Post-View and Post-Click in Attribution: An Overview

There are two ways to credit a touchpoint for a conversion. Post-click credits a touchpoint the user actually clicked. Post-view, more commonly called view-through, credits a touchpoint the user only saw, without clicking, provided the conversion happens inside a set lookback window.

Which one you can use is now largely decided for you by the platforms rather than by your own preference, and that changed significantly in January 2026. Here is what each measures, and where view-through measurement stands today.

What changed for view-through measurement in January 2026

On 12 January 2026, Meta deprecated its 7-day view and 28-day view attribution windows, along with every combined window that paired them with a click window. The reporting fields behind them stopped returning data: actions_7d_view, action_values_7d_view, actions_28d_view and action_values_28d_view.

A 1-day view window is what remains on Meta. Post-click reporting still runs up to 28 days. In practice this means view-through credit on the largest social platform is now limited to conversions happening within 24 hours of the impression, so a long view-based lookback is no longer something you can report on there at all.

If you built reports or warehouse pipelines on those fields, they return nothing after that date rather than erroring loudly, which is worth checking if your view-through numbers quietly dropped to zero.

Post-click conversions

A click-based measure starts from the immediate action preceding the conversion. In reality the user may have taken several actions first. Say they clicked a paid search keyword, then a link in an email, then converted through organic search. Measured on a post-click basis rather than last click, each of those clicks takes a share of the conversion credit, as long as it falls inside the lookback window.

The lookback window is the period in which an action can still be matched to a conversion after the ad is clicked. For low-cost ecommerce transactions it might be 7 to 14 days. For a considered purchase like a car, 60 days may be more appropriate.

Post-view conversions (view-through)

With post-view conversions, also called view-through conversions, impressions inside the lookback window take a share of the credit alongside clicks. The user saw the ad, did not click it, and converted later.

This matters because advertisers running video and social usually have channels in the journey that rarely drive clicks but still contribute to the outcome. Below is how the same journey looks measured on a post-view basis.

Last click conversions

In a last click model all the credit goes to the channel the customer interacted with directly before converting. Every other channel in the chain gets zero.

Take a customer who searches on Google, clicks an organic result, and browses a company’s site without buying. Over the following days they see several banner ads from the same company offering a new-customer discount. Eventually they click one and purchase.

Under a last click model, all the credit goes to the banner ad. The organic search that introduced them counts for nothing, even though it started the journey.

Which one should you use?

On the face of it post-view data looks strictly better, since it captures the impressions clicks miss. In practice there are four constraints.

• Meta view windows are now one day. Since January 2026 the 7-day and 28-day view windows are gone, so view-through credit there only covers the 24 hours after an impression.
• Meta does not allow third-party impression tracking. You can track views on most other channels, but not there. Meta retired its own Facebook Attribution product in August 2021, and measurement moved to the Meta Pixel, the Conversions API and Aggregated Event Measurement. Either way you are not comparing like with like across platforms.
• Retargeting distorts the picture. Retargeting can deliver dozens of impressions before a conversion. With a non-algorithmic model, you will almost certainly over-credit it.
• An impression is not a viewing. An impression is counted when the ad is served, which is not the same as the ad being seen. An ad served halfway down an article the reader never scrolls to still counts, and in a post-view model it can still take conversion credit.

Browser and mobile privacy changes push in the same direction. As third-party cookie coverage has narrowed and mobile platforms have restricted cross-app tracking, impression-level matching has become the least reliable part of measurement, which is the background to Meta shortening its view windows rather than an unrelated development.

The practical answer for most advertisers is to treat post-click as the reportable baseline, use view-through as directional evidence for upper-funnel channels rather than a number to optimize against, and compare channels within a single attribution model you control rather than across each platform’s own reporting.