Long-Cycle · Attribution
38 days and beyond.
Which Industries Have Long Cycles
Insurance (38 days), B2B SaaS (62 to 92 days), real estate (28 days), industrial B2B (180 days). All involve multi-touch journeys with extended decision phases. Standard tracking tools are not built for this.
01
38 days
Insurance Avg.
02
92 days
B2B SaaS Avg.
03
180 days
Industrial B2B Avg.
Setup for Long-Cycle Attribution
- Custom events per sales stage (MQL, SQL, Demo, Proposal, Closed)
- CRM integration with user ID as match key
- Multi-touch attribution with a time-decay model
- Channel contributions per stage in reporting
- Weekly sales and marketing reviews
Example
An insurance broker built a long-cycle setup and halved cost per policy from 240 to 118 euros. Marketing had assumed top-of-funnel channels were worthless; in reality, they were the primary lever.
Common Mistakes in Long-Cycle Setups
They try to compress the sales cycle into a 28-day window. They ignore top-of-funnel channels like display and YouTube. They measure MQL cost without tying it to closed-won outcomes. Long-cycle attribution is a different discipline from short-cycle, with different tools and different KPIs.
„Long-cycle attribution is not a setting. It is a setup architecture.”