What is Attribution Window?

An attribution window is the period after a click or view during which a conversion is credited to an ad — for example, 7-day click means a purchase within seven days of clicking counts toward that ad.

How it works

Different windows produce different reported results from the same reality: a 7-day click window credits more conversions than 1-day click, and adding view-through credit inflates numbers further. Platforms grade their own homework inside these windows, which is why platform-reported ROAS rarely matches your store analytics. Choosing a window is really choosing how generous you want the platform's self-reporting to be.

What to watch

• Good: a consistent window used across all campaigns so comparisons between ads are apples-to-apples
• Bad: comparing results across campaigns or platforms that use different attribution settings
• Bad: treating view-through conversions as equal to click-through conversions when judging creative

In practice

Attribution settings change which creative looks like the winner, so lock one window before a test and judge every variant under it. With a cheap way to produce many variants — like generating UGC batches inside Claude with Polaris — you can rely on larger creative samples instead of over-reading small attribution-skewed differences. See the full ecommerce ads glossary, or put it into practice with the Polaris AI UGC ad generator.