The top 1% of marketers are talking about viewthroughs, again

Sharp improvements on TikTok and AppLovin as we step into a (superfluous?) Prime Deal Days event. Which is just Amazon cannibalizing your Black Friday margins, right?

Regardless, we’re seeing strong lifts in CAC this week, even as Meta CPMs jump in response to this sale. Still, we haven’t reached critical Black Friday mass yet.

Expect budgets for BFCM to turn on the first week of November and launch the ad performance armageddon. We don’t typically see huge negative swings in the auction before then.

But that doesn’t mean I want you to “time” it. This isn’t the stock market. You should have your conversion lag and flighting figured out by now. Stick to the plan!

We also don’t know what kind of mid-term election spending chaos is bound to come. Billions are flowing into the ad auctions in localized and unpredictable ways. The only way to navigate chaos is to have your performance benchmarks and strategic scenarios mapped out.

If it’s anything like the last presidential election, CPMs absolutely crashed right after election day, and it was a cheaper-than-usual sprint to cover the last few weeks to the Cyber Five. We’ll see how this year shakes out.

Last week I was hanging out at Andrew Foxwell’s NYC Summit. These are some of the best media buyers on earth, so I always enjoy chatting and learning from them. 

Something struck me, though. Most media buyers are super-focused on Meta. I mean, rightfully so – it’s still the best-converting full-funnel channel available to us. 

But you ask some of these media buyers about the “other” channels and people kinda shrug them off. 

Which feels wild to me. More people watch YouTube than Netflix and Amazon Prime combined. TikTok as a search engine is rivaling Google. There’s connected TVs in most homes in America.

So why does it feel like Meta Ads are the only game in town?

I think the answer comes down to the feedback loop. Meta performs extremely well on “last-click” attribution. This means it’s pretty easy, given the limited availability of data, to attribute a sale back to a Meta ad. 

People click on Meta ads a lot. And they click on them to buy things. 

This means it’s super easy to track those conversions, which means it’s easier to justify ad spend on Meta.

TikTok and YouTube ads are amazing at driving brand recall and discovery… but they’re terrible at driving clicks. 

If your team is prioritizing one-day clickthroughs as the ultimate metric, then TikTok and YouTube ads look terrible. But there’s no world where TikTok and YouTube are gonna change their user experience to drive more clicks. You’re there to watch, it’s not natural to interrupt yourself. 

So what happens? Advertisers end up biased against these channels because they have no trustworthy way to measure performance. 

But I’m telling you, there’s a better way: attaching ROI to views. I’ve talked about this before in this newsletter, but there’s a lot of new readers here, so it bears revisiting.

Yep. That’s why we created the Clicks + Deterministic Views attribution model in Northbeam. We saw this issue, where great ad platforms were getting ignored, and decided to solve it. 

C+DV takes verified impressions and view data directly from participating ad platforms and combines them with Northbeam’s first-party performance data. 

Advertisers can use C+DV to measure how ad impressions and views influence conversions. This is “viewthrough” conversion measurement done deterministically, which means every impression tied to a conversion is verified, not inferred.

Clicks-only measurement is biased towards campaigns at the bottom of the funnel. This obscures the impact of your vital awareness campaigns.

If you’ve ever managed a digital marketing budget, you’ve probably fallen for this. I have. Most of my career, actually.

It goes like this: you run amazing awareness campaigns on TikTok, Snap, and CTV. On these platforms people don't always click through immediately. The content performs great, engagement is solid, brand mentions are up, and revenue begins to climb across all your other channels.  

But according to your attribution dashboard? Those awareness campaigns are basically worthless, as they aren’t connected to any measurable revenue via click behaviors.

Meanwhile, your Google Ads are getting credit for literally every conversion, even though you know most of those people discovered your brand somewhere else first. Even TikTok will admit that click-based measurement undervalues TikTok ads by 73%. 

The longer you ignore or undervalue your awareness campaigns, the sooner the performance of your bottom-of-funnel conversion campaigns dry up. This leads to further consolidation of budget to lower funnel campaigns, which creates a self-destructive cycle that eventually kills the ad account – and maybe even your business. 

It's like being a basketball coach and only focusing on stats about who scored the final basket, while completely ignoring all the assists, steals, and defensive plays that made it possible.

Media consumption is constantly changing, and marketers seeking competitive CPMs are looking to these new channels for efficiency. Yet many of the rising new channels are difficult to measure exclusively with click-based attribution. 

As marketers, our goal is to get our message in front of the right people at the right time (in a measurable way, I’d argue.) As attention shifts to new channels, it’s our job to follow. So where are people going?

The short answer: video. Video-first, algorithmic-led social platforms lead in time spent on-app by users, with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram dominating the field. 

Meta has shifted focus to video with extreme success: Instagram and Facebook continue to command a large share of user attention per day. 

Connected television (CTV) is taking over: in 2025, 90% of US households use an internet-connected television device at least once a month, where users are streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and even free providers like Tubi. 

TikTok continues to lead the field in users’ time spent on app. The algorithm-driven discovery model of TikTok’s feed has sweeping influence on other social media, all of whom are launching similar feeds. Users love TikTok, and they love video – as marketers, we must react. 

But how do you reliably measure the performance impact of these emerging video channels?

So what makes Clicks + Deterministic Views different? Instead of making educated guesses about what happened (like most view-through attribution models do), C+DV actually knows what happened.

We built direct integrations with the major platforms (Meta, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, Axon, Vibe, and MNTN) to get verified impression data. Not modeled data. Not estimated data. The actual "yes, this specific person saw this specific ad" data.

Then we match that against our first-party pixel and order data using exact identifiers: order IDs, hashed emails, login data. When we say an impression led to a conversion, we can prove it.

This is called “deterministic” attribution, where other viewthrough modeling is “probabilistic.”

The difference between deterministic and probabilistic attribution:

Deterministic (what we do): Uses verified identifiers to directly connect an ad impression to a conversion. It's like having security camera footage.

Probabilistic (what everyone else does): Uses statistical models to guess which ad drove a conversion based on signals like IP address and device type. It's like relying on eyewitness accounts.

Thanks to Northbeam's direct integration with each ad platform included in this model, Northbeam can do true in-app "impression matching". 

This means that conversions can be matched with impressions that helped generate those conversions at the user level.

The logic is straightforward:

When looking at ads under the C+DV model, paid clicks and paid views take full precedence over touchpoints with the following Category (Northbeam) labels:

    - Direct

    - Organic

    - Organic Search

    - Paid - Branded Search

    - Email

    - SMS

Top-of-funnel channels will see the biggest lift. If you have channels doing lots of demand generation or with low click-through rates, you'll see the highest impact. 

Performance marketing stays accurate. For bottom-funnel campaigns with high click-through rates, you'll see more modest changes since clicks were already being tracked properly.

Upper-funnel campaigns will fill out a lot of previously-unattributed revenue. Those awareness campaigns that seemed like money pits? You're about to discover their real value.

See the full customer journey: Finally understand how both clicks and views work together to drive conversions, instead of just seeing the last touchpoint. Witness the funnels that drive your conversions from the moment of discovery to the point of sale, and optimize accordingly. 

Upper-funnel campaigns get their due: Quantify the actual revenue contribution of your awareness and prospecting campaigns that have been flying under the radar. Better connect revenue to top of funnel campaigns. Justify to clients, bosses, and stakeholders that your awareness campaigns are worth the spend. 

Make decisions with confidence: Every impression tied to a conversion is proven, not modeled, so you can trust your data. Optimize, reallocate, and experiment in your top of funnel campaigns while knowing you have a way to accurately measure their viewthrough impact. 

Smarter budget allocation: Know exactly which campaigns are driving downstream revenue and scale what actually works. Stop wasting spend on awareness campaigns that boost vanity metrics but don’t drive measurable revenue.

Cross-platform clarity: Get all your verified impression data combined with our order-level tracking in one unified view. See all your channels in one single dashboard.

Privacy-first approach: All data processing happens in our secure clean room, ensuring compliance and protecting user privacy.

Stop wasting money: Eliminate the over-crediting of last-click channels and avoid underspending on the campaigns that create real demand.

🎬 Meta showed off new AI video tools and in-chat checkout at Ad Week. The future is now, old man!

📹 Not to be outdone, TikTok also showed off some new AI tools. Anybody feel like a frog in a really hot pot of water?

🤖 OpenAI brought visual ads and more measurement to ChatGPT. You can measure this with Northbeam, by the way — we’re an official partner.

🍸 The Media Buyer is hosting a happy hour in NYC. Join us and our friends at QRY while we casually hang out with some of the best marketers in the city.

💪 Power-ranking ad platforms? I went on Zain and Isaac’s podcast to give my take on which ad platforms are S-tier - and which fall short.

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