Attribution
Linear Attribution
Linear attribution gives equal credit to every touchpoint in a user's journey. If there are 4 touchpoints, each gets 25% credit.
Key Takeaway
Linear attribution gives equal credit to every touchpoint in a user's journey.
Why linear attribution matters for SaaS
Linear is simple and gives visibility into the entire journey, but it assumes every touchpoint has equal value—which is rarely true. It's a starting point, but needs refinement based on your specific data.
How tracerHQ measures linear attribution
tracerHQ's default view shows linear-style attribution across your keyword clusters. You see equal weight given to awareness, consideration, and decision-stage keywords that contributed to each conversion.
Linear Attribution in depth
Linear attribution is the simplest form of multi-touch attribution: every touchpoint in a conversion path receives 1/n of the credit, where n is the number of touches. It is easy to explain to stakeholders and does not require any ML or training data. The downside is the assumption that a casual blog skim is worth the same as a 45-minute demo, which is rarely true. Linear is best used as a baseline multi-touch view to compare against single-touch models and to show the long tail of assists that single-touch hides. It is particularly useful early in an MTA implementation, before there is enough conversion volume to train a data-driven model. Linear also serves as a useful teaching tool for stakeholders who are new to multi-touch reporting, because its even distribution is trivially easy to reproduce by hand and makes the conceptual difference from last-click immediately obvious.
credit_per_touch = total_revenue / number_of_touches_in_journey
Examples in practice
A journey of 4 touches (blog, email, paid ad, branded search) each gets 25% credit. A $1,200 deal shows as $300 attributed to each touchpoint.
An agency uses linear to build the first ever "assisted revenue" report for a client and discovers 18 content pieces that have never received credit under last-touch but appear in 40% of converter journeys.
A SaaS team compares linear vs last-touch for the same month. Last-touch shows branded search at 55% of revenue; linear drops it to 22% and redistributes the rest to the blog and comparison pages that set up those branded searches.
Common mistakes
- Presenting linear attribution as "the truth" rather than one valid lens. It is deliberately naive about touchpoint weight.
- Using linear for budget allocation on a channel with very long journeys. Credit spreads so thin that no single channel looks valuable.
- Double-counting events as separate touches (a pageview and a scroll event on the same page should typically collapse into one).
- Ignoring short journeys. A 1-touch journey in linear is just last-click in disguise.
Track linear attribution in your dashboard
Connect Google Search Console and start seeing your metrics by keyword.