The Ecomm Analyst

Meta and TikTok both default to counting view-through conversions in their attribution. This means a customer who scrolled past your ad without clicking, then bought within 24 hours, gets credited to that ad. The platforms call this “1-day view.” The accurate name would be “1-day coincidence.”

The problem with view-through is that it counts impressions as causes. An impression isn’t a click. An impression isn’t even necessarily a viewing. The ad appeared on a screen for some duration that may or may not have included the user actually looking at it. If anything happens within the next 24 hours, the platform claims credit.

Think about how this plays out for retargeting campaigns. You’re running ads to people who’ve been on your site in the last 30 days. They’re already in your audience because they’ve already shown intent. Those people are going to convert at some baseline rate even if you serve them no ads. The view-through window catches all of those baseline conversions and credits them to the campaign.

The math gets ugly fast. A retargeting campaign serving 100k impressions a day to a 50k-person audience reaches each person twice on average. If your baseline conversion rate from that audience is 2%, you’ll see roughly 1,000 conversions in the window naturally. The campaign will claim most of them.

What I actually do with view-through.

Turn it off in Ads Manager attribution settings. Default to 7-day click only. The number gets uglier and more honest.

Look at incrementality testing for retargeting. Run a holdout audience that doesn’t see the campaign and compare conversion rates. Most retargeting campaigns deliver less incremental lift than the platform claims, and some deliver none.

Cross-reference with independent attribution. ThoughtMetric doesn’t count view-throughs by default in its multi-touch view, which means the channel mix it shows is closer to actual click-driven activity. When Meta’s reported revenue drops 40% switching to click-only attribution, that 40% was view-through and most of it wasn’t real.

The defense of view-through I’ve heard is that brand awareness matters and view-through approximates it. Brand awareness does matter. View-through doesn’t approximate it. View-through approximates “we showed someone an ad and they happened to buy.” Those are different claims.

If you’re running paid social and your ROAS looks healthy on default settings, switch to click-only for two weeks and watch what happens. The number you get is closer to what’s actually happening.