Social View-Through

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It was a simple enough tweet. It was one of those idle questions that didn't even deserve the average 2.8 hour half-life of a tweet.

"What do you call the social media equivalent of a view-through?" I opined. "Anybody?"

While I was not flooded with responses, what I received kept me thinking well past that 2.8 hour mark. Why? Because I am infatuated with the names of things. I want things to be named as clearly as possible to communicate their meaning as readily as possible and I got stuck on this one.

A "view-through" is not a simple concept to start with. It's the recorded visit to your web property after having previously seen an ad but not necessarily having clicked on it. That's a lot to unpack but basically it's the proof that your ads have an impact via branding, which led to awareness that generated interest that resulted in a visit to the website that Jack built.

So I thought it would be valuable to identify that concept in the sociosphere. I saw a tweet or read a review or witnessed a status update that piqued my interest…later.

So what to call it? Suggestions included:

Awareness impression
Delayed/postponed chat session
Hypothetical ad impression
Interaction effects
Post throughs
SM throughs
Social exposure
Social placement
Social velocity

A view-through is recorded by capturing the exposure to an ad via a (usually) third-party cookie. A social view-through ("peer group pressure"?) is not so easy to detect.

To those who said, "Hey, a view-through is a view-through. Why make it more complicated than necessary?" I say, "Because it's very different and important to separate out the paid-throughs from the earned-throughs."

Wait…did I just say "earned-throughs"? [Shudder] [Sigh]

Falling back to my outreach project, I think my favorite offer was "nibble." The closest to the truth? "specious attribution model."

Many thanks to:

William J Brown (@realBillBrown)
Sean Carlos
Ernst Hiemstra (@ernst_hiemstra)
Michele Kiss (@MicheleJKiss)
Keith MacD (@keithmacd)
Bob Mitchell (@boboram)
Craig Sullivan (@OptimiseOrDie)