Stop killing your ads on day seven

A flooring store in Greenwood put $600 into Facebook ads over nine days in June. The report showed two form fills. She turned it off.

Her July install schedule had six jobs on it from people who first called during those nine days. She only found that out because she started asking at the counter.

Run a campaign for one full buying cycle before you decide anything about it. For a $12 haircut, that is one day. For a $6,000 floor, it is closer to a month. Your ad dashboard does not know which business you run, and out of the box it is set up for the haircut.

What changed about how people decide?

RTB House published a study on August 10, 2026 called "Who's Buying? Consumer Trust in the Age of Agentic AI." They surveyed 1,840 people across the US, UK, France and Japan during June and July.

42 percent of the US respondents said AI tools make their purchase decisions take longer. Gen Z was highest at 48 percent, and boomers came in at 42.

The reason sits in the same study. 59 percent of US respondents said AI showed them brands they had never heard of. Somebody asks Gemini about luxury vinyl plank, gets back three shops she did not know existed, and now she has homework. That homework happens on her couch over the next two weeks, and none of it touches your ad account.

Jaysen Gillespie at RTB House said it this way: "For more than a decade, e-commerce growth was driven by buying attention on social feeds and optimizing for instant checkouts. This research proves that era is coming to an end."

I do not care much about the era. I care that your reporting window did not move.

Why does your report show fewer sales than your bank?

Meta and Google Ads use different defaults for the same customer.

Meta counts a conversion if it lands within 7 days of a click, or 1 day of a view. I wrote about what Meta changed in March and how to put those columns back. Day 8 is a zero.

Google Ads is more generous. The default click-through conversion window is 30 days, and you can set it anywhere from 1 to 90. That default is fine. The problem is that plenty of accounts run a shorter one because whoever set them up wanted the data to look cleaner.

So a buyer who takes 19 days to decide is a win in Google Ads and a zero in Meta. Neither number tells you whether the ad worked. Both are missing conversions for a separate reason that is worth twenty minutes on its own.

Nine days of data on a three-week decision tells you how long your reporting window is. Nothing else.

How long should you run an ad before you judge it?

Stop guessing at this. The answer is already in your own records.

Pull your last 20 sales. For each one, write down the date of first contact (the call or the form) and the date they paid. Average the gap. Add a week for the people who take longer than average.

That number is your judging window. Everything before it is noise.

Rough brackets from the shops I have looked at:

What you sell	First contact to money	Judge the campaign at
Lunch, a haircut	Same day	7 to 10 days
A $200 service or repair	3 to 10 days	3 weeks
A $2,000 to $10,000 job	3 to 8 weeks	8 to 10 weeks

An HVAC company in Fishers is not entitled to an opinion about a Facebook campaign in week two. A taco counter can have one by Friday.

What killing it early costs you

Back to the flooring store. Her numbers.

Average job: $4,800 installed.

The nine-day campaign spent $600 and reported 2 conversions. That reads as $300 a lead, which to a shop used to $40 Google leads sounds insane.

Six people who first called during those nine days ended up on the July install schedule. She could trace four of them back to Facebook. Four jobs at $4,800 is $19,200 of installed work against $600 of spend.

The campaign was fine. She looked at a five-week decision through a nine-day window.

Four things to do this week

1. Check your Google Ads conversion window. Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. Click the conversion action, then Edit settings, then Click-through conversion window. If it reads 7 or 14 days and you sell anything over $500, that setting is costing you money. 30 days is the default for a reason.

2. Set your Meta attribution on purpose. Do not accept whatever the report opens with. The March change split clicks and engagement into separate windows, and most accounts still show the narrow view.

3. Ask, and write it down. "How did you hear about us?" on the intake form, and out loud at the counter. Log the answers in a spreadsheet with the date. At 40 sales a month, that spreadsheet beats every dashboard you own, and it costs nothing. If your form is going nowhere anyway, fix that first.

4. Put a number on your website. During those three weeks, she is reading an AI summary of you. In the same RTB House study, 43 percent of US shoppers said they trust Google's AI Overviews for shopping advice, and 43 percent said the same about ChatGPT. That is 11 points above Instagram and Facebook, and 20 points above influencers. An AI cannot quote a price you never published. It will quote the competitor who did. We argue about pricing transparency a lot around here, and this is why. If you want help getting an honest range onto the page, that is most of what we do.

The flooring store turned the ads back on in July. Same creative, same $600. The only thing she changed was that she stopped opening the dashboard until day 30. Her cost per sale did not move. Her willingness to keep paying for it did.

Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	AI lengthens purchase decisions for 42% of US shoppers, RTB House finds	The 42% figure, the Gen Z and boomer splits, and the AI trust rankings against Instagram, Facebook and influencers.
2	Shoppers Trust AI More Than Social Feeds but Still Want Human Control, Reveals RTB House	The study name, sample size and countries, the 59% brand-discovery figure, and the Jaysen Gillespie quote.
3	About conversion windows, Google Ads Help	The 30-day default click-through conversion window, the 1 to 90 day range, and the menu path for changing it.
4	Meta changed how it counts your Facebook conversions	Meta's 7-day click and 1-day engage-through windows, and how to add those columns back.