When do you decide a social platform is sending the wrong kind of traffic?

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I'd stop judging by volume and judge by what visitors from each platform do in the week after the click: a second page, a return visit, an enquiry. A channel is sending the wrong traffic when its visitors never do the thing that even your weakest channel's visitors occasionally do. To keep low volume from becoming an excuse in either direction, set the cut-off before you look at the data, something like "if 500 visits from this platform produce no enquiries and almost no return visits, we drop it". Tagging every link per platform is the boring part that makes any of this possible.

empty clicks are honestly brutal.

I’d make the stop decision with a small scorecard rather than a single traffic threshold. For each platform, define one leading signal and one business signal before the test:

• Leading: engaged-session rate, second-page view, or return visit within 7 days
• Business: qualified enquiry, signup, or assisted conversion

Then compare each channel on cost per qualified visit, not cost per click. A qualified visit can be something simple like 45+ seconds plus a key-page view. That filters out cheap curiosity clicks without requiring enough volume for final conversions to be statistically clean.

I’d also run one message-match test before cutting a channel: same offer, but a landing page and CTA built for that platform’s intent. LinkedIn might go straight to a case study/demo; Instagram might need a visual proof page and a lower-friction next step. If post-click quality stays weak after 2–3 creative/landing-page combinations, that’s stronger evidence the audience is wrong rather than the execution.

For low volume, use a pre-set decision window and minimum spend/visits, then classify the result as scale, iterate, or pause. “Pause” is useful wording because you can retest later when the offer or targeting changes. I’d keep awareness only if you can name and measure the expected downstream behavior (branded search lift, direct return visits, assisted conversions). If “awareness” has no observable prediction, it’s probably just protecting the channel from scrutiny.