A view-through conversion is a conversion credited to an ad that someone saw but did not click or engage with, when they convert later within a set window. Google Ads, Meta and Floodlight (Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360) each count it differently, with different windows and different rules for when a click wins.
That last part is where most reporting arguments start. A view-through number is not a fact about your ad; it is the output of a counting rule. Change the window, the platform or the precedence rule and the number changes, even though nothing about the campaign did. This guide walks through what a view-through conversion is, how each major platform counts it, how YouTube's engaged-view conversions fit in, and how to test whether any of it was caused by your ads. For the one-paragraph definition, see the view-through conversion glossary entry.
What Is a View-Through Conversion?
Google's help page on view-through conversions puts it plainly: the column "tells you when customers view, but don't interact with your ad, and then later complete a conversion on your site." That is different from the other conversion columns, which record conversions after someone interacts with an ad.
Three ingredients make a view-through conversion:
- An impression: the ad was served and, depending on the platform, met a viewability or play threshold.
- No qualifying interaction: no click (and on some platforms, no engagement) that would claim the conversion first.
- A conversion inside the window: the conversion happened within the lookback period set for impressions.
Other names you will see for the same idea: post-view conversion, post-impression conversion, and view-through attribution. Floodlight reports call them view-through conversions, and Display & Video 360 line item settings call the window a post-view window.
How Is a View-Through Conversion Different From a Click-Through Conversion?
A click-through conversion follows a click on the ad. A view-through conversion follows an impression with no click. The practical differences:
- Strength of signal: a click shows the person acted on your ad. An impression only shows the ad had a chance to be seen.
- Window length: Google Ads and Meta both allow longer windows for clicks than for views, because a click is the stronger signal.
- Precedence: when the same person both saw and clicked, platforms generally credit the click, not the view.
- Bidding: in Google Ads, most view-through conversions are reporting only and stay out of the Conversions column, unless the campaign type supports view-through optimization.
The most common mistake is adding view-through and click-through conversions together and calling the total "conversions." They measure different levels of evidence. Keep them in separate columns, and read view-through as a range of possible influence rather than a count of sales your display ads produced.
How Does Google Ads Count View-Through Conversions?
Google's rules, from the same help page and its page about conversion windows:
- Last impression wins: "For Display Network and video ads, the last impression leading to conversion gets credit for the view-through conversion."
- Interactions take priority: view-through conversions "automatically exclude conversions from people who have also interacted with any of your other ads."
- Reporting only, mostly: with the exception of Performance Max for store goals, App campaigns and Demand Gen campaigns, view-through conversions "aren't included in the 'Conversions' column, only in the 'View-through conversions' and 'All conversions' columns."
- Cookie limits: Google notes that view-through conversions from browsers that don't allow cross-site cookies can't be reported.
What is the default view-through window in Google Ads?
Google sets three separate windows per conversion action. If you don't customize them when you create a conversion action, the defaults are 30 days for click-through, 3 days for engaged-view and 1 day for view-through. The view-through window can be set anywhere from 1 to 30 days, or 1 to 4 weeks. The click-through window can be set from 1 day up to 30, 60 or 90 days for Search and Display campaigns, depending on the conversion source.
Two details matter when you change a window. Changes apply only to conversions recorded from that day forward, so nothing is recounted. And as Google's own view-through window definition says, a longer view-through window will usually increase the number of view-through conversions Google Ads records. That is the inflation lever in one sentence.
When do view-through conversions count toward bidding?
Google lists the exceptions. For App campaigns promoting Android apps, view-through conversion optimization adds view-through signals to install bidding. In that context Google defines a view as at least 50% of the ad's pixels on screen for at least one second, or a video viewed for at least 2 seconds, matched within a 24 hour window, which is the default lookback for app campaigns. For YouTube-only Demand Gen campaigns, view-through optimization is available but off by default. Biddable view-through conversions show in the Conversions column only for campaigns opted in, and you can separate them by segmenting Conversions by Ad event type, where they appear as "Impression."
What Are Engaged-View Conversions on YouTube?
Engaged-view conversions sit between clicks and views.
Google built them for video, because people usually finish what they were watching before they act. Per Google's page about engaged-view conversions, an engagement counts when:
- Skippable in-stream ads: the viewer watches at least 10 seconds, or the whole ad if it is shorter than 10 seconds.
- In-feed ads: the viewer watches at least 5 seconds.
- Shorts ads: the viewer watches at least 5 seconds or clicks the call-to-action button.
- Display Network video ads: the viewer watches a non-skippable rewarded ad, or watches at least 5 seconds after the ad becomes skippable.
If the engagement criteria are met and the person converts inside the engaged-view window, it counts. Unlike standard view-through conversions, engaged-view conversions are included in both the "Conversions" and "All conversions" columns, so they sit next to click-through conversions in the main column. Google lists the campaign types that track them as Video, App, Display, Demand Gen and Performance Max.
Default engaged-view windows vary by conversion type on that page: 3 days for web conversions and offline conversion imports, 2 days for App campaigns for installs, 1 day for App campaigns for engagement, 1 day for Video action, Demand Gen, Performance Max and in-app actions through App Connect, and 3 days for store visits and store sales. You can set an engaged-view window anywhere from 1 to 30 days.
Two things to know in practice. First, a video "view" in Google's terminology is not an impression: Google counts a view when someone watches the whole ad, at least 30 seconds of it, or clicks on part of it, and a view that leads to a conversion lands in the Conversions column. Second, formats not measured through TrueView views, such as bumper ads and non-skippable in-stream ads, base engagements on clicks. To split click-through conversions from engaged-view conversions, segment Conversions by Ad event type.
How Does Meta Count View-Through Conversions?
Meta handles this through attribution settings at the ad set level. Its help page on attribution models and attribution settings lists three standard settings for website and in-store conversions:
- Click-through: events within 1 day or 7 days after a link click on your ad.
- View-through: events within 1 day after an impression of your ad.
- Engage-through: events within 1 day after a non-link click action on your ad. For video ads, it also includes a video played for 5 seconds, or 97% of the video if it is shorter than 5 seconds.
So on Meta, the view-through window is 1 day, and the closest equivalent to YouTube's engaged-view conversions is engage-through, which covers any click on the ad other than a link click, plus 5 second video plays.
Meta also offers an incremental attribution model alongside standard attribution. Meta describes it as optimizing for incremental conversions "using models that predict whether a conversion is caused by an ad." Meta warns that results "cannot be compared in the Campaign Overview table across ad sets with different attribution models," and points to its Compare Attribution Settings feature instead. Apply the same rule across platforms: never compare a Meta number counted with view-through against a Google Ads number that excludes it.
How Do Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360 Count View-Through Conversions?
Programmatic campaigns on Google Marketing Platform count conversions with Floodlight. Google's page on how Floodlight counts conversions explains that every visit to a tagged page creates a Floodlight impression, which is then checked against the person's ad impressions and clicks inside the conversion window. A conversion can be recorded on the basis of a click, an impression or a Rich Media event.
The precedence rule is explicit: "Floodlight considers clicks to be more significant than impressions." A conversion counts as click-through if the person clicked within the click window, even though it is also view-through. Only when there is no click in the window does the most recent impression get the credit.
Floodlight windows have their own quirks, per the Floodlight conversion windows page:
- Windows start at 0 days: a window of 0 counts events within 24 hours, 1 counts within 48 hours, and so on. A "7" in Floodlight is not the same as "7 days" in Google Ads.
- The maximum is 90 days.
- Set at several levels: account, advertiser, campaign, placement and site. Campaign and placement overrides cannot exceed the advertiser's value, and the window used is the one on the placement where the impression or click happened.
- Cookie or device ID match required: if no match is found for the converting user, the conversion record is discarded.
Display & Video 360 adds line item controls. Its conversion counting page lists three options: all post-view and post-click conversions, only post-click conversions, or all post-click conversions and a customizable percentage of post-view conversions. If you also use Campaign Manager 360, the shorter of the two windows wins. That percentage setting is a blunt but honest tool: it lets you tell the bidder to discount view-through credit instead of pretending it is worth the same as a click.
Why Do View-Through Conversions Inflate or Deflate Results?
View-through conversions can overstate or understate what your ads did, depending on the setup.
How they inflate results:
- Retargeting overlap: retargeting shows ads to people who already visited your site, some of whom were going to come back anyway. A view-through rule credits the ad for a return that was already likely.
- Long windows: every extra day in the window adds conversions that happened for other reasons. Google says as much about longer windows.
- Cheap, low-visibility impressions: a large volume of low-cost, barely seen placements can produce view-through conversions from reach alone, not persuasion.
- Double counting across platforms: Google, Meta and Floodlight each claim the same conversion under their own rules. Summing platform reports produces more conversions than your CRM recorded.
How they deflate results:
- Cookie loss: browsers that block cross-site cookies drop view-through conversions in Google Ads, and Floodlight discards conversions it cannot match.
- Click precedence: when a video ad prompts a later click on a branded search ad, the click gets the credit and the video's influence disappears from its own report.
- Short windows on long sales cycles: a 1 day view window will miss influence on a purchase that takes weeks to decide.
That is why view-through conversions alone can't tell you whether display or video works. They tell you about correlation inside a window. Our guide to paid search attribution and data-driven models covers the same problem from the click side.
How Do You Judge Whether View-Through Conversions Are Incremental?
Incrementality is the question that matters: how many conversions happened because of the ads that would not have happened without them. The only reliable way to answer it is an experiment with a holdout group.
Google describes Conversion Lift as a controlled experiment that splits your audience into people who see your ads (treatment) and people who don't (control). "The difference in conversions between these 2 groups will tell you the 'lift,' or the increase in conversions that are caused by the presence of the ad." Studies can be based on users or on geography, and they report metrics like incremental conversions, incremental cost per action and incremental return on ad spend. Google notes Conversion Lift isn't available for every account, and you contact your Google account representative to use it.
A practical sequence for any display, video or social program that leans on view-through credit:
- Report view-through separately. Keep click-through, engaged-view and view-through conversions in separate columns in every report.
- Normalize windows before comparing. Line up the view window, click window and counting method across platforms, or label each number with its rule.
- Check the overlap with your source of truth. Compare platform totals with conversions in your CRM or analytics. If the platforms claim more than actually happened, view-through credit is a likely source.
- Run a lift test. Use the platform's lift tool or a geo holdout, where some regions run the campaign and matched regions don't. Measure conversions in your own systems, not only in the ad platform.
- Calibrate. Compare the incremental conversions from the test with the view-through count. Use that ratio to set how much view-through credit you accept, or set the post-view percentage in Display & Video 360 to match.
Keep the test clean. Hold the rest of the media mix steady during the test, run it long enough to reach a confident read, and retest when creative, audience or budget changes materially.
The Bottom Line
A view-through conversion is real data about timing, not proof of cause. Know the rule behind every number: Google Ads defaults to a 1 day view-through window and leaves most view-through conversions out of the Conversions column, Meta counts views for 1 day, and Floodlight lets clicks override impressions with windows that start at zero. Report views separately, count engaged-views for what they are, and let a holdout test decide how much credit your display and video budgets deserve.