Meta Attribution Settings: The Four Windows, and Which Is Default
What is the default attribution setting for Meta ads?
Meta documents 7-day click or 1-day view as the default for all new ad sets. Four settings can be compared in reporting: 1-day view, 1-day click, 7-day click and 28-day click. Commerce Manager uses a separate window you cannot change.
In short
Meta documents the default attribution setting for all new ad sets as 7-day click or 1-day view. The selectable options are 1-day click, 7-day click, 1-day click or 1-day view, and 7-day click or 1-day view (default).
Separately, you can compare reported conversions across 1-day view, 1-day click, 7-day click and 28-day click regardless of what the campaign optimised for. Comparison and optimisation are different things, and conflating them is the source of most attribution confusion.
Why Commerce Manager never agrees with Ads Manager
This is the single most common “my numbers do not match” problem, and Meta documents the cause precisely. The two products differ on three axes at once:
| Ads Manager | Commerce Manager (tagged content) | |
|---|---|---|
| Attribution window | Your setting, default 7-day click / 1-day view | 28-day click + 1-day view, fixed |
| Can you change it? | Yes | No |
| Reports by | Impression date | Conversion date |
| Model | Last touch | Last touch, ads-preferred |
Meta states it directly: if you have set click-through to 7 days or 1 day in Ads Manager, “Commerce Manager will still use the default attribution configuration, regardless of your selection”.
The reporting-date difference compounds it. Meta’s own worked example: someone clicks an ad on Monday and converts on Friday. Ads Manager reports it on Monday (impression date). Commerce Manager reports it on Friday (conversion date). The same conversion lands in two different weeks.
So two products can be simultaneously correct and disagree on both the total and the day. Neither is broken.
The 28-day trap in reporting
Meta notes that if a campaign has not been live for at least 28 days, the 28-day click view “will only provide partial data, covering the length of the campaign”.
A campaign running 10 days shows a 28-day click column populated with 10 days of data. It looks like a longer window measured properly. It is a shorter window mislabelled, and comparing it against a mature campaign’s 28-day column compares two different things.
What this means for window selection
The honest framing: a longer window does not create revenue, it reallocates credit. Moving from 1-day click to 7-day click will raise reported conversions and lower reported cost per result without a single additional sale occurring.
The arithmetic makes the size of the illusion concrete. Take $5,000 of spend that a 1-day click window credits with 100 conversions — a reported $50 cost per result. If the 7-day window credits the same spend with 140 conversions, reported cost per result falls to $35.71, an apparent 28.6% improvement, while the bank balance is identical. Nothing was optimised. A wider net was cast over the same fish.
This is why window changes should be dated in your own reporting: a 28.6% step change that arrives on the day a setting was flipped is a measurement artefact, and six months later nobody remembers which it was.
That makes the choice a measurement decision, not an optimisation one. Two rules cover most cases:
Match the window to your actual purchase latency. If your median time from first touch to order is under 24 hours, a 7-day window is mostly crediting ads for purchases that would have happened anyway. If it is six days, a 1-day window is systematically under-crediting.
Change it rarely, and mark when you did. Every window change creates a discontinuity in your own historical reporting. Meta additionally documents that for active ad sets, the attribution setting continues using the deprecated conversion-window setting to avoid affecting delivery — so an account can be reporting on a mix of settings without that being visible in any single column.
Interpretation boundary
These are Meta’s documented options and defaults as retrieved on 2026-09-22; Meta has changed both the available windows and the default before and will again. Attribution windows govern what gets reported, not what happened — none of these settings measures incrementality, and a conversion credited inside any window may or may not have been caused by the ad.
Can software help?
Bach.ai audits your connected Meta account, estimates the revenue impact of what it finds, and proposes specific fixes. It applies a change only after you approve it. Think of it as an automated audit layer that surfaces issues and proposed fixes for your review — not a replacement for your team’s judgment, and creative production is not its core job, though the Pro and Agency plans can generate a limited number of variants.
FAQ
What is the default Meta attribution setting?
7-day click or 1-day view for all new ad sets. The other selectable options are 1-day click, 7-day click, and 1-day click or 1-day view.
Why do Commerce Manager and Ads Manager show different numbers?
They use different windows and different reporting dates. Commerce Manager tagged content is fixed at 28-day click plus 1-day view and reports by conversion date; Ads Manager uses your chosen window and reports by impression date.
Can I change the Commerce Manager attribution window?
Not for tagged content — Meta documents it as fixed at 28-day click and 1-day view regardless of your Ads Manager selection. Reporting on connected data sources does offer 1-day, 7-day and 28-day click.
Does a longer attribution window improve performance?
No. It reallocates credit rather than creating revenue. Moving from 1-day to 7-day click raises reported conversions and lowers reported cost per result without any additional sale taking place.
Method and sources
“Meta documents 7-day click or 1-day view as the default for all new ad sets.”
Source: Meta Business Help Centre, retrieved 2026-09-22:
- https://www.facebook.com/business/help/854500742637772
- https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1997130013754737
Meta’s documentation changes without notice and these thresholds have moved before — verify anything load-bearing against the current version of the article before you act on it.