• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Google introduced a Gemini powered metric in Google Ads that predicts the long-term revenue impact of top-of-funnel campaigns by connecting early actions, like brand searches, to expected future sales. 

“Qualified Future Conversion (QFC)” was announced during Google Marketing Live in May 2026. Not to replace Google’s other conversion metrics like attributed branded searches (ABS), but to supplement them.

The metric relies on a mandatory, immediate micro-conversion pattern to generate its predictive model. It relies on a trigger, window of time, and action.

Adriaan Dekker, a Google Ads specialist, wrote in a LinkedIn post explained how to use the metric.

“Someone sees your YouTube or Demand Gen ad today,” he wrote. “They don't buy. They don't click. But they go to Google and search for your brand three days later.”
QFC connects those dots, and tells the advertiser the ad exposure is likely to produce a conversion, and here’s the probability.

“Upper funnel advertising has had one problem for as long as I can remember,” Dekker wrote. “You spend the budget. You see the impressions. You have no idea if it worked.”

Then the company’s finance department asks to see the return on investment for the ad spend.

“You show them reach and frequency and hope they don't push back,” he wrote. “QFC changes that conversation completely.”

QFC was announced during Google Marketing Live in May 2026, but not much has been said about it until Boris Beceric, a freelance paid search consultant in Germany, inquired about the metric, and Ginny Marvin, Google Ads product liaison, explained it during a Community Q&A about AI Search published late Thursday.

It’s only being tested with a select number of advertisers, with wider availability expected later this year.

QFC is a predictive metric that forecasts beyond a “lookback window,” defined as a predefined time period that occurs after a user interacts with an ad in which the next conversion can be attributed to that action.

It’s being tested with a select number of advertisers. Google plans to widen availability later this year to give advertisers a longer term and more complete view of the impact of their Google Ads spend.

The predictive metric analyzes total conversion that occurred or predicted to occur within 180 days of a human interacting with an ad to show the full impact of the brand and demand generation ad spend. It combines those signals with past data to forecast sales that could occur during the next six months.

“Standard lookback windows often undervalue long-term demand creation from branding and prospecting campaigns because they only capture what happened within that specific and somewhat arbitrary window,” Marvin said in a video published Thursday.

For example, 50% of conversions from Performance Max campaigns* and 40% from Demand Gen campaigns are captured within a standard 30-day click and 3-day engaged-view window. She explained that even for a standard Google Ads campaign, 70% of conversions are captured within the 30-day click and 3-day engaged-view conversion lookback window. That leaves 30% of conversions unattributed.