Attribution
Time-Decay Attribution
Time-decay attribution gives more credit to touchpoints that happened closer to the conversion. Credit increases exponentially as you approach the conversion date.
Key Takeaway
Time-decay attribution gives more credit to touchpoints that happened closer to the conversion.
Why time-decay attribution matters for SaaS
In B2B SaaS, the research phase can be weeks or months. Time-decay acknowledges that recent interactions likely influenced the decision more than early awareness ones—but it still undervalues the discovery phase.
How tracerHQ measures time-decay attribution
tracerHQ can show time-decay views for keyword clusters, highlighting which "near conversion" searches influenced closed-won deals. This helps prioritize keywords for retargeting or remarketing.
Time-Decay Attribution in depth
Time-decay attribution is a multi-touch model that weights credit by recency: the closer a touchpoint is to the conversion, the more credit it gets, typically following an exponential decay curve with a configurable half-life (often 7 days). The rationale is that recent interactions are more proximate causes of a decision than touchpoints from months ago. Time-decay is useful for sales cycles where nurture and consideration content drives the closing moment, and for retargeting evaluation. The downside is that it systematically under-credits the awareness touch that made the buyer aware of you in the first place. It should be paired with first-touch reporting to avoid defunding demand-gen. The half-life parameter is the single most important configuration knob: set it too short and the model collapses toward last-click, set it too long and it behaves like linear, and matching it to the median sales cycle length is the only reliable way to tune it.
weight_i = 2^(-days_before_conversion_i / half_life); credit_i = (weight_i / sum(weights)) * revenue
Examples in practice
With a 7-day half-life, a touch 7 days before conversion gets half the weight of a touch on conversion day. A 28-day-old blog visit gets about 6% of the weight of a same-day branded search.
A SaaS team with a 45-day sales cycle uses time-decay and discovers their "pricing" page receives 3x more credit than in linear, confirming it is a primary closing asset.
An agency tunes the half-life from 7 to 14 days for an enterprise client and watches mid-funnel webinars gain 20% more attributed revenue, matching the longer real-world sales cycle.
Common mistakes
- Leaving the half-life at the tool default without matching it to the actual sales cycle length.
- Using time-decay alone to evaluate TOFU content, which will always look weak against decaying weights.
- Forgetting that time-decay compounds the last-touch bias when journeys are short.
- Mixing half-life definitions between tools (some use days, some use sessions).
Track time-decay attribution in your dashboard
Connect Google Search Console and start seeing your metrics by keyword.