For Best Results on CTV Advertising, Test Early & Often

“TV advertising is dead.” 

For years, industry gurus have been eager to cancel TV as a viable ad medium. And in an era of cord-cutting, where mobile devices dominate the digital landscape, it’s easy to take these advertising obituaries at face value.

The truth, however, is more nuanced. Traditional TV advertising may be in decline, but connected TV (CTV) is rising to fill the void. Riding on the ubiquity of streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video, and powered by multi-device tools like Chromecast and Apple TV, CTV advertising is a burgeoning market. CTV ad spending has more than tripled since 2019, reaching over $20 billion in 2022.

Behind this mega-opportunity for brands, there’s a fresh set of challenges associated with learning the new medium. The most effective CTV ads have figured out how to captivate viewers and cast a lasting brand impression.

Grasping CTV’s advertising potential

CTV advertising shares one key similarity with traditional TV—no one really wants to see commercials. Whether viewers spend breaks checking their phones or searching for a "skip ads" button, you're fighting to grab their attention and interest.

40% of 18- to 34-year-olds prefer customized ads. To that end, successful ads use data to build, iterate and optimize for the ideal campaign. For example:

• Audience targeting: 87% of American households have at least one CTV device. This massive pool allows advertisers to drill down audiences based on attributes like age, location, gender, income, or interests.
• Prospecting or retargeting: By uploading customer databases and email lists to CTV ad platforms, you can leverage the technology to support any step of the customer journey.
• Real-time feedback and results: Pulling CTV ad data into your real-time customer journey analytics platform lets you track, analyze, and most importantly, optimize CTV campaigns as you would an online media buy.

Work backward from your end goal 

Like any media buy, successful CTV advertising starts with well-defined goals. What do you hope to achieve with your ad?

• Build brand recognition: If your goal is to build brand awareness and affinity, you might focus more on conveying a memorable message than on selling your product.
• Improve brand reach: CTV’s broad reach is a great opportunity to expand reach, especially with key audience segments. For example, 62% of Americans in the coveted 18- to 34-year-old demographic watch CTV on a daily basis.
• Increase engagement: Even if the content is part of a media buy, ads that your customers interact with and share through social channels are a win for your brand’s engagement goals.
• Drive conversions: Most brands’ end goal is for consumers to buy their product or service. With a strong call to action, CTV advertising can accelerate a user’s velocity through the customer journey.

This 30-second piece for Wordscapes successfully hits on realistic goals for a mobile game app. The app name is introduced within the first three seconds of the ad, immediately delivering value for brand recognition. It targets a broad audience by showing how simple it is to play (thus improving brand reach) And CTA to download the app creates a clear path to conversions. 

Monitor and adjust as you go

With goals in place and creative assets launched, it’s time for tracking and optimization. You’ll quickly be able to see who’s engaging with your ads and focus more on them, while cutting underperforming campaigns. A/B testing at critical stages improves overall ad performance by helping you find the right content and messaging for the right audiences, fast. 

The key to understanding whether your ad is a success is to see how your viewers respond to it. Testing and tracking based on the following KPIs during all stages of the campaign. 

• Completion rate: If the percentage of viewers who watched the entire ad is low, you’re probably targeting the wrong audience or you need to refresh your creative.
• Cost per completed view: As the cost per viewer creeps up, assess whether you’re over-bidding on a competitive audience and if the return value is worth it.
• Click-through rate: Experiment with different placements and messages for calls-to-action to see how they impact click-throughs to your website.
• Conversion rate: If you’re seeing high click-throughs but poor conversion rates, then you know you have pain points to address along the customer journey.
• Brand lift: Is your ad creating the engagement and brand impression you’d hoped for? If not, what do you need to change?

CTV advertising is a highly iterative process. You might not hit it out of the park on your initial effort, but with careful tweaking, you can dial in the optimal campaign and boost your ROI.

Optimize your campaign with customer intelligence

With data in hand, you can sharpen your ad’s focus on the creatives that work and the audiences who respond. Since you can’t afford to wait months for stale reports, you need actionable insight in real-time. Use Scuba’s customer intelligence platform to:

• Ingest data from across your digital ecosystem in real-time for up-to-date 360* views of your customers and optimize campaigns in-flight.
• Integrate with CTV ad platforms to build audience segments and collect comprehensive traffic data.
• Follow ad performance and your customer’s journey from CTV to purchase with bird’s eye and granular views.
• Use real-time analytics to spot user pain points before they impact large chunks of your customer base and drive better ad ROI.
• Maintain a privacy-first operation with industry-leading data compliance and privacy to protect your customers’ data.

CTV advertising brings TV into the digital age with new and exciting opportunities to reach customers. To reach the medium’s full potential, you need a customer intelligence platform that gives you full command over your data.

Request a demo today to learn about improving your ad ROI with Scuba.