Know which half of your traffic paid off
Every lead arrives carrying where it came from, so paid cost per lead divides paid spend by paid leads only.Every lead arrives carrying where it came from: campaign tags, click ids, referrer, landing page. So paid cost per lead divides paid spend by your paid leads only, which is where most reporting quietly goes wrong.
What breaks attribution, and what fixes it
Almost every wrong number in marketing reporting starts here.Almost every wrong number in marketing reporting comes from one of these three.
Paid divided by everything
Adding up ad spend and dividing by every lead you received counts your organic traffic as a return on ad spend. Airdec keeps the split on the lead itself, so paid metrics only ever see paid leads.
Sessions and leads in different tools
Analytics knows about sessions per channel; your CRM knows about leads. Joining them gives site conversion per channel, which is where wasted paid traffic becomes visible: clicks that arrive and never convert.
Tags that were never right
An untagged creative sends its clicks in as organic, and every report built on top inherits the error. Airdec audits your creatives for missing and malformed tags and can repair them in place.
The repair
Fixing tags, with the trade-off stated
Audit
Airdec lists the creatives with missing or broken tracking parameters, and how many clicks each has mis-attributed.Airdec reads your Meta creatives and lists the ones with missing or broken tracking parameters, with the number of clicks each has already mis-attributed.
Repair
The fix injects the correct parameters in place. It needs the ads management permission, so it is opt-in.The fix injects the correct parameters by duplicating the creative and swapping it in. It needs the ads management permission on your connected account, so it is opt-in rather than automatic.
Nothing else changes
Only the tracking parameters on the link change. Targeting, budget and creative stay as they were.The repair touches the tracking parameters on the link and nothing else: same creative, same targeting, same budget. Delivery carries on as it was. The only difference is that from now on the traffic arrives labelled.
Attribution, in detail
What exactly is stored on a lead?
The campaign parameters it arrived with, any click identifier from the ad platform, the referring page, the landing page it converted on, and a derived traffic source. It travels with the lead, so it is still there months later when someone asks where that customer came from.
Is this last-click attribution?
Today, yes. The lead is credited to the touch that produced it. A longer window that stitches earlier visits together with a cookie is on the roadmap.
What is “wasted paid traffic”?
Paid sessions on a channel that produce no leads at all. Seen next to that channel's spend, it is usually the fastest budget saving available, and it is invisible if sessions and leads live in separate tools.