Google’s attribution window closes at 90 days. For one major housebuilder we analysed, 80% of purchases happened after that window had already shut.
Those purchases still happened, but the platform just wasn’t looking anymore.
The window closes before the sale does
Standard attribution models track a buyer who searches, clicks and converts within a measurable window. Most platforms default to 30 days, while Google’s ceiling sits at 90.
That may work for short sale cycles, but not for the construction industry, where a contract can take eleven months or more to close. Pair this with the fact that the buyer isn’t one single person but a sequence of procurement leads, commercial directors, architects and specifiers, and it becomes clear why measuring marketing efforts is a challenge.
We looked at the account data behind a set of construction campaigns to see what standard reporting was missing. The gap was bigger than a missed conversion here and there. It was an entire campaign, cut for underperforming at the exact moment they were working.
Invisible on the platform but very visible on the bottom line
One example from the report: two long-tail keywords, a few hundred pounds of spend between them, generated five figures in confirmed sales. Neither ranked as a priority term inside the platform. Without offline tracking, none of it would have shown up.
That’s just one insight from our comprehensive report.. This pattern was seen across every account we looked at: the campaigns that look most efficient on a dashboard are often the ones doing the least, and the ones getting cut are often the ones doing the most.
Why construction breaks the model
A few things make construction buying journeys hard to see, including:
- Sales cycles that run past a year
- Decisions made by committee rather than by one buyer
- Relationships built at trade shows and site visits that never touch a digital platform at all
None of that makes the journey unmeasurable, but it does make the standard 90-day model the wrong tool for the job.
What a system built for a construction business actually looks like
The full picture needs three things most construction marketing doesn’t have: offline conversion data feeding back into ad platforms, CRM tracking that follows a prospect the whole way, and reporting structured around pipeline stages instead of platform conversions.
The Attribution Gap report sets out what that looks like in practice, with the account data, the numbers and the model behind it.
