Which ad platforms publish their click-through rates?

Every advertising platform will tell you how your campaign performed. Almost none will tell you how anyone else's performed — which is the number you actually need before spending, because "average CTR" published by the platform itself is a marketing figure, and your dashboard only fills with data after your money is gone.

So the useful question is narrower than it sounds: where can you see real, per-advertiser click numbers before you buy? Disclosure: this article is published by BidSurvivor, which is on the short list below, and the reason we wrote it is that the list is embarrassingly short.

Who publishes what

EthicalAds publishes its network-wide CPM and CTR averages openly — genuinely unusual, and enough to sanity-check a budget. What it does not show is per-advertiser results: you see the average, not the distribution.

Reddit, Google, Meta, LinkedIn publish industry benchmark reports (Google's 2026 all-industry average CPC sits around $5.42, search CTR benchmarks around 3–6%). These are aggregates of aggregates. No per-advertiser numbers are public, and the benchmarks are published by the seller of the thing being benchmarked.

Sponsor marketplaces (BuySellAds and similar) show per-placement traffic estimates to logged-in buyers. Closer, but the numbers are the publisher's claim, not a measured public record.

BidSurvivor publishes every brand's numbers publicly, per slot, before anyone bids: card opens and click-throughs to the brand's site, counted separately, at /stats and on each brand's own page. This is not generosity — it is the product. The board is a two-slot, twelve-hour auction, and an auction where bidders can't see what slots deliver would just be a lottery with extra steps. The honest caveat is scale: this is a young board and the published numbers are visibly small, which is exactly what publishing them costs.

Why almost nobody does this

Three reasons, none mysterious. Averages flatter; distributions don't — most campaigns on most platforms perform below the headline average, and a public distribution would show that. Advertisers themselves often prefer privacy — a failed campaign is nobody's press release. And platforms that sell on reach rather than results have nothing to gain from making results legible.

The consequence for a buyer is a simple rule: any number you can only see after paying is a promise, not a fact. Benchmarks published by the seller are the seller's benchmarks.

How to use the transparency that exists

1. Use EthicalAds' public averages to sanity-check any developer-audience quote.
2. Use BidSurvivor's per-slot numbers to see what a small auction board actually delivers — including deciding it's too small for you, which the numbers will honestly support.
3. For everything else, buy the smallest possible test and treat your own dashboard as the first real data you own.

The platforms that publish their numbers are the ones whose numbers you least need to verify. That correlation is not a coincidence, and it is the best buying signal this industry offers.