Question
While running a tROAS campaign [on Google Ads] for a few days, if I change conversion window from 30 day (default) to 7 day, does this change affect ad spend in tROAS campaign?
Answer
It’s a business problem more than anything:
- If 100% of your conversions happen on the first 7 days, then changing from 30 days to 7 days will not make any difference.
- If 90% of your conversions happen after the 7th day, then you’ll have huge problems changing from 30 to 7 days conversion window.
The machine, when given a tROAS, averages your actual ROAS over the course of x days (I found it to be between 21 and 28 days in general), and compares it against your target ROAS, so if you lose 90% of your conversion data because Google doesn’t consider a conversion 8 days after the click happened, then it won’t get fed conversion data and you lose any kind of learning.
Essentially, conversion windows are to prevent your campaigns from misattributing a conversion to an ad click that happened x days ago because it doesn’t make sense with your model, but honestly, with how things are with multichannel advertising and users with multi touchpoints, platforms don’t work together and they end up overattributing, and unless you track sales at your 1st party level, it’ll always be a mess.
Make sure you choose the appropriate conversion window for your business, but never forget your 1st party (= your own sales platform) has the most accurate data.