Understanding CTV Measurement: Key Metrics + Tools for Success
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Are your CTV ads hitting the mark or just floating in the digital abyss? If you’re feeling unsure, mastering CTV measurement can help you turn a shot in the dark into a precise, data-driven strategy that puts your ads in front of high-value CTV viewers.
Connected TV (CTV) has transformed the advertising landscape by giving media teams a powerful method to reach engaged audiences through streaming content. With CTV ad spending expected to surpass $30 billion next year, understanding its impact is vital for media experts looking to drive campaign success.
Effective CTV measurement is complex. It requires focusing on the right metrics and using advanced tools to analyze performance.
This guide will walk you through the fundamentals of CTV measurement, highlighting some key metrics to track and the tools required to propel the success of your CTV advertising efforts.
What Is CTV Measurement?
CTV measurement is the process of analyzing and evaluating the performance of CTV ad campaigns.
Compared to linear TV advertising, CTV advertising allows teams to better assess how viewers engage with their ads and the overall effectiveness of their campaigns. The fundamentals of CTV measurement include collecting data on various metrics, such as impressions, reach, frequency, viewability, completion rates, and more.
By examining these metrics, media experts understand how their CTV ad campaigns perform. They can then optimize campaigns in real-time and make data-driven decisions to achieve even more positive campaign results.
Why CTV Measurement Matters
Accurate CTV measurement enables media teams to gauge how their CTV campaigns perform overall and determine which CTV ads resonate with their target audience – and which do not. This level of insight allows for more effective allocation of ad budgets, ensuring that media dollars are directed toward high-performing CTV inventory and audiences.
Precise CTV measurement also helps identify trends and patterns in viewer behavior, allowing media teams to refine their strategies and deliver more personalized, engaging content.
While traditional linear TV still has value for reaching broad audiences, its measurement and targeting capabilities are limited. In contrast, CTV advertising provides more advanced measurement tools that offer deeper insights into audience targeting, viewer engagement, and ad results.
The shift from traditional TV to internet-connected devices is occurring rapidly. Statistics show a tremendous increase in the number of adults planning to cancel their cable TV subscriptions in favor of streaming services, highlighting the value of CTV advertising. As a result, ad spending in this area is also projected to grow exponentially, creating a highly competitive landscape for media teams.
How CTV Measurement Works
CTV measurement is a multifaceted strategy used to accurately track and analyze CTV campaign performance. It begins with the meticulous planning and execution of media campaigns on ad-buying platforms that support CTV advertising, such as The Trade Desk, DV360, Amazon Ads, and Hulu Advertising.
In these platforms, media teams set their campaign objectives and the specific metrics to track and measure performance, such as impressions served, video completion rate (VCR), cost per completed view (CPCV), frequency, and reach at individual and household levels.
When the CTV campaign launches and ads are served to users’ CTV devices, these ad-buying platforms record the above metrics to gauge immediate performance.
Media teams can use additional platforms, tools, and integrations with third-party tech providers to obtain deeper insights regarding user actions across different channels, devices, and even offline, which are attributed to the CTV campaign.
Key CTV Metrics
Understanding and tracking the right ad metrics is vital for evaluating the success of your CTV strategies. These key metrics provide valuable insight into how well your CTV ads perform and help you make informed decisions to optimize your campaigns.
Like with display advertising KPIs, monitoring essential CTV metrics is vital for a comprehensive evaluation of your campaign’s success. From impressions to completion rates, each metric plays an important role in painting a comprehensive picture of your ad performance.
Impressions
Impressions measure the total number of times your ad is displayed on a screen, regardless of whether it is viewed in its entirety. This metric helps teams understand the exposure of their campaigns.
High impression counts indicate that your CTV ad is being shown frequently, which is important for brand visibility. However, impressions alone do not provide a complete picture of CTV ad effectiveness because they don’t account for viewer engagement or completion. Analyzing impressions alongside other metrics is essential to get the whole picture.
Reach
Reach measures the number of unique viewers exposed to your CTV ad. Unlike impressions, which count every time an ad is displayed, reach gives advertisers valuable insight into the number of individual viewers who have seen their ad at least once.
This metric is used to understand the breadth of your audience and ensure that your message is not being shown to the same viewers over and over again. A high reach indicates that your campaign is effectively extending its visibility to a broader audience, which is crucial for brand awareness and market penetration.
Lots of the AdTech tools used for CTV campaign execution and measurement calculate a unique individual reach and a unique household reach.
Frequency
Frequency in marketing measures the average number of times a unique individual viewer is exposed to a campaign’s ad. This metric helps media teams understand how often their message is reaching the same audience. The goal is to ensure that the ad is seen enough times to make an impact without causing viewer fatigue or annoyance.
Achieving the ideal frequency is important for ad effectiveness. Too low, and your ad may not be memorable. Too high, and it can lead to potentially negative perceptions of your brand. Monitoring frequency helps you fine-tune your campaigns to reach high-value CTV viewers.
Completion Rate
Completion rate measures the percentage of viewers who watch an ad in its entirety. Media teams use this metric to assess their CTV ad content's engagement level and effectiveness. A high completion rate tells you that viewers find your ad compelling enough to watch from start to finish, which leads to better brand recall and higher conversion rates.
Monitoring conversion rates helps you understand which ads resonate most with your audience. This allows for better optimization of creative content and messaging to maximize viewer retention and impact.
In the CTV space, completion rates tend to be high because many OTT providers do not allow users to skip ads. However, as the domain evolves and ad-skipping becomes more available, we can expect these rates to change. Let’s also note that a high completion rate doesn’t necessarily mean the user was fully engaged—many viewers might be distracted during ad airing.
Cost Per Completed View (CPCV)
This metric puts into perspective the amount spent on the CTV campaign compared to the completed views delivered. As marketers, we often want to drive more impressions, views, clicks, and so on for a lower price. So, a lower CPCV is optimal.
Viewability
Viewability measures whether a CTV ad had the opportunity to be seen by viewers. Media teams use this metric to ensure that ads are being displayed in a visible area of the screen and that they are noticed for a sufficient amount of time. High viewability rates indicate that ads are effectively placed and likely to capture viewer attention.
This metric helps you validate the effectiveness of your ad placements and maximize the impact of your campaign. By optimizing viewability, you can ensure that your ads reach their intended audience and drive better engagement.
Since CTVs are larger devices and these ads take up the majority of the screen, viewability tends to be higher in this space – not much of a concern.
Effective CTV Measurement Strategies
Effective CTV measurement strategies help you get the most out of your CTV advertising campaigns. These strategies ensure that you are accurately tracking performance and making data-driven decisions.
Here are some best practices for setting clear objectives, choosing the right metrics, and ensuring accurate CTV measurement, with some additional thoughts.
Setting Clear Objectives
The foundation of effective CTV measurement lies in setting clear and precise objectives. Start by defining what you want to achieve with your CTV campaigns. Since CTV is a top-to-middle funnel strategy, the objective is likely to increase brand awareness and enhance viewer engagement.
These objectives will provide direction and help you decide which metrics to track. They also enable better alignment of your team’s efforts and resources, ensuring that everyone is working toward the same goals.
Choosing the Right Metrics
Setting the right metrics is essential for driving campaign success. Metrics should align with your CTV campaign objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, focus on measurements like impressions and reach. If your goal is to boost engagement, refer to viewability and completion rate measurements. This approach is important for making data-driven decisions when optimizing your digital media strategy to drive the best results for your campaigns.
While CTV is not generally considered a lower-funnel channel, there are, as previously mentioned, multiple AdTech companies and providers that work to offer capabilities that measure lower-funnel user actions and outcomes driven by CTV campaigns. When using these capabilities, media teams keep an eye out for key performance indicators and metrics such as:
Conversion Rate: Tracks the percentage of viewers who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a free consultation, after viewing your ad.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Calculates the cost associated with acquiring a new customer lead, helping to evaluate the efficiency of your ad spend.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Assesses the revenue generated from your ad campaign relative to the amount spent, providing insight into the overall profitability of your efforts.
Tips for Accurate CTV Measurement
Accurate CTV measurement requires meticulous planning and implementation. Here are some tips to ensure precision in tracking and analyzing your CTV campaigns:
Use Advanced Tracking Tools: Employ the tracking and measurement tools offered by the ad technologies you use to execute your CTV campaigns. Explore additional tools and platforms available to collect comprehensive measurement data.
Implement Cross-Device Tracking: Research cross-device tracking capabilities offered by the platforms you use to execute CTV campaigns. These help ensure measurement consistency by tracking target users across multiple devices.
Perform Pacing and Validate Data Regularly: It is best practice to monitor the speed at which your CTV ad campaign budget spends and, in effect, serves ads. At Pathlabs, we perform pacing checks daily. Alongside this, we continuously check and validate campaign measurement data coming in to identify and correct any discrepancies.
Segment Your Audience: Break down your audience into segments to understand performance across different demographics and targeting options offered by the ad-buying platform used for campaign execution.
Adjust in Real Time: Use real-time data to make immediate adjustments and optimize your CTV campaigns on the fly.
As any digital media expert knows, applying these tips in real life is much more complicated than one might think. For agencies taking them on, they can collaborate with a Media Execution Partner (MEP), like Pathlabs, to develop an actionable plan to correctly get client CTV campaigns and measurements off the ground correctly. They can even delegate most of these measurement and tracking responsibilities to the MEP.
Recognizing Continued Challenges in CTV Measurement
Recognize that CTV measurement is still evolving. As media experts, we primarily rely on top-funnel metrics like impressions, reach, completion rates, and CPCV to measure CTV campaign performance. While these metrics provide valuable insights, CTV still needs improvement in terms of measuring conversions and user actions connected to these campaigns.
These challenges largely stem from issues with tracking, identity, and attribution. It can be challenging for AdTech to easily identify and recognize CTV users engaging across devices and other channels. For instance, a user might see an ad on a CTV device with its unique ID, then convert on a different device or even in-store. Connecting these actions to the same user and attributing them to the original CTV campaign is extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, many AdTech providers continue to work towards developing better systems to measure the impacts of CTV ad campaigns on lower funnel user actions. At Pathlabs, our full media activation team constantly monitors these new tools and developments, assessing and adopting the most effective ones.
Understanding the Power of CTV Ad Creative
The quality of ad creative is crucial in CTV campaigns. Media teams may struggle to achieve high video completion rates (VCR) or overall increase brand awareness, thinking it is due to the platform or inventory used for ad serving. However, it can often come down to the creative itself. Ensuring top-notch, engaging ad content is key to maximizing the effectiveness of CTV campaigns, regardless of the inherent measurement challenges.
CTV Measurement Tools and Solutions
Effectively measuring CTV campaigns requires leveraging a variety of tools and solutions to capture comprehensive data and insights. Our team at Pathlabs can streamline this process, ensuring that all your media execution processes are aligned and working together to drive performance.
Here’s a look at some key tools and solutions for CTV measurement and how we can help you manage them to drive CTV ad results.
Unified Measurement Platforms
Unified measurement platforms consolidate data from various sources to provide a holistic view of your CTV campaign performance. These platforms integrate metrics across multiple devices and channels, ensuring consistency and accuracy in your reporting. Using a unified measurement platform allows media teams to track and analyze key metrics in one place.
A Media Execution Partner (MEP), like Pathlabs, can help agencies implement and manage these platforms, ensuring seamless data integration and providing actionable insights to optimize your CTV advertising strategies. With our expertise, you gain consistent and accurate reporting that drives better campaign outcomes and maximizes ROI.
Cross-Device Targeting and Tracking
Cross-device targeting and tracking provide valuable insights into the full scope of user interactions across multiple devices. It links viewer behavior from connected TV devices to other devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to provide a holistic view of the customer journey.
By capturing data on how viewers engage with ads across different devices, media teams can optimize their strategies for maximum reach and effectiveness. Pathlabs can help implement the best tools for cross-device targeting and tracking, ensuring accurate and integrated measurement for a comprehensive understanding of your CTV campaign performance.
Partner with Pathlabs for Seamless CTV Measurement and Better Campaign Results
Effective CTV ad measurement is key for optimizing performance and driving results. By leveraging the right tools and solutions, media teams can gain better insights into CTV ad effectiveness and user engagement.
At Pathlabs, we empower independent agencies to navigate the complexities of CTV measurement by serving as their dedicated Media Execution Partner (MEP). We provide agencies with the right people, workflows, and technology to support all aspects of their digital media execution, from planning and execution to optimizing and reporting.
Our teams are well-versed in the CTV space and ready to assist your agency in launching successful CTV campaigns. We leverage a suite of premium tools and platforms essential for executing CTV campaigns and offer a detailed approach to ensuring measurement accuracy. This enables your agency to make informed, data-driven decisions and achieve exceptional results with your CTV campaigns.
Ready to maximize your clients’ CTV campaign performance? Learn more about our approach and find out how we can help you capture the attention of high-value CTV viewers.