A 10.7% click-through rate. Zero sales.

What we ran

One campaign, one landing page, standard cold traffic. 15,368 impressions, 1,649 clicks, a 10.7% click-through rate. That rate runs roughly four times what's normal for this kind of ad.

What it cost

A$564.35 in spend. Zero purchases. Zero enquiries.

What the numbers showed

For about a week, the click-through rate read as a win, because it arrived first. The sales number, the one that actually mattered, arrived days later and said something else entirely: people clicked, landed, and left. The advertisement had promised something the page did not deliver.

Why it failed

Click rate only measures whether the ad was interesting enough to tap. It says nothing about whether the page behind it matched that interest, or whether the offer on the page was worth buying. A flattering metric that arrives in hours will always get read before the slower, truer one that arrives in days, and there is always a reason to act on the flattering one while the real result is still in transit.

What we changed

Attention stopped counting as evidence. We built a fixed read order with three gates: impressions (did the creative get tested at all), cost per landing page view (is the fault the creative), and cost per purchase against target (is the fault the page or the offer). Click rate only explains movement inside the first two gates. Every decision now runs on cost per purchase from the payment ledger, never on clicks.

How to spot it in your own account

Pull up any campaign where the click-through rate looks unusually good. Check the purchase count against spend for the same window, not the click count. If the purchase count is zero or close to it while the click rate looks strong, you are looking at an interesting ad on a page that is not converting, not a winning campaign. Read cost per landing page view next. If that number is fine and purchases are still zero, the fault sits on the page or the offer, not the ad.