Your client, a pet shop owner, wants to know how long it takes customers to buy dog food after selecting an ad. What metric in Search Ads 360 should you tell them to follow?

Conversion delay, also known as time lag, measures the time between a user's initial ad click and their eventual conversion. This metric directly answers the client's question about how long it takes customers to buy dog food after clicking an ad. Understanding conversion delay helps optimize bidding strategies and evaluate campaign performance more accurately, especially for products with longer consideration phases. Target return on ad spend (tROAS) and target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) are bidding strategies focused on achieving specific financial goals, not on measuring the time to conversion. The learning period refers to the time an automated bidding strategy needs to gather data and optimize performance, which is unrelated to the customer's purchase journey duration.