<b>How much credit does an ad nobody clicked deserve?</b>

<b>How much credit does an ad nobody clicked deserve?</b>

The question: view-through conversions — credit assigned because a user <i>saw</i> an impression and later converted without ever clicking — are one of the most disputed line items in attribution. Are they real causal influence or sophisticated double-counting?

What the evidence says: the honest answer is 'it depends, and usually less than reported.' Controlled studies of display and video repeatedly find view-through credit is heavily contaminated by two effects. First, <b>targeting endogeneity</b>: ad systems show impressions to users already likely to convert, so the impression correlates with conversion without causing it. Second, the standard view-through windows (24 hours to 30 days) are wide enough to sweep in conversions that would have happened regardless. Incrementality experiments often find true view-through lift is a fraction of the platform-reported figure.

The nuance: it's not zero. Brand and upper-funnel video genuinely move users who never click — that's the whole point of awareness media. Dismissing all view-through as fraud is as wrong as accepting it at face value. The error is in <i>magnitude</i> and in attributing it without a counterfactual.

What to actually do: never include view-through credit in a model that drives budget decisions unless it's been calibrated against a holdout. Shorten windows aggressively as a sanity check — if 80% of view-through credit lives in the 7-30 day tail, most of it is correlation.

<b>Bottom line for practitioners:</b> a view is the weakest causal claim in attribution. Demand an experiment before you pay it like a click.