View through conversions are a metric. They are not a bullshit metric. We know this because we work with thousands of companies and have run lots of "lift tests" to determine incrementality.
Some folks see a big lift, others see a smaller lift.
It depends on your product, funnel, and a host of other factors outside our control as an ad company.
The other annoying thing about the "view through conversions are bullshit" meme is that it implies that all advertising throughout the history of civilization is bullshit. A trip down 101, where several companies with very smart marketers are running billboards shows the fallacy of that. People still buy print ads. Bus ads. Any business that comes from those would also qualify as "view through conversions".
At Perfect Audience we record all the conversions, click and view, and then give you tools to assign a "multiplier" to them based on how much weight you want to give them.
We're rather give you lots of data and easy ways to organize it than offer a black box experience like most of our competitors.
Kyle! Thanks for the comment. As with anything anywhere ever, YMMV. Just because a metric is bogus for one business doesn't mean it is across the board.
I have a phone call with almost every new customer and the data from those calls supports VTC as a metric...nearly all new customers saw Baremetrics everywhere before they ultimately converted.
Lots of reasons why that's the case for our business (goes back to the value proposition I mentioned in the article).
Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but I'm confident in that metric for us.
A way to attribute view through conversions is to have Perfect Audience run a test for you:
Keep cookie-ing people but don't show half of them any ads. Then compare the conversion rate to the people shown ads and come up with VTR attribution coefficient.
Not currently but we're working on it! Drop us a line at support@perfectaudience.com. I can say for certain that our support team would love to "roll" you away from our distinguished competitor.
Thanks. We(Plivo) actually tried PA out for the dev-targeting display ad option. (not retargeting). We didn't feel we had the kind of ROI we wanted at that time.
Incidentally, would the reports from Conversion Explorer be more granular than the conversion reports at Adroll? (with Adroll, it's not possible to see the "who" part, but when and where, yes)
I totally get your point but I don't think VTC is a total BS. With services like Adroll, which I use, you can set a time window for a view event to be considered a conversion (VTC). (i.e. with 5-day time window, if someone is served an impression and converts after 5 days, that won't count as a conversion). This way, you can get a better net impact of view events.) And I think the default setting of retargeting ads providers won't offer a short time window like 5 days.
Yep. Those features are very helpful for giving marketers control over what gets counted and how. Another feature we've added to the mix is a "Conversion Explorer that gives details on who converted, when, and from which ads so you can take that data and reconcile it against your other reporting.
Not all advertising is direct response (ie: looking at dollars in vs dollars out in specific advertising channels). There will always be a Coca-Cola or a P&G that care more about eyeballs than direct sales.
I second that. Working for a publisher, I know, that it is most valuable for us, if any big brand covers our front page with a big eye-ball-grabbing-wallpaper.
A view through conversion occurs when a user sees your ad, returns to your site through another channel and then converts.
How often do you see an ad banner, don't click on it, then go back to the site because of the banner? View through conversions are a bullshit metric.