The 59% CTR that should scare you
Imagine a segment of your traffic with a 59% click-through rate, while the rest of the account sits at 22%. Scale it, right?
Don’t. We found exactly this on a real account — and the segment was 2G connections.
Why a great number can be a bad sign
Nobody browses product pages on a 2G connection and clicks ads at triple the normal rate. CTRs that high on legacy networks are the signature of click farms and accidental taps — cheap devices, misfiring touchscreens, or bots that click everything. The clicks are real to the billing system. The intent behind them doesn’t exist.
The trap for automated tools
Any naive optimizer — human or machine — sees a high-CTR segment and pours budget into it. Our own rules engine flagged this segment as a “winner” for about an hour before we taught it the difference: for connection-type segments, an abnormally high CTR versus other connections triggers a fraud warning instead of praise, with a suggestion to exclude the connection type from targeting.
What to check on your accounts
- Break your traffic down by connection type (TikTok reports it natively).
- Compare each segment’s CTR against the others — not against the blended average, which the suspicious segment itself inflates.
- If 2G/3G traffic clicks at 2× the rate of Wi-Fi, exclude it and watch your cost per real visitor drop.
ROASTED runs this check on every report, automatically. Sometimes the most valuable finding is the metric that looked too good.