Which Facebook Conversion Window to Use?
When people are setting up their Facebook ads, there is a setting that can cause both experienced and beginner marketers confusion – and that is the Facebook conversion window.
This is found in the ad set level of your Facebook campaign and shows up if you’re using the conversion objective. That means your Facebook campaign will probably be set up for leads or purchases.
What Is a Facebook Conversion Window?
This can be confusing, so it deserves a bit of an explanation. In Facebook, a conversion window refers to the time after someone either clicked or viewed your ad AND in which they convert AND when Facebook includes the data in their optimization process.
This is NOT saying when you want your conversions, but it does effect HOW Facebook optimizes your campaign and what data they include in their data set as they optimize your campaign.
Here’s an example: Let’s say that YOU think the people who will convert on your campaign are age 30 to 55, but after you run your campaign for a month it turns out that 90% of converters are 40 to 44. Facebook will automatically start to optimize to that group.
If you have your conversion window set to 7 days click or 1 day view, then if they convert 3 days after clicking on your ad they will be counted in the optimization data. But if you are using 1 day click and they convert 3 days after clicking on your ad, they WON’T be counted in optimization data.
This is a bit confusing, but is very important. Please let me know if you have questions. You can ask questions in my free Facebook Ads Mastermind Group.
Choosing the Correct Facebook Conversion Window
I’m going to show you how to do this by setting up a dummy Facebook conversion campaign.
The first thing you need to do is go into Facebook and click on “create.” It’s the green button in the left hand corner.
This will cause the campaign screen to pop up and you will need to select the conversions campaign objective.
You can fill out the ad set name and ad name as whatever you want and then press “save to draft.”
Since the conversion window is set at the ad set level, you will then need to click into the ad set level on the Facebook campaign.
You’ll need to select a conversion event. In this case I’m selecting lead as the conversion event, but this will vary depending on what you want to optimize your Facebook campaign for.
NOTE: The next section is to select your audience. That’s a little bit beyond the scope of this article, but I have lots of tutorials on it and encourage you to check them out:
1. Facebook Audience Insights Explained
2. How to Build Facebook Custom Audiences
3. How to Create Lookalike Audiences in Facebook
The section we are looking for at the ad set level is called “Optimization and Delivery”
You’ll see that the default Facebook setting for the conversion window is 7 days click or 1 day view. Most people should go with this setting.
Here are the rules we use:
- More than 50 conversions a day = 1 day click
- Less than 50 conversions a day = 7 days click or 1 day view
The basic idea here is that Facebook needs ENOUGH conversion data to work with in order to optimize your campaign correctly and get you the best results possible. Unless you are spending lots of money or have extremely low cost conversions, you should go with the 7 days click or 1 day view setting.
There is one other thing to consider. If you are having trouble with attribution – meaning you don’t know where your sales are coming from because you are advertising across different platforms – it is sometimes a good idea to drop the 1 day view setting and choose JUST 7 day clicks.
This can give you more accurate attribution numbers and help you to know if your Facebook campaign ACTUALLY caused a sale.
Which Facebook Conversion Ads Window to Use – Video Tutorial
Facebook ads conversion windows can be confusing. Watch me explain in detail which conversion window to pick for your campaign and WHY you should pick it.
The Bottom Line on Facebook Conversion Windows
For most Facebook ad campaigns, using the 7 day click and 1 day view conversion window makes the most sense.
If you have more than 50 conversions per day, then 1 day click may work better.
If you are advertising on more than one platform and want better attribution by platform select 7 day click only.
Picking the right conversion window for your business depends on your spend and how much other advertising you’re doing.
