Artificially Inflated Performance
The main purpose of View Through Conversions is to inflate performance.
View Through Conversions often account for 50% of Facebook’s revenue using their default 7-day-click and 1-day-view attribution window.
- 50% more attributed revenue means 50% more performance.
- 50% more performance means more ad spend
- More ad spend meas more revenue for Facebook
- More ad spend also means more revenue for the Ad Agency
As the saying goes: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
– Upton Sinclair
If your ad agency really believes in View Conversions, shouldn’t they also believe in TV ads?
Attribution Poaching
Consider this scenario:
You’re shopping at Walmart and you put a red hat into your shopping cart. While waiting in line at checkout, you notice a TV screen overhead.
This TV happens to have an RFID reader that can detect what products are in your cart. Based on what is in your cart, the TV can show you commercials for those specific products. In this particular case, the TV shows you a commercial for the red hat you are planning on buying.
When you finally reach the checkout and make your purchase, guess who gets the “last-touch” credit for that sale? The TV commercial of course!
The performance data will be indisputable: The TV displayed an ad for a RED HAT and TWO MINUTES LATER you purchased a RED HAT! What other conclusion could there be, other than you definitely need to spend more money on those in-store TV ads…
Correlations and Causations
View Conversions are Correlations: They are measuring people that are buying, but they are rarely actually causing the buying.
Click Conversions are much more causal in nature. The shorter the duration of the look-back-window, the better.
So ignore view-through revenue, and only count click-through data.
Ad Heretic 
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