Sales cycle
Also called Time to close, Sales cycle length.
How long it takes a lead to become a sale, from the day it arrives to the day the deal closes. Usually read as the median across won deals, because a few very slow deals would drag an average far off.
Why it matters
It decides how soon you can know anything. A two-week cycle means a lead's worth is known within a month; a six-month cycle means today's leads are judged next spring, and every value sent in between is an estimate.
What goes wrong
It is why a lead's value has to be worked out on the day it arrives rather than the day it closes: Google only listens for about a week, and most sales take longer than that. The value is estimated from how similar leads closed in the past, and the real outcome comes back later to improve the next estimate.
The cycle also decides which leads can be judged at all. A lead younger than the typical cycle is not lost, it is undecided, and counting it as lost makes every recent week look worse than it was.
What this product does about it
The report measures your median cycle from your own won deals, and leaves out leads too young to have resolved rather than counting them as lost.
How to check it on your own account
Take your won deals from the last year and find the middle one when sorted by days from created to closed.
Next to this
- Conversion lagThe time between the click and the outcome.
- Day-0 valueThe value sent at the moment the lead is created, estimated from what similar leads have historically been worth rather than from what this one eventually does.
- RecalibrationRefitting the model on newer outcomes so tomorrow's leads are priced better.
Where this comes up
- Value-Based Bidding for Lead Generation - The Complete GuideA lower cost per lead looks good in a report. It means much less if those leads never become customers. How to estimate what a lead is worth, send it to Google Ads, and check whether the bids brought better business.
- Meta Value Optimization for Lead Generation - The Complete GuideHow to give Meta a value for every lead, which of its three optimization goals your account can actually use, why the value has to arrive once and on day zero, and how to tell whether Meta is now finding better customers or just more leads.
- Google Ads Value-Based Bidding Migration Guide: What to Expect When You SwitchA staged migration, in Google's own order. What resets the learning period, why it is measured in conversions and not days, and when you can honestly read the result.
- Google Ads Click ID Guide: Why Leads Lose Their GCLID and How to Fix ItA lead value Google cannot attribute cannot influence Smart Bidding. The six places a click ID disappears between the ad and the CRM, the one-line script that carries it into every form, the fixes in the order worth doing them, and how to measure click ID coverage rather than upload success.
- Journey-Aware Bidding: Google's Lead-Gen Bidding Upgrade, and What It Does Not DoJourney-aware bidding is an upgrade to Smart Bidding, not a new strategy. Target CPA campaigns learn from every stage between a form fill and a sale. What changes for lead-gen advertisers, what does not, and what to prepare.
- Is Your CRM Data Ready for Value-Based Bidding?Five checks before you turn your sales history into Google Ads conversion values. Stage timestamps, source fields, deal ranges, click ID coverage and late outcomes all mislead in ways that become spending instructions.
In your trade
The industry pages that work this through for a kind of business.
The rest of this step
Measure this on your own data
The diagnostic reads a CRM export in your browser and reports your volume, your match rate and the spread between your leads against the thresholds in this glossary. Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.