UrbanTechFlow · Gatineau–Ottawa

What paid traffic does not tell you: 30 days of our own money

For thirty days we ran search ads with our own money, on our own business, and measured everything. The result: 175 impressions, 18 clicks, a click rate of 10.29%, and zero forms filled. Here is what those numbers actually mean, because most people read them backwards.

The raw numbers, 27 July to 25 August 2026

• 175 impressions on precise, commercial searches.
• 18 clicks. A click through rate of 10.29%, which is a very good rate. The ads matched what people were looking for.
• Zero forms filled.

The naive reading, and why it is wrong

The naive reading: zero customers from 18 clicks, so the page does not work, so rebuild everything. That is wrong, and it is the mistake that costs the most money in local marketing.

At a normal conversion rate for a page like this, three to five percent, eighteen clicks produces between 0.5 and 0.9 expected customers. In other words, the single most likely outcome of eighteen clicks is exactly zero. Zero is not a failure here. It is a sample too small to contain an answer.

To even measure a conversion rate with any reliability takes roughly a hundred clicks. That is the real information: until you have spent enough to buy about a hundred clicks, nobody knows anything. Not you, and not the agency invoicing you.

The process we use to read any number

Four questions, in this order. They prevent almost every bad decision.

• Is it measured? If nothing connects a customer to where they came from, there is no data, only impressions. Measurement goes in before the spending, never after.
• Is the sample big enough to hold an answer? Almost nobody asks this. A gap across a small number is noise, not a trend.
• Did the number move, or did the period move? Two thirty day windows that overlap share most of their days. Comparing them manufactures the appearance of movement.
• What else would explain this? Before crediting a change, go looking for another cause. There usually is one.

On promises of results

We regularly see small businesses paying for marketing where nobody can say what it produced. The reports show spending, impressions, sometimes clicks. Almost never the only thing that matters: whether a customer arrived, and which one.

We promise no ranking and no result, because nobody controls a search engine's algorithm and anybody promising otherwise is selling something they do not own. What can be guaranteed is the work delivered, the date of every fix, and every customer tied back to where they came from. The rest is a forecast, and a forecast should be presented as one.

Why we publish our own disappointing result

Because it is true, and because it saves you paying to learn the same lesson. An agency that only shows you its wins tells you nothing about how it thinks when things go badly. That is the only time it matters.

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