Attribution windows: the setting nobody double-checks after setup

Attribution window, the setting that determines how many days after an ad click or view a conversion still gets credited to that ad, gets configured once, usually at account setup, often left at whatever the platform's default happens to be, and then quietly shapes every reported performance number afterward without anyone revisiting whether that default still matches the business's actual purchase cycle.

The mismatch matters more than the setup-time decision suggests: a business with a multi-week consideration cycle, common in higher-price categories, using a platform's default seven-day click attribution window will systematically undercount conversions that happen just outside that window, making campaigns look worse than their real contribution to revenue.

The opposite mismatch is just as real: a business with genuinely fast, impulse-driven purchases using a generous 28-day window may be crediting ads for conversions that would have happened anyway, inflating apparent performance and making it harder to tell which spend is actually driving incremental demand.

The fix is a five-minute audit most accounts have never run: compare the platform's attribution window setting against the business's actual median time-to-purchase, pulled from real order data, and adjust the setting to match reality rather than leaving whatever was configured, possibly by someone who's since left the company, years ago.