Eight hundred US dollars, and the cheapest leads in the set

Line item 1 spent $149.27 at a 10.50% click-through rate and an 82.50% hold rate, and produced 2 leads at $74.64 each. Line item 2 spent $662.72 at a 3.14% click-through rate and a 39.58% hold rate, and produced 52 leads at $12.74 each. Click counts are not exported directly: they are derived from reported CTR and impressions, and are approximate, which is why both line items are marked 'about' in the chart.

The click-through rate ran the opposite way from the result: 10.50% on line item 1 against 3.14% on line item 2, better than three times over. Line item 2 converted those clicks 12.5 times better than line item 1 did. The account does not record why; what it does record is that a click bought on the line item with the stronger click-through rate was worth far less than a click bought on the other one.

Line item 2 converted 4.78% of its clicks into leads. Line item 1 converted 0.38%. That is not a small gap: line item 2 turned its clicks into leads 12.5 times better than line item 1 did, on a click-through rate barely a third as high.

Fifty-two of the account's 54 leads came from line item 2, on $662.72 of spend. The other two came from line item 1, on $149.27 of spend that a click-through rate alone would have called the stronger performer. Leads per click was the number that told the truth here, and click-through rate was the number that did not.

54 leads became 41 qualified leads, a 75% qualification rate the clinic reported from its own records. Those 41 qualified leads became 15 new clients, a 36% close rate on qualified leads, also the clinic's own figure. New client count is derived as leads times qualification rate times close rate, then rounded, rather than a raw headcount from the CRM.

Cost per new client came out at $55.69, the headline number this account is published for. Fifteen new clients is not a large enough base to prove that $55.69 holds at a bigger budget: it says what fifty-four leads and fifteen clients cost inside this specific account, not what the next dollar of spend would buy.

What transfers from this account is a method, not a price. Click-through rate measured the ad: how compelling the creative was at the moment someone saw it. Leads per click measured the offer: whether what a person found after clicking matched what made them click in the first place. Only one of those is worth optimising towards. This account had a line item with a strong click-through rate and an almost non-existent leads-per-click rate, and the ad performing well was not the same thing as the account performing well.

There is no price to draw from this page and no New Zealand number either. What is worth carrying into a New Zealand clinic account is the instinct to distrust an unusually strong click-through rate rather than celebrate it, and to check what happened after the click before deciding a creative is working.