A link placed in March influences a deal that closes next January. Every honest disagreement about whether link building works is really a disagreement about that sentence — one side measuring in months, the other in quarters, both looking at the same programme.
The fix is not a better attribution model. It is reporting three horizons separately and agreeing which one you are talking about before anyone opens a dashboard.
The three horizons
Delivery, monthly. What shipped: placements live, publications, anchors, what was rejected and why. This is an operational report about whether the supplier did the work. It is not evidence that the work is producing anything, and treating it as such is the first mistake.
Search response, months three to eight. Positions, impressions, the referring-domain gap closing. This is where you find out whether the acquisition is having the mechanical effect it is supposed to have. It is a leading indicator and it is the horizon on which you should decide whether to continue.
Commercial effect, months nine to eighteen. Pipeline influenced, deals that did not stall, revenue. On a nine-month B2B cycle this is arithmetic, not pessimism: a placement in month three reaches a buyer in month four, who enters a cycle that closes in month thirteen.
Almost every cancelled programme was cancelled in month five, using horizon-three expectations against horizon-two data.
What to report monthly
Six things, and none of them is revenue.
Placements live and indexed. Not "secured" or "scheduled". Live URLs, with the index date. Anything not indexed by day thirty should not be billed, which puts the cost of a bad host where it belongs.
Rejections with reason codes. What was refused and why. Anyone can produce a list of what shipped; the rejection log is the only artefact proving a standard was applied rather than a quota filled.
Referring-domain gap, remeasured. The gap on the target page against the median of the four above it. This is the number the whole programme exists to close, and it moves slowly enough that monthly measurement is honest.
Anchor distribution, trailing three months. Against the model agreed at kickoff. All-time distribution hides a bad quarter; trailing three months does not.
Attrition. Links lost this month and replaced. Around four percent a year is normal in B2B SaaS. Anyone reporting zero either has not been running long enough to see it or is not checking.
Position and impressions for the target page. One page, not a portfolio average. Averages across a site hide the thing you are paying to move.
The leading indicator almost nobody tracks
Between the mechanical response and the commercial one there is a signal that arrives earlier than either and predicts outcomes better than both. It is not in any analytics tool.
Whether sales starts sending the placements to prospects unprompted.
When a placement is genuinely good — when it makes the category argument better than your own deck does — account executives find it and start using it. That behaviour shows up in months two to four, long before rankings move, and in our experience it is the single most reliable predictor that a programme will produce commercial effect later.
The inverse is equally informative. If nobody in sales can find a use for anything you have placed after four months, the placements are technically fine and commercially inert, and no amount of additional volume will change that.
Tracking it is crude and works: ask the sales lead once a month which pieces they have sent to prospects. If the answer is consistently none, that is a finding rather than a gap in your reporting.
Lagging measures worth holding, and how
Three, and each needs a caveat attached or it will be misread.
Organic pipeline influenced. Any deal where someone touched an organic entry page before the opportunity was created. Use a wide attribution window — at least the length of your sales cycle — and accept that this over-credits organic. It is directionally useful and precisely wrong, and saying so up front prevents the argument later.
Deals that did not stall. Harder, and worth the effort. The economic buyer's objection is often "is this a real category with real vendors". A placement that answers that does not create a lead; it prevents a loss. Ask closed-won contacts what reassured them, and count the mentions.
Cost per referring domain, blended. Total programme spend divided by domains closed. This is a supplier-efficiency measure rather than a business measure, but it is the number that makes proposals comparable. Credible B2B SaaS placements run roughly $150 to $500 across the market; a blended cost far below that band means the inventory came from somewhere that will not survive scrutiny.
What to agree before month one
Four things, written down, at kickoff — when nobody is emotional about the numbers yet.
Which horizon each report answers. What month three, month six and month nine should look like if the programme is working. What the stopping criteria are: the conditions under which you would end this rather than renew it. And who reads which report, because the delivery report and the commercial report should not go to the same meeting.
That last one is more useful than it sounds. Delivery reports invite operational questions and commercial reports invite strategic ones, and mixing them produces a monthly meeting where a board member asks why revenue has not moved in response to a table of anchor texts.
The version that fits on a card
Month one ships prospecting, not links. Months three to eight are where you learn whether the mechanism is working. Months nine to eighteen are where the money shows up, and only if the cycle allows it.
Report all three separately, watch whether sales starts using the work, and agree the stopping criteria while everyone is still calm. Programmes that do this end deliberately. Programmes that do not end in month five, having bought two thirds of a gap — which is worth almost nothing, because rankings move at the end of the curve rather than along it.