LinkedIn counts a view for 90 days. Google, Microsoft and Reddit: 1

A conversions column that adds Google, Microsoft, Reddit and LinkedIn together looks like one number. It is four numbers measured with four different rulers, and the longest ruler is ninety times the shortest.

Left at their defaults, Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising and Reddit credit a view-through conversion for 1 day after an impression. LinkedIn credits it for 90 days. Nobody chose that difference. It is what each platform ships with.

The defaults, from each platform’s own help pages

Checked on 11 October 2026. Every cell is in facts above with its source.

Platform	Default view window	View window options	Default click window	Where view-throughs land
Google Ads	1 day	1–30 days	30 days	View-through conv. and All conv., not Conversions
Microsoft Advertising	1 day (UET goals)	1 minute to 30 days	up to 90 days	All conv. by default, reported at impression time
Reddit	1 day	1, 7 or 28 days, never longer than the click window	28 days	Included under the default attribution type
Pinterest	1 day (Conversion insights, if no window was chosen)	—	30 days	—
TikTok	not stated on the current help pages	Off, 1 or 7 days	not stated	—
LinkedIn	90 days	1, 7, 30 or 90 days	90 days	Recorded as view conversions

Two gaps are deliberate. Meta and Snap are not in the table because their help centres render in the browser and returned no article text to a fetch, so their current defaults could not be read from a primary source today. TikTok’s current pages list the options but not the default. An empty cell is more useful to you than a figure copied from an old blog post.

What the gap does to one sale

Take one buyer. On Monday they are served a viewable Google display ad, a Microsoft Advertising ad, a Reddit ad and a LinkedIn Sponsored Content ad. They click none of them. Later they type the URL and buy.

• They buy 6 hours later. All four platforms are inside their default view window. Each reports a view-through conversion. One sale, four platform-reported conversions. Google keeps its copy out of the Conversions column. Microsoft puts its copy in All conv. by default.
• They buy 20 days later. Google’s, Microsoft’s and Reddit’s 1-day windows closed on Tuesday. Only LinkedIn still credits the sale, and it will keep doing so for any purchase up to day 90.

Neither outcome is a bug. Each platform is applying its own documented attribution window to an impression only it can see. But the second case is the one that skews a budget review: on long B2B cycles, LinkedIn’s view-throughs keep arriving weeks after every other platform has stopped counting, so LinkedIn looks like the channel that “keeps working”.

The attribution window and the view-through conversion get confused because one number, the window, quietly decides how much of the other you see. Lengthen a view window from 1 day to 90 and you have not measured more influence. You have widened the net for sales that would have happened anyway.

A long window also keeps past days moving. Microsoft reports a view-through at the time of the impression, not the sale. Any platform that reports that way and holds a 90-day view window keeps rewriting a past day’s numbers for three months.

What to do differently

1. Write the view window next to every platform total. “LinkedIn: 140 conversions (90-day click, 90-day view)” is a number you can argue with. “LinkedIn: 140” is not.
2. Compare platforms on one window, or on clicks only. Google, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok and LinkedIn all document a choice of view window. To compare channels, set them to the same value, or report post-click and view-through in separate columns.
3. Never sum platform-reported conversions across platforms. Every platform credits the same buyer independently, and none of them deduplicates against the others. The sum is an upper bound on nothing.
4. Decide view-through value with a test, not a window. Whether a seen-but-not-clicked ad caused a sale is an incrementality question. A holdout test answers it. A 90-day window just assumes the answer is yes.