View-through attribution (VTA), also known as ‘impressions tracking’, is one of the mobile advertising attribution models. In case of view-through attribution a conversion happens when a user just sees a display of the product’s ad and then makes the target action (e.g. install the app or purchase) by going directly to the website or doing an organic search separately within the specific lookback window.
Let’s say you’re selling training shoes and you’ve developed an ad which is shown up to a user during some gaming session. The user sees an ad and decides not to interrupt the ongoing game by ultimately clicking the ad. Instead, he remembers the product and goes on searching for it online some time later. If a user sees an ad for the training shoes today, and then buys them a year from now, you’d hardly attribute such a purchase to the display of the ad made a year ago. But if the same user makes a purchase just within a couple of hours, we could reasonably say that the ad had an impact on his purchasing decision. In this case we’re talking about the view-through conversions, i.e. view-through attribution model.