What is Attribution Window?
An attribution window is the period after someone sees or clicks your ad during which the platform will still take credit for a resulting sale. Meta defaults to 7-day click plus 1-day view. Change that setting and your reported ROAS changes with it, even though nothing about the campaign, the creative or the customer has moved an inch.
Attribution Window
How attribution windows actually work
Two dimensions. Click windows count people who clicked and later converted, view windows count people who saw the ad without clicking and later converted, and Meta offers 1-day and 7-day click alongside 1-day view while Google Ads runs its own conversion window, commonly 30 days.
Longer windows credit more sales to the platform. Shorter ones credit fewer. A 7-day click window on considered purchases like furniture will always look better than a 1-day, because that is a decision people sleep on. The platform is not inventing sales. It is answering a different question than you thought you asked.
Where teams get attribution windows wrong
Comparing campaigns running on different windows. If prospecting sits on 7-day click with 1-day view while retargeting runs 1-day click, the comparison is meaningless and any budget decision built on it is guesswork. Standardise first.
Second, forgetting that windows are precisely why platform revenue always exceeds store revenue, since Meta claims a sale on 7-day click, Google claims the same sale on 30-day, and Shopify counts it once.
Third, picking a window that does not match your buying cycle. A Rs 400 supplement gets bought the same day. A Rs 90,000 sofa from a Kirti Nagar showroom takes weeks, and judging it on 1-day will get a working campaign switched off.
What good looks like in India
Match the window to the decision. Impulse and low-ticket work fine on 1-day or 7-day click, while considered purchases, property enquiries and B2B services need the longer view and should be treated as directional only.
The arrangement most Indian growth teams land on is one consistent window across the account for internal comparison, a weekly MER check against store revenue for the truth, and a standing rule that nobody quotes platform revenue in a board deck. That last rule prevents several awkward conversations a year.
Related terms: Average Order Value · Backlink · Blended CAC.
Where this shows up in the work: Performance Marketing · Full glossary.
Attribution Window — questions, answered.
Seven-day click with one-day view is the workable default for most brands. Drop the view component if you want a stricter read, and accept that doing so lowers reported ROAS without changing a single actual sale.
Each runs its own window on its own data and neither can see the other. A customer clicking a Meta ad on Monday and a Google ad on Thursday before buying Friday generates a conversion in both accounts. Your store records one order.
Last updated 2026-08-08
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