Attribution window

A click-through window credits conversions after someone clicked the ad. A view-through window credits conversions after someone only saw it. View-through credit is generous for video, where a viewer may have bought anyway, so many teams report it separately or exclude it when judging performance.

Switch from a 1-day to a 7-day click window and the same campaign will usually report more conversions, a lower CPA and a higher ROAS. Nothing about the ads changed; the counting did. Comparing campaigns or periods with different settings produces false conclusions.

• Pick one window for decision-making and keep it fixed.
• Match the window to your buying cycle: impulse products convert fast, considered purchases slowly.
• Reconcile platform-reported conversions with your own sales or CRM data regularly.
• Treat each platform's self-attribution as its own view, not the whole truth; the sum across platforms often exceeds actual sales.

• Meta (standard attribution, website and in-store conversions): click-through counts events within 1 or 7 days of a link click; view-through within 1 day of an impression; engage-through within 1 day of a non-link click, including a video play of 5 seconds (or 97% of a shorter video).
• Meta also offers an incremental attribution model, and warns that results from ad sets using different attribution models cannot be compared directly.
• Google Ads: a conversion window is the time after an ad interaction during which a conversion is recorded. Search and Display default to 30 days if you do not change it, and it can be set from 1 to 90 days depending on the conversion source.
• Meta's help pages disagree on its default setting, so read the one applied to each ad set in Ads Manager before comparing reports.