are not being measured.

Conversion value, Conversion rate, Cost per conversion

Conversion value is the monetary benefit you report to the advertising system, typically revenue from orders. Conversion rate is the share of conversions in the number of clicks. Cost per conversion is spend divided by the number of conversions, that is how much one order or one completed enquiry cost you on average.

Average position

A figure from Sklik: what position your ad appeared in on average in search results. Here a lower number means better placement; one is the first position.

Video

Video views

How many times your video was played. On TikTok and YouTube the item is called Views, on Facebook and in the Meta Ads and Google Ads sections Video views. This is the metric whose definition differs most between networks, see the last chapter.

Video views (25%)

Meta Ads also has a Video views (25%) card, that is how many times at least the first quarter of the video was played. It says more than a plain view count: starting a video can be an accident, whereas a quarter of its length already means the viewer was watching deliberately. The difference between the two numbers shows how quickly people leave.

Estimated minutes watched and Watch time

Besides the number of views, YouTube also measures time. Estimated minutes watched is the sum of the minutes people spent on your video, and on the video detail you will find the same thing under the name Watch time. Ten thousand views of five seconds each and a thousand views of a minute each are two very different situations that the view count alone cannot tell apart.

Average view duration

The average length of a single playback in seconds. Together with the number of views it tells you whether people watched the video to the end or left after a few seconds.

Website and traffic

These terms belong to the Website section, that is to data from Google Analytics.

Sessions

The number of website visits, which Google Analytics calls sessions. One visit is one continuous sitting by one person on the website. One person can have ten visits in a month.

Users and New users

Users is the number of different people who came to the website, New users are those who were there for the first time. The ratio between them shows whether the website is gaining new audience or living off returning visitors.

Page views

How many times someone opened a page of the website. One visit usually means several page views, because during it a person clicks through several pages in a row.

Bounce rate

The share of visits that did not count as engaged. Google Analytics considers a visit engaged when it lasted longer than ten seconds, contained a key event, or had at least two page views. Bounce rate is the exact opposite of engagement rate: if seventy percent of visits are engaged, the bounce rate is thirty percent.

Average session duration

How much time a person spends on the website on average during one visit.

Why the same metric differs between networks

This is the most important part of the whole glossary. gas does not invent the metrics, it only downloads them from the individual platforms and displays them under a name of its own. Each platform defines its metrics in its own way, and when two definitions end up with the same name, they look like the same thing even though they measure something else.

Video views. In its reporting, Meta counts a view only once the video has been playing for at least three seconds (in its documentation it lists it directly as a three-second video view). TikTok, on the other hand, counts a view from the moment the video starts, requiring no minimum length. That is why the same video with the same audience gets a considerably higher number on TikTok, without either platform counting incorrectly. YouTube does not publish its threshold and in its own documentation warns that the view metric means different numbers in different types of reports.

Reach on Facebook. In June 2026, Meta discontinued the original page reach metric and replaced it with one calculated differently. The new one only counts content that was actually rendered on the screen, so the values tend to be lower than with the original metric. gas still displays the history up to the discontinuation date, but it cannot be joined smoothly to the newer numbers.

Interactions. Under this name, Google Ads reports the main action for the given ad format, that is clicks for search and shopping ads, but views for video ads. So depending on the campaign type, a single column mixes two different things. Under the same name, Meta Ads reports the sum of all actions attributed to the ad. Two columns with the same name, different content.

Engagement rate. To make it comparable across networks, gas had to choose the closest available pair of numbers for each network. It looks like this:

Sklik has no engagement metric of its own, which is why clicks are used for it. Comparing engagement rate between networks therefore makes sense as a look at the trend, not as an exact measure of which network is better.

Some metrics are not provided by the platform at all. Neither Sklik nor Google Ads provides a figure for the number of people reached, so you will not find reach for them, and in the campaign detail gas points this out right next to the number. Pinterest, in turn, does not release the number of clicks for ads, so the click-through rate cannot be weighted by the number of displays and gas calculates it as the average of the daily values Pinterest reports.

Common problems

The sum of individual days does not match the total number

This concerns reach. Reach counts different people, so adding Monday to Sunday means counting the same person up to seven times. That is why, for Meta Ads, gas shows the actual reach for the whole downloaded period rather than the sum over the selected range, and points this out in the help for the column.

Numbers in gas do not match what Facebook or Google shows

Most often it is a differently named metric, that is reach and impressions swapped. Other common reasons are a different time zone and therefore a different day boundary, and the fact that the platform is still finalising the numbers for the last few days. Always compare metrics with the same definition, and preferably a longer period rather than a single day.

A metric is missing for one network but present for another

Not every platform provides everything. Sklik and Google Ads, for example, do not release the number of people reached at all, so you will not find reach for them. The left-hand menu of each network contains only the metrics that the platform actually provides.

The engagement rate came out differently from my own calculation

Each network has a different formula; the table above shows what is divided by what for each of them. If you calculate the share by hand, use the same pair of numbers that gas uses for that network.

Video views on TikTok are much higher than on Facebook

This is neither a measurement error nor a worse result on Facebook. TikTok counts a view from the moment the video starts, Meta only from the third second of playback. That is why the same video with the same audience gets a significantly higher number on TikTok.

Facebook reach breaks in the middle of 2026

In June 2026, Meta discontinued the original page reach metric and replaced it with one calculated differently, with typically lower values. Older data stays in gas unchanged, it just cannot be joined to the new data smoothly. In a generated report, in such a situation you will see a note that the metric was discontinued instead of a graph that would drop to zero.

The number of fans differs from the number of followers

This is not an error. On Facebook these are two different groups of people: fans clicked Like on the page, followers subscribe to its posts. One person can be both, only one of them, or change their status at any time.

Conversions are zero even though orders are coming in

Conversions have to be set up on the advertising system's side and a measurement code has to be placed on the website. If they are not there, the platform sends no conversion data and gas has nothing to display. Setting this up is the job of whoever manages the ad account and the website.

Spend differs from the amount in the advertising system

Spend is converted into Czech crowns at an exchange rate, so if the ad account is billed in euros or dollars, a small difference from the platform's interface is normal. Details are in the article on currency and expense conversion.

I can see the metric, but it is empty

Either there is no data for the given period (the profile was connected later, or nothing was running in that period), or access to the network has stopped working. In Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts, check whether the profile shows a warning about a paused connection. If you are not sure what to do, write to us through the contact form.