Where click obsession comes from
Clicks are easy to count, arrive instantly, and go up when you optimize for them. That makes them a satisfying metric and a poor one, because a click is a cost, not a result. You paid for it.
The only questions that matter are how many customers you got and what each one cost.
The four lines worth reporting
Spend. Outcomes — booked jobs, calls, appointments, purchases. Cost per outcome. And the trend of that cost over time.
Impressions, reach, click-through rate, and engagement explain why those four moved. They are useful when something breaks and noise the rest of the time.
Why the best channel often looks worst
Last-click attribution hands credit to whatever the customer touched immediately before converting, which is almost always search. So search looks efficient and everything that created the demand looks wasteful.
Run a channel-level cost-per-lead report and you will conclude you should cut streaming and social. Do that and total leads fall, because you cut the thing that made the searches happen.
The defence is simple: read blended cost per outcome across the whole program, and judge channel changes by what happens to the total.
Hold the definition still
The most common reporting failure is not bad math — it is a moving definition. If a lead means a form fill in March and a form fill plus a call in April, the trend line is fiction.
Write it down once. Make every channel report against it. Then the numbers are comparable, which is the entire point of having them.