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.
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.
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.
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.
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)