Analytics
What is Attribution Window?
The period after a click or a view during which a later purchase still gets credited to that touch. It is the single setting that most often explains why two reports show different sales for the same campaign.
Why it matters in practice
A longer window credits more sales to a campaign, a shorter one credits fewer, and neither is wrong. What is wrong is comparing two numbers built on different windows and calling one of them a decline. In practice this shows up when an ad platform reports one sales figure and the store's own reporting shows another: the platform is usually counting purchases that happened days after the click, while the store is counting the session that checked out. Before you judge any campaign, check that the window has not changed and that every number in the comparison uses the same one.
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