Best conversion window for Facebook Ads?

If you are running Facebook ads, the first question that comes to your mind is: Which conversion window I have to select and what’s the best conversion window in Facebook ads?

What is the conversion window in Facebook Ads?

A lot of marketers assume that the conversion window is the time it takes for their target audience to complete a conversion after clicking or viewing their ad.

So they set their conversion window accordingly.

But the conversion window is the time frame you give to your Facebook pixel to learn & optimize your ad sets for generating maximum possible conversions and start delivering your ads as stable as possible (without performance fluctuations).

For example, if you set your conversion window to ‘7-day click’ then it means, your Facebook pixel has got 7 days to learn and find as many people as possible (on Facebook) who are most likely to convert on your website after clicking your ad.

Similarly, if you set your conversion window to ‘1-day click’ then it means, your Facebook pixel has got just 1 day to learn and find as many people as possible who are most likely to convert on your website after clicking your ad.

As a rule of thumb, unless your ad set is generating 50 or more conversion events a day, you would be better off using ‘7 days click’ conversion window.

The ‘1 day click’ conversion window works best for big advertisers who are generating hundreds of conversions a day.

Apart from measuring the conversion window, it would be best if you considered cross-platform actions too.

For example, even for an app campaign, I have seen close to 40% of the conversions comes from website purchases.

Facebook gives you visibility into the cross-platform actions being taken from your ads. FB can do it accurately since it’s a people-based platform.

While your campaign will optimize for app actions, but there’s a pool of audience that clicks or views the app ads but completes an action on the web.

Example of one such path:

Clicked on FB app ad -> went to plays store -> did not Install the app -> purchased on desktop.

A lot of advertisers have started considering both(App + Web) outcomes a part of performance marketing results. This behaviour is even more prominent in markets with a lot of multi-device usage.

So which attribution window you use? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Also, look at my recent post on 2 ways to improve Facebook ads performance.