Summary

  • Connected TV (CTV) offers great promise, but how do you know if it drives conversions?
  • Digital ad challenges with ID resolution hampers the quest for CTV conversion attribution.
  • Matchback Analysis enables a transparent view of the consumer from targeting to measuring to improving future campaigns.

Connected TV (CTV, a subset of OTT) offers a wealth of opportunities for brands to more precisely connect with their ideal consumers where and how they live. The key is figuring out how exactly to quantify the potential.

That’s where CTV runs into the same issue that linear TV has: attribution.

Traditional TV has always offered metrics on awareness and exposure. But today’s marketers want to connect advertising dollars to tangible results such as foot traffic and sales. Validating and quantifying CTV’s effectiveness at conversion is a must in order for advertisers to realize the full value of this emerging media.

Certainly, proposals abound for making the connection between CTV and conversion, but most leave a lot of questions unanswered, including the most important one: “Did my ads actually drive conversion?” This is mainly because the digital advertising ecosystem continues to struggle with three major attribution gaps:

  • Identity resolution. Cookies are fading fast for most digital media, but they simply don’t exist at all for CTV. So, most attribution methods lack a reliable way to even identify who is seeing the ads, not to mention who responded by visiting a store or buying a product.
  • Data sources. Often, attribution requires a third-party tracking device or depends exclusively on online activities. What happens when your audience isn’t tracked by a third party or when offline activities figure prominently into your attribution calculations?
  • Data stability. Validating data assumptions with both online identifiers and physical addresses is important to help triangulate in on what is really going on. Many attribution methods rely too heavily on one data source while others are disproportionately impacted by consumer privacy choices.

Unfortunately, the attribution approaches many media companies follow do not successfully bridge these gaps. As a result, advertisers are often in the dark about the real-world impact.

What’s missing is transparency. From beginning to end, advertisers deserve to know who they are targeting, how that audience responded, how the insights gained can improve future campaigns, and of course, actual sales and the return on advertising spend.

The solution that bridges the industry gaps most effectively is Matchback Analysis.

Better Targeting. Matchback Analysis starts with a complete understanding of the targeted audience including a comprehensive mapping of digital identities to physical locations. This ensures that you hit the right audience with your message based on who they are, where they are, and what they are in the market for. The Vericast Consumer GraphTM is a great example of this capability in action.

Better Data. It’s one thing to know who you are reaching and it’s quite another to be able to reach the audience you identify. Matchback Analysis done right is supported by reliable data that enables you to execute a campaign against over 80% of the audience — both via CTV and across other digital and traditional marketing channels.

Better Analysis. The “matchback” in Matchback Analysis involves focusing the picture on who your CTV campaign is targeting against your partner or owned first-party data such as customer or loyalty card lists. This enables you to watch the impact of the campaign as exposure flows into engagement and turns into purchases. Vericast’s IllumisTM platform is an example of how you can shine a light on this information for actionable insight and program improvement.

Learn more about how Vericast makes it possible to reach and measure the streaming TV audience with precision and real-world impact, via Connected TV.