What is VTR?

In its creative sense, VTR measures retention. Reported as views over impressions, or more strictly as the share of viewers reaching 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the video, it tells you whether the body of the ad held attention after the opener did its job. A strong scroll-stopper with a collapsing VTR usually means the hook overpromised and the middle of the ad failed to pay it off. High VTR signals that pacing, demo, and structure are working, which is also a signal ad platforms reward with cheaper delivery. The honest limit is that VTR can become a vanity metric. A short, slow, low-stakes video can post a beautiful completion rate while driving no clicks and no sales, so VTR only matters when it is read alongside CTR, CPA, and ROAS. In its attribution sense, view-through conversions credit a sale to an impression a viewer saw but did not click. That number is real but soft. It overlaps with organic demand, is sensitive to the attribution window, and got materially noisier after ATT cut off user-level tracking, so most performance teams weight click-based conversions more heavily and treat view-through credit as directional. Used well, the creative VTR diagnoses where in the video you are losing people, while attribution VTR hints at the assist value of impressions that never earned a click.