Marketing Analytics Confidential: Let’s Talk about View-Through Conversions

We need to talk about view-through attribution (VTC).

Why?

It’s one of the metrics we see used to pull one over on brands, so naturally it's in focus for our Analytics Confidential series.

As a reminder, click-through conversions are credited to an ad that a user clicked on. View-through conversions are credited to an ad that a user viewed. Click conversions are far more meaningful, with easier-to-measure value. Yet some bad actors will try to give view-through conversions the same value as click-through conversions. Worse, some will just lump view-through and click-through conversions into the same bucket.

Some scenarios where brands are particularly vulnerable to this kind of gaming are in YouTube reporting, which does not cleanly differentiate between click-throughs and view-throughs, and in Facebook campaigns, where advertisers often use one-day view-through lookback windows. 

The worst of the worst is when retargeting and VTs are combined. That just sets up the channel to show an ad to someone who would already purchase.

Don't get us wrong; view-throughs can provide some value, for instance in giving advertisers some directional data with more scale than clicks can provide. But advertisers who are claiming precise attribution from view-throughs or telling brands they’re as valuable as click-through conversions are either mis-informed or shady. Deliberate or not, any mistakes like the ones described above are a sign your campaigns aren’t in trustworthy hands.