<b>Should a view-through conversion count at all?</b>

<b>Should a view-through conversion count at all?</b>

It's one of the most consequential definitional choices in display and video, and it's usually made by an ad platform on your behalf.

<b>What it is</b>

A view-through conversion (VTC) credits an impression that was <i>served but not clicked</i>, when the user later converts within a lookback window. It is the entire justification for upper-funnel display and most programmatic video budgets.

<b>Why it's contested</b>

The central problem is unfalsifiable credit. If you served an impression to someone already likely to buy, VTC will record a "conversion" whether or not the ad mattered. With wide windows and broad targeting, you can manufacture impressive VTC counts by spraying impressions at high-intent audiences — pure correlation, formatted as performance.

<b>What experiments find</b>

Ghost-ad and PSA studies consistently show view-through lift far smaller than reported VTCs, and sometimes statistically indistinguishable from zero — especially for retargeting display, where the audience was going to convert anyway.

<b>The nuance</b>

View-through effects are real for genuine prospecting against cold audiences; they're largely illusory for warm retargeting. The metric isn't worthless, but it's the most over-claimed number in the stack.

<b>What to actually do</b>

— Never report VTCs at full face value next to click conversions; they are not the same evidentiary tier.
— Validate any meaningful VTC line against a holdout before scaling spend on it.
— Shorten lookback windows for retargeting to limit demand-capture inflation.

Bottom line for practitioners: view-through is where attribution is most easily gamed, often unintentionally. Treat every VTC as a hypothesis until an experiment says otherwise.