A luxury car dealership and a candy bar company both run the same Facebook campaign optimization strategy. They both track conversions over a 7-day window. They both judge success using the same ROAS benchmarks.
One thrives. The other struggles. Guess which one is measuring marketing completely wrong.
The one-size-fits-all measurement mistake
Your attribution window is set to 7 days because that’s what everyone else uses. Your ROAS targets mirror industry benchmarks. Your campaign optimization follows best practices from marketing blogs.
But here’s the problem: those “best practices” assume every business operates on the same timeline. They don’t.
Someone buying gum sees your ad and converts within hours. Someone buying enterprise software might see your ad, research for months, get buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and finally convert six months later. These purchasing journeys obviously can’t be measured the same way.
Your attribution model isn’t broken—it’s just measuring the wrong timeframe for your specific business.
The platform default problem
Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn optimize for the conversion timelines you set. But their default settings assume rapid purchase cycles because that’s what works for most advertisers.
If you sell high-consideration products but use short attribution windows, you’re essentially telling the algorithms to find people who make impulsive expensive purchases. Those people exist, but they’re probably not your core market.
The sixth law of marketing
Depending on your purchase consideration cycle, marketing effects take differing amounts of time to show themselves. Each business is different and needs to be treated as such.
A skincare routine purchase and a software implementation purchase don’t happen on the same timeline. Your measurement approach should reflect your customer’s actual decision-making process, not generic platform defaults.
Even within the same category, consideration cycles vary wildly. Two home fitness companies might have completely different customer journeys—one targeting impulse buyers during New Year’s resolution season, another targeting serious athletes who research equipment for months.
The consideration cycle determines everything about how you should evaluate marketing performance.
The short-cycle trap
Low-consideration purchases seem easier to measure. Someone sees your ad for protein powder, clicks through, and buys within the hour. Clean attribution. Clear ROAS. Simple optimization.
But here’s what makes it tricky: with short cycles, you’re competing on impulse and immediate availability. Your awareness campaigns might seem ineffective because people convert quickly from whatever channel happens to be in front of them last.
We see this with DTC brands constantly. Their awareness campaigns appear to underperform because customers discover the brand on Instagram, then convert three days later from a Google search. The awareness gets zero credit despite creating the entire journey.
The long-cycle blindness
High-consideration purchases create the opposite problem. Someone researches at-home gym equipment for months. They check out your before and afters, read what fitness influencers think about your product, maybe even hit up a local gym to try one out. By the time they convert, they’ve interacted with dozens of touchpoints.
Standard attribution windows miss most of this journey. A 30-day window captures the end of a 6-month process. It’s like judging a movie by watching only the final scene.
B2C companies with luxury or higher-priced goods often conclude that awareness campaigns don’t work because their attribution can’t see the long journey from first touch to closed deal.
The custom timeline reality
While your competitors use generic measurement timelines, successful businesses understand that measurement windows should match their specific customer journey.
A supplement company might need 7-day tracking because impulse health purchases drive growth. A luxury grill manufacturer might need 60-day visibility because buying a $3,000 outdoor kitchen involves research, spouse approval, and timing around home improvement projects.
Neither approach is right or wrong—they’re right for their specific business model.
The measurement solution you need
This is why Prescient’s MMM analyzes your historical data to understand your actual purchase patterns, then models effects based on your specific consideration cycle. We don’t assume standard timelines because your business isn’t standard.
Whether you’re selling olive oil that converts in days or high-end appliances that convert in months, we track the attribution windows that match your customers’ actual behavior. Because measuring a 2-month grill purchase decision with a 7-day attribution window doesn’t just give you incomplete data—it gives you actively misleading data that can destroy your best campaigns.
Understanding Law #6 ensures your measurement matches your business reality, but there’s another assumption about marketing performance that’s even more dangerous. Because most marketers believe that spending more always delivers diminishing returns, when the opposite is often true.
Next week, we’ll explore Law #7 and why the assumption that marketing always saturates might be costing you millions in missed opportunities.
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