Google Changes Adwords Conversion Window Settings

By Tinuiti Team

Sep 27 2013

Google announced yesterday a fairly significant change in the way that advertisers view and optimize their conversion data, now allowing users to customize their conversion window from 7-90 days after a click to their site. Previously, Adwords only counted conversions that occurred within 30 days after a click. This is a very useful change that we plan on implementing immediately for our accounts here at Elite. How can this change effect the accounts that you currently manage?

Here are a few uses for the change:

Does Your Product/Service Have a Longer Buying Process?

Many industries sell a product or a service that requires a great deal of research (planning a big vacation? Need a new computer?) before making a final decision . In those cases, it’s very possible that a user clicked an ad, did research over a period of time (30+ days) then decided on a purchase after a long thought out process.
- This means that potentially, a conversion was not recorded even though the user interacted with a search ad at some point in the buying process. You will now be able to record this information and optimize accordingly

Bid Management

If you’re using a bid management platform or some sort of reporting tool, you can now customize your Adwords conversion data so that it aligns with whatever tool you’re using. In the past, oftentimes the data wouldn’t match up because the conversion windows were different from tool to tool.
- Now you can make sure all of the data you’re looking at from different tools is aligned.

Attribution

The big buzz word in the industry these days is attribution, and how you to give credit for conversions to different keywords, channels, etc. Now you’ll be able to find keywords and give credit to keywords that are clicked on in the beginning of the buying cycle.

Search Funnel Reporting

Adwords offers Search Funnel reports which can tell you a lot about how users are interacting with your keywords and ads. Within these reports, you can see how long, on average a click turns into a purchase or lead.
- Using the data in there can help you determine how long your conversion window should be.

As you can see, this change is a pretty important one in Adwords. It is essential that you make any necessary changes to your accounts and take advantage of this new feature.