<b>Everyone watches blended CPC. The blend is where they bury the bodies.</b>

<b>Everyone watches blended CPC. The blend is where they bury the bodies.</b>

A $0.18 average CPC feels like a steal. Break it down by sub-publisher and you'll often find a handful of source IDs eating 70% of spend at $0.40+ with garbage post-click metrics, subsidized in the average by a long tail of dirt-cheap, never-converting fraud clicks.

The blended number is mathematically true and operationally useless. It's engineered to look efficient.

Demand source-level (placement-level) reporting and block at the source ID, not the campaign. If a vendor resists granular reporting or only offers "smart" auto-optimization, they're protecting the supply that's protecting their margin.