Attribution Window Too Long

Attribution windows are a tradeoff between recovering delayed conversions and maintaining causal cleanliness. A 90-day window is appropriate for B2B SaaS sales cycles where the click really might still be influencing the eventual decision. For an impulse purchase where the median conversion lag is two hours, a 90-day window means most of the credit is going to clicks that have no causal relationship to the conversion. They happen to fall in the window. This inflates campaign performance reports and biases attribution toward channels that show up earlier in the path, regardless of whether they actually drove the outcome. The check is info-level because "too long" is harder to defend than "too short". But worth reviewing when the time-lag distribution shows most conversions happen within hours or days.

1. In Google Ads → Reports → Predefined → Time → Time lag, check the conversion-lag distribution.
2. If 95% of conversions happen within N days, consider tightening the click-through window to roughly 2× that figure to capture realistic outliers while excluding likely-coincidental late attributions.
3. Update the click-through window in Tools & Settings → Measurement → Conversions.
4. Annotate the change date and re-baseline campaign reports.