Click to install rate, and when to worry
A bad ratio sends teams rewriting creatives. Sometimes the creative is fine and the taps are dying somewhere nobody is looking.
6 August 2026 by PAD team
Rough expectations
Ranges vary wildly by category and geography, so treat these as orientation rather than benchmarks.
| Channel | Click to install, roughly |
|---|---|
| App install campaigns, store sheet | 25 to 40% |
| Traffic campaigns via landing page | 5 to 15% |
| Organic social, bio links | 3 to 10% |
| Broad display | 1 to 5% |
The gap between the first two rows is mostly friction: an install sheet inside the feed versus a browser, a page, and a store visit.
The failure that mimics a bad creative
If a share of your taps ends on a blank page, your click count is unaffected and your install count drops. That reads as a conversion problem, so teams change the creative, then the landing page, then the store screenshots, and the ratio never moves.
The tell is the shape of it: install campaigns look normal while traffic campaigns look broken, and the difference between them is precisely whether a browser is involved.
How to check in ten minutes
- Compare click to install on an install objective against a traffic objective for the same app
- Tap your own ad from inside the app on a real iPhone, not from Safari
- Compare iOS against Android, since Android rarely suffers this
- Look for a store link at the end of the chain that nobody has tested in situ
The arithmetic
At $0.40 a click and 10,000 clicks, a fifth of taps failing is $800 spent on nothing, while the dashboard reports full delivery and a healthy CTR. That is the same money as a mediocre creative, without the visible symptom.
Our links separate taps that reached the store from taps that got stuck, so the ratio stops being a guess.