Chasing a Cheaper Click Is the Wrong Fight
A cheaper click is only progress if the click was ever going to cause a sale. Often it was not.
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By Joris van Huët, Founder & CEOUpdated 2 min read
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Cheap and Useless Are Not Mutually Exclusive
Lowering your cost per click only helps if the click drives incremental revenue, so optimizing for cheapness on a channel that harvests demand you already had just loses money more efficiently. The cheap-click chase feels like work and often is not.
It is a comfortable metric to move. Tighten targeting, refresh creative, watch cost per click drop, feel productive. But cost per click says nothing about causation. A channel can serve the cheapest clicks on earth and still be taking credit for sales that would have happened without it.
The Metric That Hides the Real Question
Cheap clicks and high ROAS often travel together on exactly the channels you should scrutinize most: retargeting, branded search, audiences packed with people already on their way to buy. You are paying, cheaply, for a sale you already owned.
Optimize for Lift, Not Price
The fight worth having is not price per click, it is revenue per incremental euro. Some expensive channels turn out to be your real growth engines. Some cheap ones turn out to be accountants, booking revenue that was already coming.
Stop negotiating the price of the click. Start measuring whether the click did anything.
Frequently asked questions
Should I optimize for a lower cost per click?
Lowering your cost per click only helps if the click drives incremental revenue, so optimizing for cheapness on a channel that harvests demand you already had just loses money more efficiently.
Go deeper: Causal attribution, explained.
Sixty-second versions of these ideas: Causality Engine on YouTube Shorts.
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Terms in this article
- CausationCausation is the relationship where a change in one variable directly causes a change in another.
- ClickClick is the action a user takes to interact with a digital advertisement, redirecting them to a website or landing page. Clicks are a fundamental metric for measuring ad engagement and a primary input for click-based attribution models.
- RetargetingRetargeting is online advertising that targets users who have previously interacted with your website or content. Attribution analysis shows the causal role of retargeting in driving conversions and improving ad spend.
- RevenueRevenue is the total income generated by the sale of goods or services related to a company's primary operations.