Breaking Through on CTV Success: Key Metrics & Analytics Tools

Connected TV (CTV) has become an increasingly important channel on which brands and advertisers connect with their audiences. In fact, CTV viewership notably overtook that of Linear TV in recent years, and the trend has continued to go that way. However, despite its growing success, there’s one hurdle that could stand in the way of advertisers getting the most out of CTV — measurement.

Due to the absence of third-party cookies, measuring success in CTV advertising has historically been more difficult compared to traditional digital advertising. But hope is not lost — with the right key metrics, tools and a savvy technology partner — effective measurement on CTV can be a breeze.

Follow along for a breakdown of everything you need to know about measuring and analyzing the success of CTV campaigns.

The Key Metrics for Measuring Success on CTV

• Reach and Viewership: The number of unique households reached and the ad’s viewership can help advertisers understand their campaign’s overall reach and potential impact.

• Completion Rate: This is the percentage of viewers who watched the entirety of an ad, and a high score here indicates that an ad has strong engagement and may perform well.
  
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): CTR represents an ad’s success rate for generating clicks and can be simply understood as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of views on that ad. And although CTV does not have traditional clickable ads, a variation of CTR can still be used to measure how successful an ad is at generating engagement.

• Brand Lift and Awareness: These metrics measure an ad’s impact on brand perception and awareness within the target audience. Brands can use studies and surveys to measure shifts in brand perception that result from their CTV ads.
  
• Attribution: Understanding the influence that CTV advertising has on your target audience’s behavior and purchase decisions is crucial for quantifying campaign success. Luckily, there are attribution models for CTV that can determine the impact of CTV ads on driving conversions and sales, despite the lack of third-party cookies.

Analytics Tools for CTV Advertising

• Data Platforms: By onboarding first-party data to a data platform, advertisers can create powerful audience segments, more reliably reach consumers across multiple devices and channels and gain a holistic view of their marketing efforts. 

• Identity Resolution Tools: Identity resolution tools can complement data platforms by helping advertisers create unified, privacy-minded identifiers for CTV viewers using their first-party data. By stitching together data points and signals, identity resolution tools provide a holistic view of the consumer journey across devices and channels — including CTV.

• Measurement Partners and Research Firms: Collaborating with third-party measurement partners and research firms provides ample access to industry-standard metrics and benchmarks for CTV advertising. These partners can also conduct brand impact studies and ad effectiveness research tailored to CTV channels.
  
• Cookieless Advanced Reporting: Leveraging cookieless reporting provides advertisers with a more complete view of their CTV campaigns by tying post-ad exposure actions — like visiting a website or downloading an app — back to a CTV ad. 

Overcoming Challenges with Innovative Solutions

While the absence of third-party cookies in CTV advertising presents challenges in measuring campaign success, it has also fostered considerable innovations and given rise to a host of new measurement solutions. That’s why it’s crucial to choose an innovative technology partner, like Viant, that’s built for today’s increasingly cookieless media landscape. By leveraging the innovative people-based analytics tools available within the Viant DSP, advertisers can gain valuable insights into the performance of their CTV campaigns and drive impactful, targeted advertising strategies on across this fast evolving channel.

Ready to kickstart your CTV advertising with Viant? Get in touch today!