Clicks, visits, and conversions are different meters

A click versus a page view in advertising is not a rounding difference. They are different meters. Exchange delivery clicks are what the Reporting API billed. Click tokens and /go/... redirects are plumbing. Landing visits are first-party presence. Conversions are a later event you defined. Collapsing them is how a dashboard shows engagement that never reached a page.

If you are comparing click counts to sessions, keep them in separate columns. Do not subtract one from the other and call the gap fraud without a join.

The order we will not collapse

1. Exchange delivery clicks. On this seat the field is clicks plural, not click. A parser that asks for click reads zero. Snapshot rows store clicks = 0 on purpose. Real delivery clicks come from source = beeswax reporting rows. See Why a dashboard can show zero clicks.
2. Click tokens. ad_click_tokens are attribution redirect plumbing. They are not delivery truth. A creative that uses a normal click URL can have real exchange clicks and zero tokens.
3. Landing visits. First presence on a page we log. Supply-bench click URLs go straight to /sb/<slug> and do not mint ad_click_tokens or carry an Adprime campaign id, so landing_page_visits.campaign_id is null and the Buzz id lives in properties.beeswax_campaign_id. A join on our campaign id alone reports zero landings against a portfolio that is landing.
4. On-screen interaction. A visible tap, quiz step, or hold-confirm. That is a fifth meter when the page has one.
5. Conversions. An event you chose. Zero conversions can mean the event is not firing, the window is wrong, or nobody converted. It does not mean zero clicks.

How to judge display traffic is the scoring page. This page is the column list.

The ratio that is allowed to judge

Click-to-page-view is clicks that became a first-party visit, once the join is honest. Anonymized main-seat brand-name display flights we can cite without naming the advertiser sat at 15.85 percent when the traffic was usable and 3.75 to 6.68 percent when it was not. Those numbers are Click-to-page-view benchmarks we trust. Missing visit instrumentation is an instrumentation gap, not automatic fraud.

CTR is billed clicks over impressions. It does not require a visit. Remnant display is good at inflating it. CTR is a trap.

What we will not do

We will not treat billed clicks as people. We will not treat token fires as delivery. We will not treat a Supply Bench landing as an Adprime signup. We will not publish a conversion rate from a flight whose click column is still the snapshot zero.

Until a vendor add-on is attached, we also will not promote IVT as the missing column. invalid_impressions of zero means nothing is measuring. Keep the meters named. Add columns. Do not subtract stories.