‍This is an excerpt from MarketerHire's weekly newsletter, Raisin Bread. To get a tasty marketing snack in your inbox every week, subscribe here.

We’ve seen a lot of chatter about marketers trusting their guts lately.

Last week, SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin argued that empowering  marketers to trust their guts often outperforms fixating on provable marketing attribution.

This week, Alex P., creator of e-commerce newsletter No Best Practices, tweeted something similar. 

They’re not really against conversion data, though. They’re making more nuanced recommendations.

Don’t ignore conversion data, but do… 

• Hypothesize boldly based on past experience and insights (a.k.a. “reps”).
• Run tests that start small to find out if your hypotheses hold. Nik “The DTC Guy” Sharma told MarketerHire that this was his secret weapon during his stint at Hint Water: “We rarely did anything too big.”
• Track top-of-funnel metrics like views and engagement in addition to — or, at smaller companies, instead of? — conversions. “Free, vanity metrics are often good enough,” Fishkin wrote. 

Our takeaway?

Data won’t always tell the whole story. 

It can confirm or refute theories and highlight trends, but metabolizing performance data into actionable plans is a job for an experienced marketer —  like the vetted freelancers in MarketerHire’s network. Learn more.