My sales cycle is 90 days but Meta only attributes 7 days, what do I do?
Short answer. Stop asking Meta to see the sale. With a 90-day sales cycle, most of your sales close long after Meta’s 7-day click window, so Meta will keep reporting a fraction of what your ads produce. Measure the sale on your side instead: record the origin of every lead in your CRM, then read closed sales by the month the lead came in. Give Meta an earlier signal it can see, such as a qualified call or a booked appointment, and judge your campaigns on your CRM numbers, not on the ads dashboard.
Why does Meta miss most of my sales?
Because the window closes before the buyer decides. Meta credits a conversion to an ad only if it happens within a short period after the click. When a buyer clicks in January, talks to your team in February and signs in April, the sale lands outside that period. Meta does not see the call, the meeting or the contract either: that part happens in your CRM and on the phone. The ads look weak, the campaigns that feed your pipeline get cut, and the ones that produce quick, cheap leads get more budget.
Will a longer attribution window fix it?
No. Even the longest setting Meta offers is far shorter than 90 days, and a longer window does not change what Meta can see. It still only counts the conversions it can match to a click. Changing the window setting changes the report, not the number of sales your ads produce.
How do I measure sales that close months after the click?
Read them by cohort, in your CRM:
- Record the origin on every lead. The campaign or channel, captured from the form or asked (“How did you hear about us?”).
- Keep the origin attached until the sale is signed. The sale must carry the same record as the lead, not a new one.
- Group leads by the month they came in. January leads form one cohort, February leads another.
- Read each cohort again as it matures. Check closed sales at 30, 60 and 90 days. A campaign is judged on the sales its leads produce over the full cycle, not on its first week.
This way, a sale signed in April is credited to the January campaign that brought the lead, not to whatever ran in April.
What should I send back to Meta, then?
A signal that happens early and predicts a sale. Pick the first step in your process that buyers reach within days and that non-buyers rarely reach: a qualified call, a booked appointment, a quote request that meets your minimum. Send that event to Meta so it can optimize toward people who take it, instead of toward anyone who fills a form. Check the signal against your cohorts every quarter: if the leads that reach it stop turning into sales, pick another one.
If your sales close on the phone, the ways to connect each sale to its ad are compared in How do I know which ad produced which sale when my sales close on the phone?
What does this look like in practice?
For a custom food truck manufacturer selling nationwide, reading closed sales against the origin recorded in the CRM showed which channels produced buyers, and the budget moved there. The client went from 200K to 1.3M a month in three months, on 30% less marketing spend. Read the full case study.
If your cost per lead looks fine while revenue stays flat, the same problem is described in Your cost per lead is fine and your revenue is flat. Tracking and reporting are two of the nine parts of a 360 marketing system.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Meta miss sales when my sales cycle is 90 days?
Because Meta only credits conversions that happen within a short window after the click, and sales that close months later fall outside it. Meta also does not see the calls, meetings and contracts that happen in your CRM.
How do I measure ad performance with a long sales cycle?
Record the origin of every lead in your CRM, group leads by the month they came in, and read closed sales for each group at 30, 60 and 90 days. Send Meta an early signal it can see, such as a qualified call.
AHBC Group is a marketing agency for high-ticket businesses. We build the 360 Marketing System: branding, website, advertising, SEO, content, newsletters, automations, tracking and reporting under one strategy, so you can trace a sale back to its campaign, including when you sell from several locations. Headquartered in Miami, we work remotely with clients worldwide, with the United States as our main market. We have generated more than $20M in tracked sales for our clients, and that is only the part we were able to track.
