View-Through Conversion

A view-through conversion is a sale or lead credited to someone who was shown your ad, never clicked it, and then converted on their own inside the platform's view window.

You open Ads Manager, see a healthy return, and feel good about the week. Part of that number comes from people who scrolled past your ad, tapped nothing, and bought later anyway. Meta still counts that as a view-through conversion, and as of the 2026 attribution changes it stays on by default with a one-day view window. Anyone served your ad in the last twenty-four hours who then converts gets partly credited to the campaign, whether or not the ad actually moved them.

You feel this most on retargeting. When you run ads at people who already visited your site or left something in the cart, a large share of them were coming back on their own. The ad happened to be in front of them, but it did not do the work. View-through credit quietly sweeps up those sales and hands them to the campaign, which is exactly why warm audiences almost always look like your top performers when view-through is switched on. You can see the gap yourself: break your results into click conversions and view-through conversions side by side, and watch how much of the win disappears when you count only the clicks.

The honest catch is that view-through is the single most contested credit in all of attribution, and it inflates return most on the exact audiences that were coming back anyway. It is not useless, it just cannot be read at face value. Always separate view-through from click conversions before you decide a campaign is working.

If a campaign only looks great with view-through turned on, it is not the campaign that is winning, it is the credit.