Freshness Half-Life

Freshness Half-Life is the interval at which a dashboard's numbers stop matching what a client can see with their own eyes, and how fast trust erodes after that point. Every reporting stack has a half-life: a live ad spend figure might hold for an hour, a GA4 conversion count for a day, a reconciled CRM pipeline for a week. Agencies that publish without knowing each metric's half-life end up defending numbers instead of discussing performance. The framework asks three questions per data source: how often does it actually update, how often does the client check it independently, and who absorbs the gap when the two disagree. Dana DiTomaso's argument that GA4 simply made attribution's limits visible is the canonical case: clients trained on Universal Analytics read consent-driven gaps as underreporting, and the agency eats the credibility cost. Set refresh cadence to the client's checking rhythm, not the vendor's sync schedule.