Metrics worth watching

Most dashboards are full of numbers that move without meaning anything. These four move for reasons you can act on.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

Worth watching

**Arrival rate.** The share of taps that reached the destination. No platform reports it, which is exactly why it is the most informative number available: it is the only one that separates delivery from billing.

**Click to install, split by objective.** Not the aggregate. The gap between install and traffic objectives on the same app tells you whether the problem is mechanical or not.

**Cost per arrival.** Spend divided by taps that actually landed, rather than by clicks billed. It is the honest version of cost per click.

**Campaign-level installs from App Store Connect.** Deterministic, free, and immune to the modelling that clouds everything else.

Misleading

• CTR, which is healthy while taps die on blank pages
• Click volume, for the same reason
• Aggregate click to install, which averages together objectives that behave completely differently
• Industry benchmarks, which include everyone else's broken links
• Tracker click counts, accurate about people who never arrived
• Unique visitors from in-app traffic, inflated because those browsers do not persist cookies

The pattern

Everything in the second list is measured on the side of the wall where the tap starts. Everything in the first is measured where it lands, or compares two things that differ only in the mechanism.

If you add one thing

Arrival rate. It costs a beacon call from the destination page and it turns a category of invisible failures into a number on a chart.