Stop buying traffic. Start buying attention.
Most paid media plans are still optimising for clicks. The brands pulling ahead are optimising for the moment a buyer actually thinks about them.
Click-through rate tells you the ad worked at one specific job: getting noticed. It does not tell you whether the right person noticed, or whether they remembered you the next morning.
When you optimise only for clicks, you end up rewarding the loudest, cheapest creative. That is fine for impulse categories. For everyone else — established businesses with longer consideration windows — it quietly burns budget.
The fix is not glamorous. It is a small set of disciplines: define which decision the campaign is meant to influence, attach a measurement to that decision, and review the work monthly with the people who own the P&L. Done well, this turns paid media from a tap into an instrument.