Advertising on Connected TV (CTV) is one of the most popular marketing channels today, reaching over 92% of United States households. With CTV, viewers watch television programming on a variety of internet-capable devices, from Fire Sticks to Apple TVs. CTV ads allow marketers to target audiences in ways traditional cable advertisements cannot. They can offer personalized advertisement experiences for watchers based on IP addresses and previous search history.
CTV’s customized strategies provide marketers with massive amounts of analytics. With all the viewership data CTV provides, it often seems complicated to measure specific goals for your campaign. Using CTV measurement is critical for understanding your ad performance and information about your viewers.
Here is an overview of how to measure CTV engagement.
First things first — the process of tracking and analyzing video ad campaigns on connected TV channels is CTV measurement. Marketers plan their campaigns around specific goals, and measuring lets them gauge the success to those goals.
Because connected TV advertising links to a viewer’s internet history, the ads can use data to provide specialized ad targeting for viewers, more similar to digital advertising. Many of these ads can’t be skipped, meaning maximum engagement for companies.
Similar to digital, detailed information on ad success is available almost immediately for advertisers. Depending on the campaign’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and the approach for success tracking, CTV marketers can study viewers’ purchase intent and the average level of brand awareness when watching.
For instance, you could conduct a brand campaign by comparing a watcher’s brand awareness before and after watching the advertisement. Then, you could monitor whether the increased awareness leads to more sales further down the funnel.
Why Is Measuring CTV Advertising Success Important?
By tracking the success of your ads, you can tie the campaign back to KPIs and analyze its overall effectiveness. And with the increased popularity of CTV ads, analyzing their success allows you to more confidently optimize your campaigns.
Here are more benefits of CTV ad measurement:
- You can connect your campaign to results: You miss critical actionable data without regularly measuring ad performance. When you track and measure CTV ads, you can compare the activity to brand KPIs and analyze the ad’s effectiveness to show the value of advertising to your stakeholders.
- You learn more about your customers: The specificity of CTV ads allows you immediate access to crucial details about your customers. Important data like customers’ geographic location or their typical viewership patterns report directly to you, as a marketer. The more information you gain about your consumers, the better you can fine-tune your future campaigns.
- You can adjust easily: By tracking the real-time reports, you can change your campaign as needed. If you measure that a particular ad component doesn’t track well, you can work immediately to remove or replace the flaw.
How Is CTV Success Measured?
To measure the success of your CTV ads, you can use multiple strategies. Marketers typically use various metrics to track campaign effectiveness. When you follow these metrics, you can analyze the campaign’s success.
Here are some important metrics you can use to measure CTV ad success, especially for your lower funnel campaigns:
- Impressions or views: Measuring the number of ad views will always be essential in advertising. Viewers typically watch around 90% of CTV ads, an overwhelmingly positive campaign rate. Tracking viewership shows your ad’s popularity trends and any pitfalls. Many CTV ads offer real-time viewership statistics, so you can analyze these metrics immediately.
- Post-view website visits: Studying website activity after viewership is a great way to measure CTV ad success. Finding a correlation between ad views and subsequent website traffic shows its success.
- Online purchases: This metric displays how many consumers made a product purchase after viewing your ad.
- CPG attribution: Consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing uses specific barcodes to track individual purchases after viewing CTV advertisements. That way, you can evaluate how your CTV advertisement influenced particular products.
- Foot traffic: This metric analyzes visitor traffic for physical locations before and after watching a connected TV ad.
- Brand lift: For upper-funnel campaigns, brand lift measuring helps you discover how your campaigns impact the perceptions and opinions of your consumers. One way to measure brand lift is through surveys. Surveying consumers after they have seen your campaign provides direct insight into customers’ buying experiences and feelings about your brand. You can stay aware of consumer perception shifts and update your approach as needed.
After studying these metrics, you can use the statistics to adjust your campaign accordingly.
Measuring Brand Lift on CTV
Another important way to measure ad effectiveness is with brand lift measurement. As a company, understanding brand perception is crucial for overall sales and prospects. Increased awareness and positive brand perception help further brand success.
Companies often use additional techniques like surveys or questionnaires to track brand lift. Instead of looking just at statistics and ratings, these surveys test KPIs like ad recall and brand awareness. In turn, you receive an in-depth look into how customers view your brand.
Cint’s media measurement solution, Lucid Impact Measurement, offers detailed analyses of brand perception for campaigns of all sizes and across all platforms, including CTV. With a survey-based methodology, we help clients understand the accuracy and effectiveness of their ads. You can set up your survey to ask consumers about brand awareness, purchase intent and message understanding for a particular brand. Once you receive results, we help you plan for the next best steps. We provide in-flight measurements, letting you view real-time statistics and feedback on campaigns. You can use in-flight data to adjust advertisements while they air and optimize results.
How to Increase Effectiveness
Once you have a CTV measurement in place, it’s essential to keep improving it as things shift. You should always try to increase the accuracy of your CTV ad measurements to keep up with every customer trend.
Here are some strategies for improving effectiveness:
- Use as much detail as possible: The more detail you use in your measuring techniques, the more accurate your results will be. Try tracking specific demographics or purchase times to find new, personalized ad techniques.
- Consider linear ads, too: If you use both linear and CTV advertisements, don’t discredit the data you receive from linear ads altogether. While not as immediate or detailed, measuring linear ads still offers important information about consumers. Use the opinions of your measured audience to make further adjustments to both your linear and CTV ads.
- Separate metrics by individual goals: Sometimes, the abundance of data offered by measuring can be overwhelming. Don’t lose any important data by mixing up goals and analytics. Instead, separate metrics according to individual campaign goals. For example, if improved brand awareness is your main campaign goal, focus on the measurement data about that.
You can refine your connected TV ads to meet customer desires as you obtain more measurement data. Luckily, the rapid relay of data allows you to make changes quickly.
Learn More With Cint
Cint is a leading software provider of insights and digital research technology. We use survey-based research to help organizations understand audience bases more thoroughly. Our services focus on real customer responses so that you can optimize your campaigns. From academic research to marketing campaigns, our surveys assist many purposes.
If you’re looking for ways to measure your CTV and linear TV ad effectiveness, choose Cint’s media measurement tool. Our measuring tool provides clients with detailed raw data, perfect for measuring both ad efficiency and brand perception. You can gain cross-platform insights, measure brand lift and optimize campaigns.
Learn more about our media measurement tools and see how they can impact your CTV ad performance. Or contact us today to get started with our innovative solutions.
