Attribution
Position-Based Attribution
Position-based attribution (also called "U-shaped") gives 40% credit each to first and last touchpoints, with the remaining 20% distributed among middle touchpoints.
Key Takeaway
Position-based attribution (also called "U-shaped") gives 40% credit each to first and last touchpoints, with the remaining 20% distributed among middle touchpoints.
Why position-based attribution matters for SaaS
This model acknowledges that discovery and decision are most important, while acknowledging middle-touch nurture. It's a practical balance that works well for SaaS with longer sales cycles.
How tracerHQ measures position-based attribution
tracerHQ's default cluster-based view aligns with position-based logic—showing first-touch (awareness) keywords, last-touch (decision) keywords, and the consideration keywords that influenced the path between.
Position-Based Attribution in depth
Position-based attribution, commonly called U-shaped, assigns 40% credit to the first touch, 40% to the last touch, and distributes the remaining 20% evenly across middle touches. The logic is that discovering a brand and deciding to buy are the two most consequential moments, and middle-funnel nurture plays a smaller but real role. It is a compromise between first-touch (which over-credits discovery) and last-touch (which over-credits closing). Position-based is a practical starting point for teams moving from last-click, especially in B2B SaaS where both the first impression and the final comparison are genuinely load-bearing moments in the purchase decision. The 40/20/40 split is not sacred and mature teams tune it against their own data, commonly shifting toward 30/40/30 for longer sales cycles where middle-funnel webinars and whitepapers play a bigger role than the default weighting implies.
first_touch = 0.4 * revenue; last_touch = 0.4 * revenue; each_middle_touch = 0.2 * revenue / middle_count
Examples in practice
A 5-touch journey worth $2,000: first touch and last touch each get $800, and each of the 3 middle touches gets $133.
An agency presents both last-touch and U-shaped views to a client. Under U-shaped, a "vs competitor" blog that never closed a deal now owns 15% of attributed revenue as a first-touch anchor.
A B2B team with typical 3-touch journeys sees position-based collapse toward 40/20/40, which closely matches their intuition that middle-funnel email nurture has some but not dominant value.
Common mistakes
- Applying U-shaped to 1- or 2-touch journeys, where the weights become trivially 100% or 50/50 and the model adds no value.
- Treating the 40/20/40 split as a universal constant rather than a starting point to tune against your data.
- Ignoring the middle-touch undercount for journeys with 8+ touches, where the 20% pool gets sliced thin.
- Using position-based for paid channel bidding, where data-driven attribution is generally more accurate.
Track position-based attribution in your dashboard
Connect Google Search Console and start seeing your metrics by keyword.