By Heather Martin, Associate Director, Media, AntiSocial
For years, click-through rate (CTR) sat at the center of every paid social dashboard. If people were clicking, the campaign was working. But social behavior has fundamentally shifted, and CTR no longer reflects how people actually engage with content.
Today’s feeds are entertainment ecosystems, not traffic drivers. Reels now account for 46% of time spent on Instagram. TikTok users watch 280 videos per day (Sensor Tower). People watch, scroll, rewatch, save and share, all without ever leaving the platform. TikTok, Reels and Shorts were built for consuming not clicking, and the algorithms optimize for that reality.
Here’s the problem: recent research from Meta shows that users who watched fewer than 10 seconds of a video ad created up to 74% of total campaign value from people who never clicked. Meta just reduced their engaged-view conversion window from 10 seconds to 5, acknowledging this shift. CTR would label those impressions as failures, but the business results say otherwise.
Metrics like view-through conversions, watch time, video completion rate and thumb-stop rate offer a far more accurate view of effectiveness. These signals show whether an ad held attention, communicated a message and seeded intent, the behaviours that drive real outcomes.
With Instagram’s latest algorithm explicitly prioritizing watch time and high‑value actions like shares and saves over simple likes when deciding what to boost and TikTok’s updated algorithm doing the same, they are both weighting watch time, completion, re‑watches, saves, and shares far more heavily than shallow interactions like likes when choosing what to recommend. In other words, both systems are architected to reward attention and in‑feed engagement, not click‑through rate.
This has made CTR an actively misleading target. It rewards clickbait, undervalues strong video creative and ignores how people really use social platforms. If marketers keep optimizing for clicks, they’ll optimize against success.
In short, it’s time to tear up your CTR benchmarks. The platforms already have.
