Linear attribution: model, example and alternatives

What is linear attribution?

Linear attribution splits the credit for a sale equally across every recorded touch that led to it. Four touches means each campaign gets 25%.

It is the simplest form of multi-touch attribution, the family of models that give credit to more than one step in a buyer’s journey.

Linear attribution example

A $12,000 deal had four touches: a search visit, a webinar, a case-study email and a pricing call. Linear attribution credits each with $3,000. First-touch would give all $12,000 to search; last-touch would give it all to the call.

Linear vs time-decay attribution

Time-decay gives more credit to touches closer to the sale, on the theory that recent steps mattered more. Position-based models give most of the credit to the first and last touches, often 40% each, and share the rest across the middle. Linear makes no such assumption, which makes it a fair baseline to compare the others against.

Linear attribution pros and cons

  • Pro: no channel is ignored.
  • Pro: easy to explain.
  • Con: treats a quick newsletter open the same as a two-hour demo.
  • Con: needs every touch recorded, or the missing ones quietly lose their share.

Seeing the models side by side

No model is the truth. Sales CRM and Pipeline shows first-touch, last-touch and linear attribution side by side, and reports revenue with no campaign touch separately instead of dropping it, so the disagreements stay visible.

Last reviewed 2026-11-01.

Related terms

  • First-touch attribution — First-touch attribution gives all the credit for a sale to the first campaign or channel that brought the contact in, such as the article they found or the ad they first clicked.
  • Last-touch attribution — Last-touch attribution gives all the credit for a sale to the last campaign or channel the contact interacted with before the lead converted or the deal was won.
  • Lead scoring — Lead scoring ranks contacts by how likely they are to become valuable customers, so sales time goes to the people most worth calling first.

All glossary terms →