Stop Chasing Clicks: How to Shift from Click-Through Rate (CTR) to Incremental Measurement

Here’s what we often find: “the people who don’t click your advert often convert the best”.
So why are so many teams still obsessed with CTR (Click Through Rate)?

CTR is easy to track. It makes for neat dashboards and quick reporting. But it only tracks those who click through to conversion, not the overall impact that your activity delivered.

CTR is underestimating the impact of your marketing activity.

Let's put an example behind this. The below is example below shows how Meta ROI on a last touch basis undervalues impact by between 1.3x and 2x.

What are the other factors you need to take into account?

👉 Pathways
Not every customer journey is linear. Many will see an ad, do nothing, then return later via search, directly to the site, or even in-store. Focusing only on CTR ignores any pathway effects and underestimates your campaigns.

Whilst tools like multi-touch attribution are meant to solve this. The deprecation of the cookie has made it increasingly difficult to run accurate pathway analysis. That's why we recommend two solutions:

• Within one platform (e.g. Google search) and on campaigns with the same goal. You can use your website analytics to review pathways - helping you go beyond CTR
• Focus on incrementality-focused measurement like experiments or Marketing Mix Modelling. See the detailed rundown on the best marketing measurement tools.

👉 Long-term impact
An ad can influence behaviour weeks or months later. Campaigns can lift awareness/ consideration or drive repeat purchase, even if it doesn’t generate clicks in the short term. Measuring only CTR risks undervalues this compounding effect. For more examples on how to measure the long-term impact, see here.

👉 Halo in partners/store
Digital campaigns often influence offline results. Retail partners, e-commerce platforms and retailers all feel the impact of digital advertising, but clicks don’t show this. They only show what drives impact on your own sites.

Looking at the source of acquisition, i.e. your website vs. partners vs. retail, is important to capture. In addition, identifying the incremental impact of your campaigns captures a more complete picture.

A focus on incrementality

This is why at Linea we move brands away from last-touch models and into incrementality-focused measurement. Because the goal is not to drive the highest CTR, but to drive real business outcomes.

Your CTR shows who clicked. Your CPA or ROI shows if the ad actually delivered new customers. Brands that want growth need to focus on the right metric, not just the easiest one to measure.