Why trust first-party data over platform metrics

Hot take: Most 'intent data' your sales team purchases is worthless compared to what's already happening on your owned assets. In my years leading sales teams, I've watched companies waste countless hours chasing prospects with low purchase intent. Truth: Most sales teams operate like they're throwing darts in the dark. They rely on 3rd party signals: "This company raised funding" "That prospect changed jobs" "Someone downloaded an industry report" But here's what I've learned from speaking with seasoned CMOs and VPs of Sales - the most powerful buying signal isn't what a prospect does on other platforms. It's what they do on your own assets (website, webinars, your events, email list, podcast) 1st party signals (direct engagement with YOUR brand) are 3-5x more likely to convert than 3rd party signals. Why? Because intent is everything. When someone visits your pricing page 4 times in a week, that's not coincidence - that's buying behavior. Last month, one of our customers uncovered a Fortune 500 company that had 3 different stakeholders exploring their website. The deal closed in 19 days - because they were already mid-buying cycle when discovered. (screenshot in comments) 3rd party data might tell you WHO to target. 1st party data tells you WHO + WHEN + WHY. This is why at Knock2, we're obsessed with website visitor tracking at the contact level. We're not interested in anonymous traffic data - we want to tell you exactly which decision-makers are showing purchase intent right now. The companies winning at sales today aren't just working harder - they're working smarter by prioritizing prospects already showing interest. Your most valuable prospects are already knocking on your door. The question is: can you hear them? 👊👊 🚪

If you’ve ever been downgraded on a flight, you know the pain. Now imagine paying twice for the same seat every single day. A couple of weeks ago, I was on a plane to Denver. I had booked business class. The night before, I got an email: “You’ve been downgraded.” Why? Because the airline had double-booked the same seat. And that’s exactly how attribution works in Google and Meta. Both platforms claim the same customer. Both show you a shiny dashboard. Both send you a “confirmation email” that says, “We got the sale.” But Shopify tells the truth: there’s only one seat. One sale. If you trust the platforms, your reporting says $700K in sales. Your bank account says $500K. Where did the extra $200K go? It vanished into the overlap. Into the “double-booked” attribution system where both Google and Meta take credit. This is why first-click new customer data is so critical. It’s like the real boarding pass that proves who actually owns the seat. Because here’s what happens with PMax: → It hunts down warm Meta traffic → It takes credit for returning customers → It shows you an inflated ROAS that looks amazing but isn’t incremental And when you pour more money into it, you’re scaling a lie. The real game now is: ✔️ Track new customers at the first click ✔️ Run those signals back into Google ✔️ Separate Google’s contribution from Meta’s That’s how you finally scale Google independently instead of just watching it follow Meta around like a shadow. Don’t let the platforms double-book your seats. Get clarity, or you’ll pay twice for the same passenger.

"More attribution data hasn't led to more confidence—it's created analysis paralysis." Last week, a $50M DTC brand confessed they're paying for 4 different attribution tools plus platform reporting. Still couldn't agree on which channels actually drove their holiday revenue. 🎯 Sound familiar? The typical e-commerce brand now tracks attribution through platform reporting, GA4, third-party MTA vendors, and "how did you hear about us" surveys. Each shows different numbers. Each has its own methodology. And reconciling them? Nearly impossible. Here's what we've been quietly building at SourceMedium.com... For the past year, we've been developing a completely different approach to multi-touch attribution. One that doesn't require another pixel. One that aggregates your existing tracking instead of adding to it. One that's already running across 10+ brands. The results? We've conducted side-by-side purchase journey data quality tests with alternative (much more expensive) solutions. What we found surprised even us: brands' own 1st party funnel data matched as closely as touchpoints collected by proprietary pixels. Let that sink in. Your existing data—properly aggregated—is just as good as those expensive black-box solutions. Our philosophy is simple: Aggregation over Addition 📊 Why add another pixel when you already have GA4, server-side CAPI, Shopify, and UTMs? We bring them together into one unified stream. Your Trusted Data as the Foundation 🎯 Built on the sources you already rely on—CAPI, GA4, enriched with your zero-party attribution data. A refreshing approach to blackbox solutions, offering full transparency on what's tracked and what isn't. Trust over Coverage ✅ 70% attribution you can verify beats 100% modeled data you can't. Especially when making million-dollar budget decisions. Transparency, Access, Full Customizability 🔍 Full BigQuery access to input and output data. Audit everything. Build custom models. Your data, your control. The attribution problem isn't about needing more data. It's about trusting the data you already have. I'll be sharing more about what we've learned from early beta customers in the coming days. Want to be among the first to see how we're solving attribution differently? Let's talk.

LinkedIn recently pulled the rug out from under many tools scraping their data. And if your GTM strategy depends on 3rd-party data, you should be paying attention. Because you’re probably sitting on a goldmine of your own GTM data, but looking the other way. Here's what I mean by this:   For years, B2B data providers have been scraping LinkedIn to build massive databases. LinkedIn knew. They just looked the other way.   Until they didn't.   This year, LinkedIn decided to enforce its terms of service and started cracking down on tools profiting from its vast database. Just like that—years of building on borrowed data, gone.   It’s one more instance (along with Google's ongoing phase-out of third-party cookies) that proves that when you don't own the data source, you don't own your destiny.   If I were building a GTM motion in 2025, I'd focus exclusively on harvesting data I actually own:   • Website visitors - People already showing interest in what you do  • Social media engagers - Folks interacting with your content • Self-serve sign-ups - Users you're not fully nurturing yet • Event/webinar attendees - People who've engaged with your brand • Email subscribers - Your owned audience   And it isn’t just about risk mitigation. First-party data sources are inherently warmer. These people have already shown they’re in-market; they’ve proven there’s interest in you, your content, or your space.   When someone engages with your LinkedIn post, they're 10X more likely to respond to your outreach than to a competitor saying, "I saw you engaged with Nathan's post."    You own that relationship. You own that data. And most importantly—you're the only one who has access to it.   LinkedIn's crackdown won't be the last time a platform changes the rules overnight. More will follow.   So if your GTM plays are too dependent on 3rd party data, it might be time to rethink your strategy.    The companies that will thrive in this new reality are the ones building GTM engines around assets they control.

"Why don't you just install your own first-party pixel?" A client asked us this recently, and it made me realize we've never told the full story of why we ditched user-level tracking entirely. When we first built Fospha, pixel-based tracking made perfect sense. You could reliably follow customers across devices, platforms like Meta and Google shared full impression data, and attribution felt... possible. But then everything changed. GDPR hit. ITP rolled out. ATT arrived. Meta stopped sharing data. Safari made pixels unreliable. iOS fragmented user journeys beyond recognition. The signal we could capture - even with our own pixel - eroded fast. So we ran the numbers across our customer base. The results? Eye-opening. Only 15% of pixel-tracked journeys were actually multi-touch. And even those rarely included more than two channels. 85% looked exactly like Last Click attribution - heavily skewed toward demand capture channels like branded search and direct traffic. Our own pixel was replicating the same flawed outcomes we'd set out to replace. Here's the deeper problem: Platforms like TikTok and Meta now share impression data under different terms, with different definitions, locked within their own ecosystems. Cross-channel comparison - the thing marketers need most - becomes impossible when you're relying on user-level IDs. So we made a decision that changed everything. We removed the pixel from our product entirely. Today, Fospha blends platform delivery data, first-party performance outcomes, and privacy-safe impression signals. No cookies. No user-level stitching. Just clean, consistent, cross-channel measurement. What does this unlock? → Models that go live in 28 days with YoY data out-of-the-box → True cross-channel comparability, without platform bias → Confident justification for brand and upper-funnel investment based on incremental impact → A solution that's immune to the next wave of privacy changes Pixels were slowing us - and our customers - down. This is what measurement looks like without them. Want to see how this works in practice? Check out the case study we did with Represent in the comments 👇

This brand owner discovered their "best performing" ads were stealing credit from their email flows. They'd been running the same playbook everyone else does - dumping budget into Facebook, watching the platform tell them they're crushing it, assuming that's the whole story. But something felt off. The numbers didn't match the bank account. So they ran a proper attribution analysis using Polar Analytics 🐻❄️  and discovered: → Ads claimed 60% revenue attribution  → Email got credit for only 15% → Server-side tracking showed the opposite was true Classic case of platforms marking their own homework. Their email flows were actually driving 3x more incremental revenue than ads. The ads weren't converting cold traffic - they were just catching people at the finish line who were already sold through email nurturing. That's the gap between platform attribution (what Facebook wants you to believe) and real attribution with first-party data tracking. Most brands never figure this out. They keep feeding the ad machine because that's where the "results" show up, while their email flows do the actual work in the shadows. Stop letting platforms tell you where your revenue comes from.  Track it yourself or you're just guessing with extra steps. This is exactly why I’m a #proudpartner with Polar Analytics 🐻❄️  - one of the few tools that actually shows you what's driving incremental growth versus what's just good at taking credit. What would you do if your "best" channel was stealing credit from your actual best channel? Time to get real with your attribution: https://lnkd.in/gDwiPSxw

4 Overrated ad metrics YOU should be questioning more: #1. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) Platform-reported ROAS is dangerous, you're letting Facebook grade its own homework while making decisions that determine your company's future. Don't trust what the platforms tell you. Verify everything with your first-party data, or you're flying blind. #2. Conversion Value Conversion values from ad platforms are often complete garbage. I've seen accounts showing "16 purchases at 11 cents per conversion" and "6 purchases with ZERO dollars spent." These numbers are nonsense and lead to panic-driven decisions that tank performance. #3. Lifetime Value Most brands are killing products that drive their highest LTV customers because they only see front-end metrics. I witnessed a client ready to scale back with "$60 CAC on $80 AOV" until we discovered those customers had $1000+ lifetime value. That's the difference between failing and scaling. #4. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Your platform CPA is likely wrong for both first-time and returning customers. The platforms are incentivized to take credit for conversions they didn't actually drive. Stop believing the fairy tales and check your actual backend data.

Your ad platforms are lying to you (and you probably already know it). Let's be honest about digital advertising: ❌ Platforms want you to see a killer ROAS so you'll keep spending ❌ Last-click attribution gives credit to the final touchpoint, rarely the true driver ❌ Blended ROAS tells you nothing about where your next dollar should go ❌ Without incrementality testing, you're making million-dollar decisions on flawed data At Lifesight, we've seen the truth: most brands discover they've been wasting 𝟯𝟬-𝟰𝟬% of their marketing budget when they implement proper measurement. One e-commerce client found that 𝟰𝟬% 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗮𝗱 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗭𝗘𝗥𝗢 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀. By reallocating that budget based on true incrementality, 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝘁 𝗯𝘆 𝟯𝟮%. Are you ready to stop trusting platform metrics and start trusting real data? #roas #lastclickattribution #blendedroas #incrementality #incrementalitytesting #marketingbudget #marketingmeasurement #ecommerce

Meta have been alleged to have purposefully over-reported ad performance. Quelle surprise. This shines a light on a far wider issue - for too long performance marketers have had to take platform-reported figures with a massive fistful of salt. Yet many still rely on them week-to-week to steer spend. Their ROAS figures included sales tax and shipping fees increasing reported performance by up to c.20%. Easy mistake to make, right?! :D The platforms effectively sell outcomes. In this case they're delivering a partially finished product - it’s like buying a car from Tesla that shows up as a chassis with no bodywork… but having no way of knowing if anything's missing and the dealer demanding you pay in full. This #PlatformPropaganda shapes daily decisions impacting billions of ad dollars. It has to make you ask how this sort of thing is still happening - Meta are 20+ years into serving ads and tracking for $200B+ in revenue. What other industry does this happen in? Regardless of this case, the platforms' incentive is clear: claim credit, show value, keep spend flowing. For marketers under pressure to hit ROAS and CAC targets, that creates a dangerous gap between reported performance and real business outcomes. That’s why we’re building Paapi – an independent measurement layer grounded in first-party data, showing what platform clicks drove which revenue - giving marketers the ability to directly act on those insights to help optimise and track performance through the funnel. Because performance marketing should be based on data you can trust, not guesswork. https://lnkd.in/eWwvhjZC

Are you comfortable building a business on shaky ground? 😶 Google takes a big U-turn on its recent update! Third-party cookies are not going anywhere—but should they? It might seem like a win, but here's the truth: Third-party cookies make you a slave of your browser and are the root of many privacy concerns. They track our online behavior, creating a detailed profile without our consent. This is the foundation of creepy marketing and raises serious questions about data privacy. #GDPR and #CCPA are just the beginning. The regulatory landscape is constantly evolving. Relying solely on third-party data puts your business at risk of hefty fines and reputational damage. Are you willing to take the risk? Or would you rather focus on a sustainable, privacy-centric approach? Zero and first-party data are the true champions of advertising! Here’s why: ✅ Accuracy: Zero and first-party data give you precise insights into user preferences and behaviors for more relevant experiences. ✅ Privacy: Data from your own interactions builds trust and respects privacy. Remember, consent is cool. 😊 ✅ Engagement: Using your own data means meaningful connections, higher engagement, and better conversions. It's time to invest in strategies that put the customer first. About time businesses shift their focus from short-term gains to long-term sustainability! #dataprivacy #digitalmarketing #userprivacy #google #thirdpartycookies