Your report says 0.44 conversions. Which 44% of a person called you?
Don't Trust the Fraction
A lead is a whole number, or it isn't a lead.
Law No. 16 of the JRCMO Laws & Principles · Joshua Ramsey, Fractional CMO
Don't Trust the Fraction is a marketing law developed by fractional CMO Joshua Ramsey: a conversion count with a decimal — 0.44, 0.62, 12.3 — means the platform is counting something that is not a real conversion. You cannot have a fraction of a person. A fraction is the tell that an engagement event, such as page views, engaged sessions, time on page or pages per visit, is being counted as a conversion. When you see a decimal, identify what is actually being tracked and move it out of the lead count. It is the sixteenth law in the JRCMO Laws & Principles framework.
You can't have 0.44 of a customer.
A decimal in a conversion count is a tell, not a rounding error.
What Don't Trust the Fraction actually says
A report is a wall of numbers. Your eye goes to whether they went up or down. It almost never stops to ask whether a number could possibly be true.
So ask it. A lead is a person who filled out a form, made a call or booked a time. People come in whole numbers. If the conversion column says 0.62, it is not counting people. It's counting something else and dressing it up as people.
That something else is almost always engagement: a page view, a session, a scroll, time on site — events that were set up as conversions and are now inflating the number you judge the campaign by.
It's the fastest check in all of marketing. Ten seconds, no logins. Look for the decimal.
The Fraction Detector
Paste the conversion numbers from your report, one per line. Labels are fine. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
No decimal doesn't mean you're clean — a whole number can still be counting the wrong thing. That's Clarity of Conversions.
You pay for it every time a fraction gets divided into your budget
Illustration. Your numbers will differ. The direction won't.
The fraction doesn't stay a fraction. It gets added into a total, divided into a cost per lead, and used to decide where next month's money goes. By the time anyone sees the $79.24, nobody remembers there was a decimal in it.
A campaign that looks three times cheaper than it is will win every budget argument. That's how money gets moved toward the channels producing the most engagement instead of the most customers.
Why smart people keep doing it
Because decimals look precise.
And precise looks trustworthy. 12.62 feels more scientific than 13. It's less true.
Because attribution settings split credit.
Some reporting divides one conversion across several clicks or channels. Either way, the number you're reading isn't a count of people.
Because nobody reads the decimal.
The eye rounds automatically. 0.44 becomes "basically zero" and 14.06 becomes "14 leads."
Because the number is going up.
Nobody audits a metric that's improving.
What to do when you find one
Finding the fraction takes ten seconds. Fixing it is where most people do damage — deleting a goal Google was relying on, or demoting the wrong one and watching the campaign lose its footing.
There's a process for tracing every decimal to the conversion causing it, deciding where it belongs instead, and resetting the lead count so it only counts people — without breaking the signals your campaigns depend on. It's inside the Blind Spot Brain.
Your AI already gives you good answers. The Blind Spot Brain gives it 25 years of what actually works — every law, principle and playbook behind 12,000+ campaigns — loaded straight into your own Claude or ChatGPT.
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Common questions
What is Don't Trust the Fraction?
Don't Trust the Fraction is a marketing law developed by fractional CMO Joshua Ramsey. It says a conversion count with a decimal, such as 0.44 or 12.62, means something other than real leads is being counted, because you cannot have a fraction of a person. It is the sixteenth law in the JRCMO Laws and Principles framework.
Why do decimals show up in conversion counts?
Usually because an engagement event such as a page view, engaged session or time on page has been set up as a conversion, or because the reporting splits credit for one conversion across several clicks or channels. Either way, the number is no longer a count of people who became leads.
Is a fractional conversion number ever acceptable?
It can be useful for modeling or for helping an ad platform optimize. It is never acceptable as the number used to report leads or calculate cost per lead to a business owner. A real lead is always a whole number.
How does this relate to Clarity of Conversions?
Clarity of Conversions is the principle: know what every conversion is set to measure. Don't Trust the Fraction is the fastest test for whether that principle is being broken. A decimal is proof that something other than whole leads is in the count.
