What is view-through attribution (VTA)?

Here are a few of the key benefits of VTA for mobile marketers:

• Determining which impressions drive installs, directly and indirectly.
• Gaining a holistic, broad view over which channels are providing brand uplift and assisting power in your campaigns.
• Providing access to the information needed to effectively assess upper- and mid-funnel performance.
• Tapping into broad and then more granular overviews of the user journey.
• Feeling empowered to increase budgets on certain channels to drive ROI and ROAS.

By taking all ads that were served in an multi-channel campaign into account with VTA, marketers can comprehensively understand which impressions influenced installs and conversions, where uplift has been provided, and which campaigns, ads, platforms, and channels assist each other. Marketing teams can then leverage these insights to decrease user acquisition (UA) costs and drive higher ROI.

Key CTA advertising considerations: The pros and cons of click attribution

Click-through attribution measures the install, engagement, or re-engagement that takes place when/after a user clicks an ad. It’s a clear and concise method of tracking the clicks on an ad and then attributing those clicks to an action or conversion. Using click-through attribution, an extremely clear path is drawn between a click and an event. It’s fast, direct, accurate, and doesn’t require a measurement window to assess before making the attribution.

While the attribution is straightforward, it does not provide the full picture of campaign performance or the journey to install. Think about it this way, if an install is attributed to Instagram, where the click took place, but the user saw an ad on a Connected TV (CTV) app earlier in the day, click attribution won’t take into account the role that the CTV played.

This is particularly important to consider if you’re running campaigns on visual platforms like CTV or video-first apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat. If you only employ CTA in this case, you’ll be led to falsely assume that Instagram is doing all of the work and leading to all of the conversions, which will likely lead you to allocate more budget to the channel. What you don’t see, however, is that the CTV ads are actually setting the scene and leading to a significant percentage increase in those Instagram conversions.

Key VTA considerations: The pros and cons of view-through attribution

View-through attribution gives you the oversight and insights needed to holistically and accurately assess campaign and channel performance. This means that the role of visual channels can be properly understood in the path to conversion and that the relationship between channels within a broader campaign can be essential to user experience and performance.

When used properly, VTA is also, fundamentally, an attribution framework that allows you to more precisely allocate your marketing budget, without over-investing in channels that only appear to be performing well. By having the full picture, you can more confidently scale campaigns and drive ROI, because the chain and path to conversion is made clearer.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that VTA won’t be relevant for all industries of campaigns. If you run ads for hyper casual games that are single-channel and aimed at driving immediate installs via direct click, then waiting out a VTA window doesn’t make sense. If, however, your industry and marketing approach take into account longer consideration cycles, branding, and exposure, VTA is crucial. This is probably most relevant for e-commerce, fintech, and streaming apps.

Realistically, however, view-through attribution will always include a level of ambiguity. Much of this can be mitigated by increasing the measurement window to at least 24 hours (though different verticals and campaigns will call for different windows) to ensure the clearest picture is gained. Via testing, you can find the sweet spot, as a window that’s too long could falsely credit long-forgotten ads, while shorter windows might not include a channel that was critical. Either way, the lack of a direct link to an action means there will always be some space for interpretation.