Link clicks
How much traffic Meta actually sent to your shop, rather than attention it collected.
What it means
Link clicks is the number of clicks that sent someone from a Meta ad to your site. Reactions, comments, shares and taps on your profile aren't counted — those sit in Meta's separate all-clicks figure, which always reads higher. It's measured at Meta's end as the person is handed over, so it won't match the sessions your site analytics records, and that gap is expected.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
A click counts when someone taps the ad and Meta sends them to the destination you set. It's a raw count with nothing divided, which is why it can only be judged next to what you paid for it and what it bought.
Worked example. An ad spends €2,000 at a €10 CPM, so it buys 200,000 impressions and earns 2,400 Link clicks — a 1.2% CTR (Link)CTR (Link)How enticing your ad is to the people who see it.1.5% or more is healthy at €0.83 a click (2,000 ÷ 2,400). Of those 2,400 visits, 2% buy: 48 purchases, at €41.67 each.
Now compare 3,000 clicks converting at 1% against 2,000 converting at 2%. The first buys 30 orders, the second buys 40, and the click column ranks them the wrong way round. Volume here is always the start of the read, never the end of it.
It answers the question
How many people did this budget actually bring to the shop? Everything before the click is Meta's job; everything after it is yours.
Why it matters
That handover is what makes this column useful for diagnosis. Weak Link clicks on heavy impressions is a creative problem and lives entirely inside Meta. Strong Link clicks with weak purchases is a landing page, a price or an offer problem, and no amount of ad work will fix it.
It's also the number easiest to buy your way into. Widen the targeting or raise the bid and the count goes up on demand — which is why the app's own note on this card says to judge it by the sales it converts.
What good looks like
There's no benchmark for a click count: it scales directly with budget, so the figure means nothing across accounts or even across two campaigns on different spend. The two size-independent readings sit next to it on every table — CTR (Link)CTR (Link)How enticing your ad is to the people who see it.1.5% or more is healthy, which does carry a graded band, and CPC (Link)CPC (Link)The cost of each site visit from Meta., which prices each visit. Against your own history, the check is clicks per euro of spend: if the count grows more slowly than the budget, each new visitor is costing you more than the last.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Raise budget on the ads already buying clicks cheaply | Add 20% to the ads with the lowest CPC (Link) and re-read in 5 days | Clicks up roughly with spend | 1 week | The cheapest clicks are already bought. The next ones come from a less responsive audience, so CPC (Link) drifts up as the volume arrives. |
| Fast Rewrite the first 3 seconds | Swap the opening frame and headline on your top-spending ad, change nothing else | More clicks on the same impressions | 3–5 days | A hook that grabs the wrong people lifts the count while purchases stay flat — you end up paying for traffic that leaves in seconds. |
| Slow Fix where the clicks land | Point each ad at a page that shows the product, price and offer the creative promised | The same clicks buy more | 1 quarter | This lever doesn't move this column at all — it moves what the column is worth. Judged on clicks alone the work looks like it achieved nothing. |
| Slow Widen the audience | Loosen targeting so the same budget reaches more people | Click volume up | 2–4 weeks | The extra clicks convert worse than the ones you had. The count rises, cost per purchase rises with it, and only the second of those is a real result. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Traffic is bought; sales are earned. The Ad Formats table puts both on one row, which is the only way to read either.
Traffic that converts
More visits and more orders from the same format. Scale gradually so you can see where the extra volume stops paying.
Visits going nowhere
You're buying traffic the shop can't convert. The format works and the destination doesn't — a shop problem wearing an ad problem's clothes.
Fewer, better visits
The creative is filtering hard, putting off people who were never going to buy. A low count isn't a fault when the orders are there.
The format is finished
No traffic and no sales. Check Frequency before you rebuild — the same people seeing it too often produces exactly this shape.
Volume against price. Clicks up with the cost per click flat means you found more of the same audience; clicks up with cost per click rising means you're paying a premium for each extra visitor. Both look like growth in this column and only one of them scales.
The pair that separates a better ad from a bigger budget. A 40% rise in clicks on a 40% rise in spend is a purchasing decision, not a performance one — and reading them together stops a budget increase being reported as a creative win.
Common misreads
The higher figure is all clicks, and it includes reactions, comments, shares and taps on your profile. Only link clicks reach your shop, which is why this is the count worth comparing ads on.
Two systems counting in two places never agree. Some people leave before the page loads, some block tracking, and the two figures are recorded at different moments. Watch the size of the gap over time rather than trying to close it.
Clicks are the easiest thing on this page to buy. Widen the targeting and the count rises the same day. Read it beside purchases and CPC (Link) before you call anything a win.
Also called
Clicks to your site · link click · ad clicks to site
See yoursYour Link clicks for the period, and per campaign, ad and format alongside the click rate and cost per click.
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