View-through Attribution (VTA) and Click-through Attribution (CTA) are both critical to understanding the full impact of advertising channels on a prospect or customer, but they require different data to accurately attribute the impact of the potential customer's decision to act or purchase. MetaRouter captures the data necessary for each and passes it to the appropriate vendor.

What is View-through Attribution?

View-through attribution (VTA) attempts to track whether an impression—a person’s viewing of an ad—has led to an eventual action, like a purchase. Of course, VTA can’t guarantee that the view was the impetus for action, but it’s an important metric to track when analyzing the user journey.

What is Click-through Attribution?

Click-through attribution (CTA) is simply the tracking of direct clicks on an advertisement that eventually lead to a purchase. While this is the most straightforward option with clear results, it doesn’t present a holistic view of all advertising channels on the decision-making process.

How MetaRouter Handles VTA

To provide VTA analytics, MetaRouter sends cookie values to third parties by syncing with them individually. The MetaRouter Sync Injector collects and enriches events with the cookie ID information so that the vendor can manage VTA. 

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Sometimes, vendors can use information from another party’s cookie ID (for example, MiQ can sync with Xandr, LiveRamp, or RevJet). In this case, we can—with the clients’ permission—pass a different vendor’s cookie ID for attribution purposes.

How MetaRouter Handles CTA

Anytime MetaRouter tracks a Click ID and passes it to the vendor, CTA is supported. Click IDs are often passed as URL decorators (the portion at the end of a URL) and those can also be accepted by the MetaRouter system and sent to the right vendor—or vendors.  

For example, a URL decorator that came from an email newsletter and Twitter Click ID looks like this:

http://www.example.com/article?ref=email&twclid=123

In this case, ref=email tells analytics software (customizable to your organization) that this link was clicked as part of a newsletter campaign and twclid=123 tells our system that this event has a Twitter Click ID of 123.  

While it is each organization’s responsibility to ensure that Click ID tracking is enabled and that data is passed appropriately throughout your properties, we’re happy to help. With that in place, MetaRouter has the ability to grab and enrich any Click ID in the data stream.

To learn more about the benefits of MetaRouter, reach out to us anytime. Let's dive in together...