Myth: higher native CTR means better quality traffic

Myth: higher native CTR means better quality traffic

Wrong, and backwards. On native, a soaring CTR is usually a warning. Curiosity-gap headlines ("Doctors hate this") farm clicks from people with zero purchase intent — they wanted the secret, not your product. Your CTR triples, your conversion rate craters.

The placements with suspiciously high CTR are also where accidental-click inventory and misclick-optimized layouts live. Allegedly "engaged" users. Pull the data: plot CTR against post-click conversion across your placements. The correlation is frequently negative. Stop optimizing the metric the network shows you on the dashboard and start optimizing the one that hits your bank account. They are not the same number, and native is where they diverge hardest.