View-through vs Click-through Attribution: Conversion Clarity
Berry:Your Marketing Assistant
14 Jul 2025
5 min read
Do you have a clear view of what’s actually driving your sales?
Many brands look at different attribution models to understand campaign success. Two main approaches stand out: view-through attribution and click-through attribution. View-through attribution takes into account users who see your ad but don't click it, and then later make a purchase. This can be useful for measuring brand awareness. However, it has significant limitations in data accuracy and performance tracking. On the other hand, click-through attribution focuses on users who actually click your ad and then convert. This makes it the most reliable and transparent way to measure ROI and optimize your campaigns.
What is Click-through Attribution?
Click-through attribution credits the conversion to an ad that a user clicked before completing a purchase. It clearly shows whether an ad directly contributed to a sale.
Advantages of Click-through Attribution
Clear ROI measurement: Directly ties purchases to clicks, eliminating guesswork.
Intent-based performance: Measures users with actual buying intent.
Easy to set up and widely supported: Compatible with most platforms and quick to implement.
Easier to optimize: Clearly identifies the best-performing channels, campaigns, and creatives.
Limitations of Click-through Attribution
It prioritizes the last click and may overlook brand awareness contributions earlier in the journey.
However, this clarity is often a big advantage in performance-focused marketing.
What is View-through Attribution?
View-through attribution credits conversions to users who saw your ad but didn't click, and then converted later. While it might seem helpful for measuring awareness campaigns, it comes with major drawbacks.
Disadvantages of View-through Attribution
Weak signal strength: It’s difficult to determine if the ad truly influenced the purchase or if the user already intended to buy.
Sampling issues: High volume and weak signals lead to sampling, increasing misattribution risks.
Privacy limitations: Regulations like Apple’s ATT and Facebook’s AEM heavily restrict view-through tracking.
Platform dependency: Typically works within a single platform; cross-channel visibility is limited.
Reliability: Can provide directional insights but should not be used as a primary performance metric.
From a technical perspective: Why Click-through is healthier
View-through data often relies on sampling, resulting in wide confidence intervals and higher error margins.
Privacy restrictions hinder deterministic tracking and reduce the accuracy of view-through reporting.
View-through should only be used as a supporting signal — not as the main decision-making metric.
Best practice: A data-driven approach with multiple attribution models
Use click-through attribution as a strong foundation to optimize campaigns, allocate budgets effectively, and understand which channels truly work.
However, relying solely on one model isn’t always enough. At Roasberry, we provide 6 different attribution models to help you analyze your entire customer journey from every angle:
First Interaction: Credits the first touchpoint that introduced the customer to your brand.
Last Interaction: Credits the last touchpoint before conversion.
Linear: Distributes credit equally across all touchpoints.
Time Decay: Gives more credit to touchpoints closer to the conversion.
Position-Based: Splits credit between the first and last interactions, with less weight to the middle touches.
Last Non-Direct: Credits the last non-direct channel before the purchase, ignoring direct traffic.
We believe that click-based measurement is the most accurate and actionable foundation for understanding conversions, but combining it with multiple attribution models gives you the full story behind every sale.
Conclusion
Don’t settle for just "viewed" — focus on interactions that actually get clicked and turn into sales.
With Roasberry’s advanced click-through attribution solutions, you can precisely analyze which ads drive revenue, optimize faster, and scale your budget more efficiently.
For example, one of our DTC (direct-to-consumer) clients in the home & lifestyle category implemented our click-through attribution model and saw outstanding results:
35% higher ROI within the first 3 months.
28% reduction in wasted ad spend, as they identified and paused underperforming campaigns.
22% improvement in customer acquisition cost (CAC), by shifting budget toward channels that actually converted.
By focusing on actual clicks rather than passive views, they were able to clearly see which ads and channels truly drove purchases — not just impressions. This data-driven clarity allowed them to reallocate budgets confidently and scale their growth faster.