CTV consumption that started to grow at the beginning of the pandemic accelerated greatly from that time. By now 78% of households in the USA are using CTV and it continues scoring points and attracting new audiences, providing marketers and brands with efficient tools to raise brand awareness and increase sales. The number of channels is growing rapidly, new trends appear one after another, and marketing experts are making more investments in programmatic advertising. According to eMarketer, CTV ad spend will reach $24,76 billion by 2025.

According to IAB’s survey report, 56% of total ad spend will be allocated to digital advertising, such as CTV, desktop, and mobile, where CTV is about to take 35% of the market. However, some marketers are concerned with the propriety of budget allocation because there are still some issues with CTV measurement. How can the effectiveness of ad campaigns be properly measured and how can we be sure that every dollar spent will pay off? The task is rather challenging because despite having access to many measurement tools. Sometimes it is hard to use them effectively to tell whether your strategy is successful and understand what measures should be taken to improve performance.

Why does your brand need CTV advertising?

On the other hand, budget allocation concerns don’t make CTV advertising less effective as, on the contrary, the many benefits still make CTV one of the best mediums of our day. With continuously changing marketing trends and the power of CTV advertising that keeps on growing bigger, many brands and companies started altering their marketing strategies. There are several reasons to make CTV one of your marketing channels starting from the fact that it fits any business. The main point is that you should take into account the specificity of your brand and your goals to succeed. If you are still in doubt about whether to leverage all CTV’s advertising advantages, let us show you a few points that may help you take the first step.

Wider reach

You can address audiences that watch linear TV occasionally or that have cut the cord. CTV viewers are mainly Gen Zers and Millennials who tend to shop online and look for new brands using digital channels. One of the greatest things about CTV is that there is always an opportunity to expand your audience.

Data collection approach

With CTV you can collect data in a variety of ways. A probabilistic approach helps find out the device type, the number of page views, time of visits, etc. A deterministic approach is used for collecting more personal data, such as email addresses and phone numbers which helps target audiences more effectively.

Higher viewability

CTV ads are distinguished by 95% viewability and the highest completion rates. This also happens because CTV ads are non-skippable. As users watch content on-demand they will likely watch the ad and won’t switch the channel as may happen with linear TV. They usually let the ad run to its end, so that they can continue enjoying the desired content.

Flexibility

Apart from providing more comprehensive reporting compared to traditional TV, CTV is also flexible in terms of pricing. While linear TV requires certain minimum investments, with connected TV you can choose the pricing models that suit you, e.g. CPCV (per completed view) or CPM (cost per 1000 views).

Furthermore, you can get the most out of CTV advertising if you use all its features properly. If you know how to measure and how to use the gathered data to improve your advertising campaign, you’ll hit the jackpot. According to INNOVID’s report, one of the challenges marketers face on the way to efficient CTV advertising is inconsistent measurement. This happens because together with valuable insights you get lots of distracting information, and various AdTech providers use different interpretations of the same metrics. It becomes a real obstacle for marketers who want to benefit from audience fragmentation and leads to erroneous targeting or unnecessary repetition of the same ads which results in a waste of spend.

What should you do to measure your campaign success properly? The takeaways

So, we’ve already mentioned that just gathering data is not enough. You need to know for certain which metrics influence your campaign performance, its weak and strong points. Something to always bear in mind is that there is no single solution since it depends on your strategy and goals. But still, there is a winning tactic. Here are several metrics that help estimate how effective your advertising strategy on CTV is:

• completion rates: these show how many times the viewers watched your ad till the very end and can give you an understanding of how engaged your audience is
• post-view visits: if viewers open your website after watching the ad, this metric will show it
• reach and viewability: with the help of this metric you will find out how many unique users receive your ads and to what extent they watched them
• foot traffic: it’s great to know whether your CTV ad leads the customer to an actual purchase offline, in other words — if a user visits a store to make a purchase after watching your ads on CTV
• brand awareness: this attribute is special — in order to estimate it effectively you will need to perform retargeting. Send a survey to viewers after your campaign exposure to understand whether awareness of your brand really had a boost.

Taking into account the metrics mentioned above, you will be able to make decisions concerning changes that should be made for your ad campaign to be more effective. Thanks to CTV’s flexibility you can make adjustments in real-time and optimize your ad spend when necessary.

BidMind is an example of effective CTV strategy implementation and measurement. Since 2010 our team has been successfully implementing innovative technologies for advertisers and managed to achieve incredible results. Our company stepped on the CTV arena with $100 million revenue as one of the leading programmatic media buying companies. With BidMind, a self-serve demand-side platform developed by our team, you can launch effective campaigns and get all details concerning its success measurement in real-time. Leveraging all the innovative features you may expect a 95%+ completion rate and over 200K impressions monthly. The secret of our success lies in using the right techniques for the right audiences at the right time. Thanks to the integration with the leading data providers, we grant access to more than 100K segments fragmented according to demographics, behavioral habits, geography, and more.

The takeaways

CTV gives lots of opportunities for every business to boost brand awareness and attract new audiences. There is always space for development — you can improve targeting by leveraging Dynamic Ad Insertion and Server-Side Ad Insertion technologies. This will help you increase conversion since viewers will receive individual offers based on their location and viewing habits. By promoting your brand on the most popular CTV platforms, you will win the attention of younger audiences. And, of course, if you measure your ad campaign performance properly using the metrics we’ve mentioned above, you will be in the loop of your ad strategy’s effectiveness and will make decisions that would lead to better performance and higher revenue. For better results, you may connect with data providers and request assistance from media buying experts like the Fiksu team.