Somewhere in the settings of every new Demand Gen campaign there is a checkbox that reads "Include view-through conversions." You did not tick it. Google did, before you ever saw the screen.
That box is not a reporting preference. It changes what the campaign is trying to buy. With it on, Google counts a sale or a lead from someone who saw your ad and never clicked it as a full conversion, puts that conversion in the same column as everything else, and then bids to find more people like them.
For some businesses that is a reasonable trade. For most of the small businesses currently being offered credits to try Demand Gen, it is a quiet way to make a campaign look better than it is. And the most useful evidence on this is not ours. It is sitting in Google's own help page for the feature, which argues against the default more clearly than any critic does.
The Checkbox You Did Not Tick
Google calls the feature view-through conversion optimization. Its help page is plain about where things stand: newly created Demand Gen campaigns have it enabled by default. It is officially an open beta, available to any advertiser who wants it, and it is now also what you get if you do nothing.
Two things change when it is on.
First, the counting. Before, view-through conversions lived in their own column that you had to add to your reports on purpose. Now they are included in the main Conversions column as a biddable conversion, sitting next to the people who clicked, the people who filled in your form, the people who called. One number, no label on which is which.
Second, and more important, the bidding. Google's systems now treat those view-through conversions as success and go looking for more of it. The campaign is no longer only hunting for people who will click and act. It is also hunting for people who will see the ad and later act by some other route. We made the same argument about Meta's attribution settings in That Attribution Setting Is Not a Report. It Is an Instruction., and the logic transfers exactly. What you count is what you ask for.
Note the word newly. Google describes the default as applying to newly created campaigns, so the ones most exposed are the ones built recently, which, given the current push, is a lot of them.
What Google Counts as a View
Here is the definition that should make any owner pause. From Google's own documentation: a view is counted when at least one pixel of an ad is on screen for any amount of time.
One pixel. Any amount of time. That is not someone who watched your video. That is someone whose screen briefly contained a sliver of it while they scrolled past on the way to something else.
A view-through conversion is then counted when that person converts within the window you set, without having clicked. Google ranks the three ways a conversion can be credited, and each conversion is credited only once, to the highest-ranking one:
- A click. The person clicked the ad and later converted. The strongest link between an ad and an action, and the only one most small advertisers ever planned to pay for.
- An engaged view. The person watched a video ad for more than ten seconds, or all of a short bumper ad, then converted without clicking. We covered how this category inflated one campaign's results in Demand Gen Will Tell You It Worked. That Is Not the Same as Working.
- An impression. Anything else. The ad was on screen, the person did not click and did not watch, and they converted anyway. This is the view-through conversion, and it is the bucket the new default feeds into bidding.
Think about who sits in that third bucket for a local plumber, a dental practice, or a roofing company. People who already knew the name. People who were going to search for you anyway, saw your ad somewhere in their feed that week, then searched and called. The ad was present. Whether it did anything is a different question, and the checkbox does not ask it.
Google's Own Help Page Argues Against It
This is the part worth reading slowly, because none of it comes from a critic. Every point below is from the help page Google wrote for this feature.
It says who the feature is not for. Google lists two kinds of advertiser for whom view-through optimization may not be the best option: those who only care about click-through performance, and those who evaluate Demand Gen campaigns outside Google Ads and cannot measure view-through conversions. That second group is almost every small business we work with. If you judge your marketing by leads in a CRM, calls on a tracking line, or jobs on a calendar, Google is describing you.
It says your own records will not match. Once the feature is on, Google explains that view-through conversions are added to the Conversions column, and that the increase will not show up in your backend system because impression-based conversions are not exported. In plain terms, Google is warning you in advance that your Google Ads number will go up and your own count will not, and that this is expected.
It says it is not trying to create new sales. Asked how the feature affects conversion lift studies, Google answers that while view-through optimization aims to increase overall conversions, it does not directly focus on incrementality, meaning the conversions that would not have happened otherwise. That is the whole question an owner cares about, and Google has said in writing that this feature is not aimed at it.
It says keep the window short. Google recommends a one-day window for view-through conversions and warns that if you set it higher, you can expect a surge in the view-through conversions reported.
It covers less than you might assume. It applies to video ads only, on YouTube, Display and Discover.
None of this is hidden, and to be fair to Google, it is unusually candid. The problem is that the candor lives on a help page, and the default lives in the campaign builder.
YouTube Tells You to Turn It All the Way Up
If you went looking for guidance on this setting, you would mostly find the opposite advice.
The one video we found that is dedicated to view-through optimization in Demand Gen, published this summer by Guaranteed PPC, recommends switching it on for essentially every campaign and pushing the view-through window to its thirty-day maximum. An older DriftLead video makes the same move from the other side, calling the default one-day window far too short and suggesting thirty days for longer sales cycles.
Their core point deserves a fair hearing, because it is right. Ads that people see without clicking do have value. Nobody clicks a billboard, and billboards are not all a waste of money. A lot of what upper-funnel advertising does is make your name familiar before someone needs you, and a click-only view of the world will always undercount that.
But the disagreement is not about whether seen-but-not-clicked ads can work. It is about whether counting them inside Google Ads proves that they did. And on that, the advocate's own numbers are the most interesting evidence in the video.
He shared six months of before and after figures for a client that sells luxury mailboxes. With view-through optimization switched on, the return on ad spend from his Demand Gen campaigns fell by roughly a quarter, and the return from his Display campaigns fell by about a sixth. His conclusion was that the lower return was worth it for the extra volume, because other campaigns in the account were profitable enough to absorb it. That is a legitimate call for a growing ecommerce brand with margin to spare. He also said plainly that he would not switch it on when you are just starting out, or when you are cutting it thin on profitability, and that click-based optimization runs more stably if you can grow without the extra data.
So even the strongest public case for this feature comes with the conditions attached. A thirty-day window, which Google itself warns will inflate your count, on an account with margin to spare, measured against real sales. Remove those conditions and you are left with the default and a bigger number.
If You Bid on CRM Leads, Nothing Changed
Here is the distinction that decides whether any of this touches your account.
Google's documentation says view-through optimization does not currently support offline conversions, store visits, or offline conversion import. It only works with online web conversions tracked directly through Google's website tags.
If your Demand Gen campaign bids on leads imported from your CRM, the qualified leads, booked appointments or closed jobs you send back to Google, the feature has nothing to work with. The checkbox may be ticked, but your bidding goal is untouched. This is one more reason to feed real outcomes back into Google Ads rather than raw form fills, which we have argued before in Your Conversion Number Is Going Up. Your Sales Aren't.
If your Demand Gen campaign bids on a website tag, a form submission, a thank-you page, a purchase, a click on your phone number, the feature applies in full. Google is now counting people who glimpsed a video ad and later filled in your form by another route, and bidding to find more of them.
Most small accounts we audit are in the second group. The website form tag is the easiest conversion to set up, so it is the one most campaigns optimize toward.
What to Do This Week
This takes about five minutes per campaign and costs nothing.
Find the setting. In Google Ads, go to Campaigns, click the gear icon next to a Demand Gen campaign's name, and open the Conversions optimization dropdown. The checkbox reads "Include view-through conversions." Check every Demand Gen campaign, especially any built in the last few months.
Uncheck it, unless the last section of this article describes you. For a lead generation business judging results by calls and booked work, there is no version of this setting that makes your reporting more honest.
If you keep it on, set the window to one day. That is Google's own recommendation. Anything longer is the surge Google warned you about.
Split the number before you read it. In your campaign report, select Segments, hover over Conversions, and choose Ad event type. Google labels view-through conversions as Impression. If most of your recent growth is sitting in that row, you are looking at credit, not new customers.
Compare against your own count. Take the four weeks before any change and the four weeks after, and put the Google Ads conversion count next to the leads in your CRM or the calls on your tracking line. If Google's number rose and yours did not, the campaign found a better way to describe itself, not a better way to reach customers. The same discipline, applied to Google Analytics, is in GA4 Says 40 Conversions. Google Ads Says 61. Both Are Right.
There is a pattern worth noticing here. This is not the only recent setting Google switched on without an owner deciding to. The first was Google Switched Your Search Campaign to AI Max on September 1. You Never Said Yes. Neither is sinister. Both are defaults chosen by the company that sells the ads, which is a good enough reason to check them yourself.
When Leaving It On Makes Sense
There is a real case for keeping the box ticked, and it looks like this.
You sell online, so your conversions are purchases measured by a website tag that Google can actually see. Your return on ad spend has room above your break-even point, so a lower return in exchange for more volume is a trade you can afford. Your Search campaigns have hit their ceiling, so you genuinely need reach you cannot get from people typing queries. And you have some way of checking whether the extra conversions were real: total sales moving in the regions you advertise, brand searches rising, or a holdout test where one area gets the campaign and a comparable area does not.
If all four are true, view-through optimization gives Google's bidding more data to learn from, and on a larger ecommerce account that can be worth the blurrier reporting. That is essentially the case the feature's biggest advocate made, and in that context it holds up.
If any of the four are missing, you are not buying more data. You are buying a more flattering version of the same results, and paying for it with bids aimed at people who were already on their way to you.
The Default Is Google's Choice. The Checkbox Is Yours.
Nothing about this setting is dishonest. Google documented it, explained the tradeoffs, and told you where the numbers will disagree. What it did not do is ask. The default is the answer that suits the company selling the impressions, and the help page is where it wrote down the answer that suits you.
So open your Demand Gen campaigns and look. Uncheck the box if you judge your business by leads and calls. Keep it with a one-day window if you are the ecommerce account described above. Either way, make the choice deliberately, because leaving it alone is also a choice, just one that somebody else made for you.
If you would rather have someone who opens these settings every day go through your account and set each one against how your business actually measures success, that is a normal part of how we run Google Ads management for small businesses. Either way, the box is worth a minute of your time this week.
