Google’s “What’s new in Google Analytics” release notes picked up a new entry on August 11, 2026: conversion windows for click-through and engaged-view conversions now take any integer. Click-through conversion (CTC) windows move from six presets (1, 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days) to any integer up to 90. Engaged-view conversion (EVC) windows move from a fixed 3 days to any integer up to 30. Both settings live under Advertising > Conversion management in Google Analytics, and in the linked Google Ads interface. That’s the entire change, and it reaches a narrower part of GA4 than the words “lookback window” suggest.
Did GA4’s lookback window just become customizable?
Not the lookback window in Attribution settings. The setting that now accepts any integer is the conversion window inside Advertising > Conversion management, part of a feature Google’s own documentation flags with a banner. It reads: “This feature may not be available to your Google Analytics property. The Google Analytics team is actively working to expand this feature to more properties.” The key event lookback window, set separately in Attribution settings, is untouched by this release note.
The two settings sit in different parts of GA4’s data model. Google’s documentation on creating and managing conversions describes the path as “Event → Key Event → Conversion.” An event becomes a key event, and a key event can be promoted into a conversion, which Google defines this way: “A conversion is created from a Google Analytics event and provides a consistent way of measuring important actions in both Google Analytics and Google Ads.” A linked Google Ads account is required to create one from a key event. Google’s separate guidance on conversions versus key events adds that “Google Ads conversions don’t appear in standard Google Analytics reports.” They live in the Advertising section, sharing settings with Google Ads instead of sitting inside ordinary GA4 reporting.
The setting that changed, versus the one that didn’t
Lay the two next to each other and the distinction is easy to lose, because both get called a lookback window in casual conversation.
| Setting | Before August 11 | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Click-through conversion window (Advertising > Conversion management) | Preset: 1, 7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days | Any integer, 1–90 days |
| Engaged-view conversion window (same path) | Fixed at 3 days | Any integer, 1–30 days |
| Key event lookback window (Attribution settings) | 30, 60 or 90 days (30 or 7 for acquisition key events) | Unchanged |
Google’s attribution settings documentation spells out that unchanged row directly: “For acquisition key events (first_open and first_visit), the default lookback window is 30 days. You can switch to 7 days if you have different attribution needs. For all other key events, the default lookback window is 90 days. You can also choose 30 days or 60 days.” No integer field appears anywhere in that description.
What happens to conversions already recorded
Google’s Analytics release note doesn’t say what happens to history when the window changes. The Google Ads conversion-window documentation, which governs the same shared conversion actions, does, and the answer is going forward only: “any changes apply to all conversions going forward. So, if you’re using a 30-day conversion window and you change it to 10 days, the 10-day window will only apply to conversions recorded from that day forward.” Google’s own example makes it concrete: a March 13 conversion that “wasn’t counted within the last window” still “won’t be retroactively counted” after a March 16 change to a 20-day window.
Shortening the window costs visibility, too. “If you set your conversion window to 7 days, any conversion that happens more than 7 days after the ad interaction won’t be recorded,” and the time lag report is capped at the same number. That report is worth reading before typing a new value: “If 75% of conversions happen between the 25th and 30th day after an ad interaction, you’ll want to make sure you set a window for at least this long.”
Ads already had day-level windows; Analytics is catching up
Google Ads’ own conversion actions weren’t starting from zero. Click-through windows in Ads could already be set “anywhere from 1 to 30, 60, or 90 days for Search and Display campaigns depending on the conversion source,” and engaged-view windows already took “a custom number of days” up to 30. What changed on August 11 is that conversions created from Google Analytics events, the ones shared into Ads through Conversion management, now match that same day-level granularity. Search Engine Land’s coverage frames the update as finer control aligned to “longer or shorter buying cycles,” a description that fits a setting where the gaps between old presets are no longer off-limits.
None of this helps if the ad click reaches your landing page with its Google identifiers already stripped. The diagnostic that flags ad clicks arriving without GBRAID and gad_ parameters covers that separate failure: it names the URLs where those parameters went missing, and the fix sits in the click chain rather than in any GA4 setting. Before adjusting either conversion window, pull the time lag report and set the number from your own conversion-delay data, not from habit. Conversion changes are tracked in Google Analytics change history, with detailed “before and after” views, so a bad guess stays traceable.
Manual campaign tagging is a different job from what Google’s auto-tagged identifiers do: a conversion window only counts what a correctly tagged click delivered, and our UTM parameter builder keeps those hand-set parameters consistent.