How Long Is Your Sales Cycle? Choosing a Google Ads Conversion Window

The short answer

A conversion window in Google Ads is a time limit. It sets how many days after an ad click a conversion still counts for that click. The default is 30 days (About conversion windows).

That works for a store where people buy on the same day. It doesn’t work for a kitchen remodeler, a B2B software company or a car dealer, where the sale can come weeks or months after the first click. Those late sales never show up in Google Ads. Your cost per sale looks worse than it is, and Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bid strategies, learns from only part of your results.

The fix has three steps. Measure how long your customers really take to buy, using your own sales data from your CRM (the system where you track leads and sales). Set the window to cover most of those sales. And when the cycle is longer than Google allows, count an earlier step in the sale instead.

What a conversion window is

Google Ads has three windows on every conversion action (Google Ads Help):

Window	Starts when someone…	Default	Range
Click-through	clicks your ad	30 days	1 to 90 days
Engaged-view	engages with your video ad	3 days	1 to 30 days
View-through	sees your ad without clicking	1 day	1 to 30 days

For Search and Display, the click-through choices are 1 to 30, 60 or 90 days, depending on the conversion source. This guide is about the click-through window, because that is the one a long sales cycle runs into.

Two rules make the window matter more than people expect. First, a conversion after the window ends isn’t recorded at all. It won’t appear in your reports. Second, a change only applies going forward. If you widen the window today, sales from older clicks that already fell outside it are not counted again.

How to measure your sales cycle

Your sales cycle, for this purpose, is the number of days between the ad click and the sale. The formula for one deal is simple:

sales cycle length = sale date − ad click date

Do that for every closed deal from the last few months, then look at two numbers:

• The median. Sort the deals from fastest to slowest and take the middle one. Half your sales happen faster, half slower. Unlike the average, one very slow deal doesn’t pull it up.
• The 90% day. The day by which 9 out of 10 sales have happened. This is the number to compare with your window.

There is no official average sales cycle for B2B or any other industry, and your own data beats any average anyway. Ten deals give a rough start; 30 or more give a more reliable 90% day.

Here is a made-up example: a remodeling company with ten closed deals. The days from click to signed contract were 2, 5, 9, 13, 16, 20, 26, 33, 41 and 70. The median is 18 days. The 90% day is 41. With the default 30-day window, Google Ads counts seven of the ten sales. Three are missing, and they are often the bigger jobs.

Why Google’s own report can’t tell you

Google Ads has a Days to conversion segment. Open a campaign, ad group or keyword report, click the segment icon and choose Conversions › Days to conversion. It splits your conversions into up to 19 rows by delay (Google Ads Help). Google suggests a date range that ends at least 30 days ago, so the data is complete.

It is useful, but it has a blind spot: it only shows conversions Google Ads already counted. Sales that came after your window never reached Google, so they are missing from the report too. If your window is 30 days, the report can’t tell you how many of your sales take 45 days.

That is why the measurement has to start in your CRM. The conversion lag calculator for Google Ads reads an export with a click date and a sale date per deal, works out the median and the 90% day, and shows how many sales a 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90-day window would count. If your CRM stores only the lead date, use that, and round your result up a little: the click came before the lead, so the real delay is slightly longer.

Choosing the window

Google’s advice is to set the window at least as long as the time your customers usually take to convert, or you might miss conversions. It also recommends at least 7 days, because longer windows give a richer set of conversion data (Google Ads Help).

A simple way to turn that into a number:

1. Take your 90% day. In the example above, 41 days.
2. Round up to a window Google offers. For Search and Display, that means any day up to 30, or 60, or 90. 41 days becomes 60.
3. Keep at least 7 days, even if most sales happen within a day or two.
4. Use one window per conversion action. A form lead and a signed contract can have different windows, because they happen at different points in the sale.

Why not always pick 90 days? Because the window also decides how long you wait for results. A wide window keeps adding conversions to old clicks for up to three months. That is correct, but recent days will look weak for longer, and it is harder to judge a change you made last week. Match the window to your real cycle, not to the maximum.

When sales take longer than 90 days

Some sales take longer than any window Google allows. Google says conversions can be reported up to 90 days after the click, depending on your window (Google Ads Help). Offline uploads have the same ceiling. Google keeps a GCLID (the Google click ID that your forms capture from the ad link) for only 90 days (Fix offline import errors). Uploads that use customer data for enhanced conversions are limited to 63 days (offline import FAQs), and every upload is also cut off by the conversion action’s own window.

So a sale on day 120 can’t be tied to its click by any setting. Google’s own suggestion is to upload more often, or to upload an earlier step in the funnel (the steps from first contact to sale) that happens within 90 days. In practice, that means picking a milestone your CRM already tracks:

• a qualified lead, after your team has checked it,
• a booked meeting or site visit,
• a sent quote or proposal.

Count that step as a conversion and let Smart Bidding work toward it. Keep the final sale as a separate action if you want to report on it. The offline conversions guide explains how to send CRM steps to Google Ads, and the enhanced conversions for leads guide covers the customer-data method.

Before each upload, run the GCLIDs through the GCLID checker. It flags IDs that are past the 90-day limit or outside your window, and shows how many days each click has left, so you upload in time instead of finding rejections afterwards.

Conversion windows and Smart Bidding

Google says Smart Bidding strategies such as Target CPA (a target cost per conversion) and Target ROAS (a target return on ad spend) count and optimize the conversions in whatever window you choose (Google Ads Help). A window that is too short means bidding learns from fewer, faster conversions and ignores the customers who take their time.

Conversion lag also changes how recent days look. Because some people who clicked haven’t bought yet, recent performance can show fewer conversions and a higher cost per conversion than it will later (Google Ads Help). With Smart Bidding, your bid strategy reports show this delay and an estimate of conversions not reported yet.

Two habits help:

• Don’t judge the last few days. Compare periods that ended at least one full window ago, or at least your 90% day ago.
• Change the window once, then wait. Give it at least one full window before you compare results.

How to change the window

1. In Google Ads, click Goals, open Conversions and choose Summary.
2. Click the conversion action and choose Edit settings.
3. Under Settings, open Click-through conversion window (and the view and engaged-view windows if needed) and pick a value.
4. Click Save, then Done.

If the conversion is imported from Google Analytics, check where to edit it. For GA4 conversions, Google says you can make window changes in Google Ads or Analytics; with the “Paid and organic channels” attribution setting, they must be made in Analytics. GA4 has its own lookback windows: 30 or 7 days for acquisition key events (first visits and first app opens), and 90, 60 or 30 days for all other key events (Analytics Help).

Other ad platforms use their own attribution settings with different names and limits, so don’t copy a Google Ads window across without checking that platform’s rules.

Once a quarter, export your newest closed deals and measure the cycle again. Prices, seasons and sales teams change how fast people buy, and your window should follow.