The Click-Through Conspiracy
The most dangerous metric in marketing isn’t cost per lead, or engagement rate, or even impressions. It’s click-through rate.
For twenty years, CTR has been treated like the holy grail of digital marketing. It’s neat. It’s easy to track. It makes for a great slide in a PowerPoint deck. The only problem? It doesn’t actually tell you whether your advertising is working.
In fact, CTR may be worse than meaningless - it may be a negative indicator. High click-through rates often come from bad creative, bad placements, or worse… bots. Meanwhile, the audiences you actually care about? They don’t click on ads. But they still see them. They still remember them. They’re still influenced by repeated exposure to strong creative. That’s how advertising has always worked.
So why does the industry keep obsessing over a metric that does more harm than good? And what should marketers focus on instead?
👉 Read the full article here: The Click-Through Conspiracy
