Attribution windows
How long a click or a view stays eligible to receive credit, and what that means when your sales cycle is longer than the window.
A touchpoint can only be credited for a sale that happened after it and within the attribution window. Anything older simply drops out of the calculation.
The windows
| Touchpoint | Window |
|---|---|
| Paid click | 7 days |
| Paid view | 1 day |
| Organic visit | 7 days (Linear only) |
Views get a much shorter window than clicks for a reason: seeing an ad is far weaker evidence of influence than clicking one, and a week-old unclicked impression tells you very little about why someone bought.
These are the defaults applied to every project.
How the window is applied
For each order, Clakta measures the gap between the touchpoint and the order:
- Negative gap (touchpoint after the order) — not eligible
- Gap within the window — eligible
- Gap beyond the window — not eligible
The model then runs over whatever survived. If nothing survives, the order is unattributed.
A customer who clicked 10 days ago and again 2 days ago keeps only the second click. Under Last Click that changes nothing. Under First Click it changes a lot — the "first" click becomes the 2-day-old one, because the older one is no longer eligible.
When your sales cycle is longer than 7 days
This is the most common source of surprise. If your typical customer considers for two weeks, the click that introduced them has expired by the time they buy, and the sale gets credited to whatever retargeting closed it — or to nothing at all.
Signals that this is happening to you:
- First Click and Last Click produce nearly identical numbers, because most journeys only have one eligible touchpoint left
- Prospecting campaigns show almost no attributed revenue while retargeting looks extraordinary
- Your unattributed order share is high despite well-tagged ads
What to do about it:
- Compare Clakta's attributed revenue to your total revenue to size the gap honestly
- Use First Click periodically to check whether prospecting is being systematically undervalued
- Read the retargeting numbers as "closed the sale", not "caused the sale"
Tracking mode interacts with the window
In privacy-friendly projects, the visitor's identity does not survive past the day it was created. The 7-day click window is therefore capped in practice by a 1-day identity: a click on Monday and a purchase on Wednesday belong to two different anonymous visitors, so the click can never be credited.
In full attribution projects the identity persists, so the full 7-day window is actually usable.
If your journeys routinely span several days, privacy-friendly mode will under-report paid performance no matter which model you choose. See Tracking modes.
This is worth checking before you conclude a channel is unprofitable. A privacy-friendly project with a 10-day consideration cycle can make excellent prospecting look like wasted budget.
Related
Related articles
How attribution works
What a touchpoint is, how Clakta walks back from an order to the ads that caused it, and why its numbers never match what the ad platforms report.
Attribution models
The six models Clakta offers, exactly how each splits credit, and which one to use for the decision you are actually making.
Unattributed orders
Why some orders receive no ad credit, how to tell a real organic sale from a tracking gap, and what to fix in each case.