Marketing Channel Expiration for Financial Services

[m_alcantara]

Coming from the Financial Services sector where our sales/engagement cycles tend to be months long. It takes prospects a while to decide to speak with us, let alone become a client.

Our Marketing Channel Expiration is set to 1 day currently, which makes no sense given the context.

What is the recommended Marketing Channel Expiration for Financial Services. I suspect a month at least, if not longer, but I'd like to hear recommendations.

[Jude_Felix · Accepted solution]

@m_alcantara Great question, and you’re right that a 1‑day expiration is far too short for financial services, where the consideration and sales cycles can easily span weeks or months.

A common best practice for financial services is to set the Marketing Channel Expiration to at least 30 days of inactivity. This way, if a prospect visits your site via Paid Search, Email, or Social Media and then comes back days or weeks later to complete an application or engage, that original marketing channel still gets credit.

You could consider extending to 60 or even 90 days depending on your sales cycle. But for most banks and financial service providers, 30 days strikes a good balance between attribution realism and keeping the data actionable.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

While I don't work in the financial sector, I am seconding 30 days as this is Adobe's default... but also, with Custom Attribution Models, you can always look at longer cycles like 60 or 90 days.

While yes, you could shorten a 90 day value to 30 days, Adobe has said that lengthening attribution IQ is more reliable than shortening a period.. likely because if you persist a value for 90 days, you have a value, and now trying to shorten it to 30... the calculations get a little complex... 

Also, the longer the campaigns you are running, I would think that reviewing cross attribution (i.e. Participation Model, or JCurve, or Time Decay, etc) would be important information to review... 

[Vinay_Chauhan]

Hi @m_alcantara 

You're absolutely right that a 1-day Marketing Channel Expiration doesn't do justice to how users actually engage with financial brands.

In my experience working with FS clients, 30 days is generally a solid baseline, especially for products like credit cards, investments, or mortgages where decision-making stretches out over time.

That said, I’ve seen some teams push it to 60 or even 90 days if the lead nurture cycle is longer, particularly for high-touch products where it might take a few weeks just to get through the education or qualification phase. One approach that’s worked well is -

• Start with 30 days of inactivity for expiration in the Marketing Channel processing rules.

• Pair it with Attribution IQ in Workspace so you can experiment with different attribution models (e.g., Time Decay, J-Curve, or even Position-Based) to understand longer user journeys.

• Don’t rely on Last Touch alone, it oversimplifies things, especially in industries where users come back multiple times from different channels.

If you are worried about overstating early touchpoints by extending expiration too long, you can always layer in segmentation or breakdowns by days since first touch to get more context.

In short , yes, extend that expiration window. One day doesn’t cut it for FS, and 30 days (or more) will give you a much more honest read on marketing effectiveness over time.

Hope that helps!

[KumarRishii]

For Financial Services, where sales cycles are long, a 1-day Marketing Channel Expiration is too short. I will recommend window 30 to 90 days, with 60 days being a good starting point. This ensures you more accurate attribution and better insights into which channels truly drive conversions over time.