Is your company gathering a lot of data? How much extensive analysis do you do on it? Do you then make business decisions off of it? What happens when the data you get is not 100% reliable? A Social Advertising Strategist and the CEO of Social Fulcrum, Andrew Krebs-Smith, challenges marketers to pay attention to purchasing behavior and to not rely too heavily on all the data they receive. Is multi-touch attribution really the answer to seeing what’s making the most impact in your marketing efforts? Listen and find out!   Takeaways: A company may not capture reliable purchasing behavior data across their market because it’s difficult to understand a user’s behavior across electronic devices. They may click on an ad on their phone, but not their laptop, or vice versa. Consider asking yourself, is it worth gating content, or product, to have an increase in data capture, but a possible slight decrease in conversion because a small portion is not willing to give up their email? Multi-touch attribution is difficult to be relied on because buyers are interacting with marketing materials before they click. For example, an event could happen that triggers the buyer to have a need. Then they might see a few ads, which leads to an idea of doing a search. Then they click on your ad or fill out your form. How do you track that? Consider who the influencers are in the buying decision. How can you market to those influencers? Higher education is not preparing marketers for what they need. The industry is changing too much. Having real-world experience will give them the tactical knowledge they need to compete and succeed. Lift Study-When you have two groups, a placebo and a control group with a hard separation between the two. You run your usual ads to about 80% of your prospects where the 20% receive ads that having nothing to do with your product or service. Observing what happens between the two groups will allow you to see the impact that your ads are actually having. When you are starting out in your career path, do not compare yourself to others around you. Encourage yourself and trust your instincts that you are right where you need to be.   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkrebssmith/ Social Fulcrum: https://socialfulcrum.com/ Social Fulcrum LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/social-fulcrum/    Busted Myths: All the data that you get is reliable and therefore you should do extensive analysis on it.-This is not true. Often companies are spending time and resources to analyze and draw conclusions based on unreliable data. There is too big of a distance between advertisers and the actual consumers to ensure that all the data coming in is completely accurate.   Shout Outs 36:54 lululemon 1:03:08 Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Work Week