$18.4 billion in digital ads. And nobody is accountable for what happens after the click.
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Nirmal Gyanwali, founder and CEO of WP Creative
In March, IAB Australia confirmed what most marketers already felt: digital ad spend hit $18.4 billion in 2025. Search alone accounted for $8 billion. Video surged nearly 20 per cent. The market grew 11.5 per cent year on year for the second consecutive year of double-digit growth.
That is a lot of money chasing a lot of clicks.
But here is the question the report does not answer, and one that very few people in the marketing supply chain are asking: what happens when those clicks actually arrive?
Post-click accountability barely exists in the industry. And the cost of that gap is growing every quarter.
Key takeaways
- Australian digital ad spend hit $18.4 billion in 2025, up 11.5 per cent year on year.
- 38 to 41 per cent of audited digital ad spend fails to contribute to a conversion.
- CPCs increased for 87 per cent of industries last year.
- AI Overviews more than tripled their presence across Google queries during 2025.
- No agency, team, or KPI typically owns the post-click experience.
- Revenue per visit is rarely measured alongside cost per click.
Table of Contents
- The post-click accountability gap in digital advertising
- Rising CPCs and shrinking organic traffic
- Why most websites are not treated as performance channels
- Making post-click performance part of every media review
The post-click accountability gap in digital advertising
Mumbrella readers will be familiar with the quarterly wastage reports from Next&Co. The numbers are consistent and uncomfortable: roughly 38 to 41 per cent of audited digital ad spend fails to contribute to a conversion. Hundreds of millions per quarter, gone.
The industry’s response has been to focus on the ad. Better targeting. Smarter bidding. Stronger creative. These are real levers. But they all operate above the click.
Below the click, there is a structural accountability gap. Media agencies are measured on reach, impressions, and cost per click. Performance agencies are measured on ROAS and lead volume. But the moment a visitor arrives on a website, ownership evaporates. There is no agency in the room, no team in the building, and often no KPI on the dashboard for what happens between the click and the conversion.
The most expensive piece of real estate in the entire marketing chain is also the least optimised.
Rising CPCs and shrinking organic traffic
Two forces are making this problem worse, not better.
First, media costs keep climbing. Australian CPCs have risen year on year. Social advertising costs have surged. The $18.4 billion figure is not just a sign of industry confidence. It is a sign of rising prices. Clicks that cost $2 three years ago now cost $4. The financial weight of each visitor has doubled. WordStream’s latest benchmark report found CPCs increased for 87 per cent of industries last year.
Second, organic traffic is structurally declining. AI-generated search results are now satisfying the majority of informational queries without a click. Research from Semrush shows AI Overviews more than tripled their presence across Google queries during 2025. Fewer people are clicking through from search. The ones who do are higher-intent and more commercially valuable.
Put those two realities together and the maths is unforgiving. Fewer visitors arriving. Each one costing more. And most of them landing on websites that have not been strategically reviewed since they were last redesigned.
Read More: AI Didn’t Kill The Website. It Made It The Only Thing That Matters.
Why most websites are not treated as performance channels
I run a web performance agency. I work with marketing teams across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. And I see the same pattern almost everywhere.
The media plan is reviewed quarterly. The creative is tested weekly. The attribution model is debated endlessly.
The website? It sits in a strange no-man’s-land between marketing, IT, and an external developer who built it two years ago. Nobody is measuring revenue per visit. Nobody is running conversion experiments tied to campaign cycles. Nobody is auditing the post-click experience with the same rigour applied to the pre-click experience.
This is not the fault of the marketing manager. Most marketing teams are stretched thin and expected to deliver across dozens of channels with limited resources. The website is seen as a fixed asset rather than a live performance channel. It gets updated when something breaks or when the brand refreshes. That is not optimisation. That is maintenance.
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Read More: The most expensive click in Australia is the one that lands on a bad website
Making post-click performance part of every media review
The ad wastage conversation has been important. But it has been incomplete.
If the industry is serious about media effectiveness, post-click performance needs to be measured, reported, and optimised with the same discipline as media performance. That means including website conversion metrics in media reviews. It means treating landing page optimisation as a line item, not an afterthought. It means asking a direct question in every campaign debrief: what happened after the click?
Because the $18.4 billion headline tells one story. The conversion rate on the other side of the click tells another.
And until someone owns that second number, the wastage will keep compounding.
Nirmal Gyanwali is the founder and CEO of WP Creative, a Sydney-based web performance agency that partners with marketing teams to improve post-click performance.
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