Two creatives with the same CTR and a 57% gap in cost per lead

Creative 1 spent $1,956.65 at a 1.84% CTR, a 34.95% hold rate, and a $21.27 cost per lead. Creative 2 spent $2,866.20 at a 1.75% CTR, a 21.76% hold rate, and a $33.33 cost per lead. The click-through rates were near-identical. The cost per lead was not.

Judged on CTR alone, these two creatives look interchangeable, and the larger budget had in fact gone to the more expensive one. The metric that tracked the price gap was hold rate, how far into the video people actually stayed.

The decision rules below were derived from this account's data after the fact. They were not a documented process running at the time, and they are stated here as what the numbers support, not as a method that was followed.

Across the account's nine line items with meaningful spend, hold rate correlated with cost per lead at -0.665. Negative means the two moved in opposite directions: line items with a higher hold rate tended to record a lower cost per lead.

Correlation is not cause, and nine line items in one account over one period is not a controlled test. What it does show is that the metric that moved with the gap between the two creatives above was not the one most reports lead with.

Nine line items, covering $9,380.20 of the $9,937.74 total, split into two bands at a 28% hold rate. Five line items at 28% or above spent $4,402.32 and produced leads at $22.81. Four line items below 28% spent $4,977.88 and produced leads at $32.54; leads in the better band cost roughly 30% less, and the line the bands were split on was how far into the video people stayed, not the click.

Hold rate is the earlier signal in this account: it is readable within days, long before a cost per lead has enough leads behind it to be trusted.

The method, not the price. Judge a video creative by hold rate before judging it by click-through rate. A near-identical CTR told this account nothing about which creative to fund, and the account had already got that call backwards once.

The 57% gap in cost per lead and the -0.665 correlation are this account's own numbers, not a benchmark. What transfers is the practice of checking hold rate before scaling a video creative on click-through rate alone.