View Through Vs. Click Through

I realized I started ranting about conversion attribution without really getting into the View Through Vs Click Through debate...

Most online marketers attribute the success event or "conversion" to the last ad clicked or viewed (as stated in the earlier blog), but what does this really mean?

If you utilize a third party ad server (i.e. Atlas or Doubleclick) for your banner campaigns they cookie users when your banner is "served" to them, because of this if you want to know how many people saw your banner as the last touchpoint prior to purchase you can. In the same way you can set the ad server to record how many people clicked on your banner as the last touchpoint.

Most ad servers will allow you to use one metric for reporting but still pull in the other metric for analysis, it has been my experience that the vast majority of conversion come from the view through users, meaning that if you use click through you are under valuing your banner campaign a lot. Now depending upon what type of banner campaign you have running this could just mean you are doing a good job at targeting your audience, because if you are serving ads on the right sites (same sites as your target audience) then whether or not the banner motivates them to come to the site and purchase view through will make it look like they saw an ad right before they came. This is particularily troubling if you engage in a lot of retargeting, since that tactic allows you to follow around your users very efficiently and with a very high frequency.

There can be a lot of opinions around which method is more accurate, normally the online marketers like to use view through while the traditional marketers lean towards click through. Which one is right for you? Well, that all depends on what the goal of the campaign as well as overall goal is. As always the best metric is to look at is the total spend and total performance of the site and business...