Why cheap clicks are costing you money

Every week someone shows us a report with a beautiful cost per click. Twelve cents! And every week we ask the same follow-up: how many of those people bought something?

Platforms are very good at finding people who click. They are less good, by default, at finding people who buy. If you tell an algorithm to get you cheap clicks, it will happily deliver an audience of curious scrollers.

Measure the thing you actually want

Set your campaigns to optimise for purchases or qualified leads, even when that makes clicks look expensive. A $2 click from a buyer beats twenty 10-cent clicks from nobody.

“The cheapest click is the one that never needed to happen.”

Three numbers we watch instead

• Cost per new customer, not per click
• Click-to-purchase rate by audience
• Return on ad spend over 30 days, not 1

Switch those on and the report gets uglier for a week. Then your bank statement gets prettier for a year.