CTV Attribution Explained: How To Track the True Impact of Your Ads
Over the last few years, traditional cable advertising has taken a significant hit from new, connected TV (CTV) devices. How people watch content has completely shifted but marketers are still stuck using outdated methods and tools that don’t properly measure attribution, ROI, or justify ad spend.
CTV attribution opens the door to precise targeting, smarter engagement, and better results.
To take advantage, read this article that gives a crash course on how attribution works, how to track results, and use the data to make informed decisions.
Understanding CTV Advertising
Connected TV refers to internet-connected devices that stream shows, movies, and other media like smart TVs, apps like Roku, Amazon Fire, and Apple TV, or even gaming consoles.
These devices also contain streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. Each device and streaming app presents new opportunities to advertise and reach audiences that have cut ties with traditional cable or satellite TV.
Unlike traditional TV advertising, CTV gives you better audience targeting, and viewers can’t always skip your ads, giving them high completion rates.
Learn how top brands are leveraging CTV attribution for success.
What Is CTV Attribution?
CTV attribution is the process of measuring and understanding how ads on connected TVs impact audience behavior, preferences, and business goals.
Campaigns for CTV advertisements are tied to measurable outcomes like website visits, app downloads, and in-store purchases. Gathering data over time lets you understand how to change and adapt CTV campaigns to influence your potential customers to move forward with your product or service.
CTV attribution gives you more precise measurements compared with traditional TV advertising. Digital tracking can monitor viewer interactions across multiple devices, giving you a clear picture of the customer journey to provide even more value.
How Does CTV Attribution Work?
An optimized CTV attribution system lets you connect your ad exposure on connected TVs to measurable outcomes like an increase in sales. We recommend sticking with three major strategies due to their proven effectiveness.
- IP-based matching:ย Links all household devices using the same IP address. Attribution connects someone watching a CTV ad with a website visit on their phone.
- Cross-device tracking:ย Uses a combination of actions and signals to follow users across multiple screens like logins, location, behavior, etc.
- Tracking pixels:ย A small snippet of code that tracks a person watching from their device and their post-view activity on your site or app.
Tracking data across fragmented devices is difficult to manage and takes significant time and resources. Third-party services like Levy Online help by saving you time, reducing guesswork, and helping navigate attribution seamlessly.
Benefits of CTV Attribution for Marketers and Advertisers
CTV tracks specific data points that will help your team go beyond guesswork. Marketers can gain insights into age, location, past purchases, and other helpful data to serve the right message to the right audience at the right time.
The enhanced targeting and personalization CTV attribution offers connect you directly to your audience instead of trying to locate them yourself. You won’t waste resources trying multiple platforms with little results.
With this level of clarity, you can optimize campaigns for more hard-hitting creatives, smarter budgets, and better ROI in ways traditional TV ads can’t.
Key Metrics in CTV Attribution
Having a set of specific metrics you follow throughout the campaign will help you gather data that will inform how you’ll improve the process.
Here are a few key metrics that are most relevant in CTV attribution:
- Impressions:ย Number of times your ad was served to individuals
- Reach:ย Total unique viewers exposed to your ad
- Completion rate:ย Percentage of viewers who watched the full ad
- Conversion rate:ย Number of viewers who took action after watching
- Incremental lift:ย Added value the ad drove beyond the control group
With the data in hand from tracking these metrics, you’ll refine your targeting, adjust creatives, and allocate budgets more effectively.
Common CTV Attribution Models
A CTV attribution model will determine how you track your conversions in the campaign and how the ads influence customer behavior. Take a look at these most common attribution models:
- First touch:ย Credits the first interaction with your brand and is useful when your goal is to measure awareness or top-of-funnel performance.
- Last touch:ย Credits the final interaction before conversion and is best for campaigns focused on immediate actions or conversions.
- Multi touch:ย Splits credit across multiple touchpoints and is ideal for long sales cycles where customers engage multiple times.
- View-through:ย Credits conversions that happen after an ad is viewed without a click. Useful when creating ads that drive interest.
The model you choose will depend on your campaign goals and how the audience interacts with your brand.
Platform-Specific CTV Attribution Strategies
On top of choosing an attribution model, you must also decide on a platform-specific strategy to be successful.
Streaming Services
While CTVs are the devices themselves, over-the-top is content and ads on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Peacock. These allow you to use their existing database of precise audience demographics to create highly targeted campaigns.
You can also use server-side ad insertion to create unskippable ads that guarantee users will watch all of your ads. Levy Online has been using CTV attribution strategies on Netflix since the program opened.
TV Apps
Beside the streaming services themselves, you can also run CTV ads on TV apps like Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire Stick. These platforms support integration with measurement partners like Levy Online for easy install and event tracking.
Using QR codes and interactive ads can help drive mobile engagement and create a seamless path from the TV screen to conversion.
Other Connected Devices
For a successful CTV attribution strategy on other connected devices like smart TVs and gaming consoles, you need device-level identifiers that can track customers on different devices.
SDKs track user interactions and conversions, making it valuable for tracking performance data, but shared devices and multiple user profiles make it challenging to get accurate attribution data.
Integrating CTV Attribution Into a Holistic Marketing Strategy
In order for CTV attribution to drive meaningful results, you need to align it with your broader marketing strategy.
Otherwise, results from CTV attribution strategies may be isolated and only helpful for one department instead of accomplishing business goals.
You must integrate CTV data with insights from other channels like paid search, social media, and email.
The insights gained from CTV are useful for cross-channel messaging and audience targeting. The more in-depth specific demographics offered by CTV platforms provide more opportunities to share those insights with other marketing strategies.
For example, if attribution shows viewers are more likely to convert through a follow-up email after being exposed to a specific CTV ad, you can adjust the email content and timing to reinforce the message and capture leads effectively.
Challenges in CTV Attribution and How To Overcome Them
One of the major challenges with CTV attribution is the communication between platforms. Devices and platforms don’t always share information easily and it makes it hard to track viewers who use multiple devices.
Privacy concerns are another issue since each platform and device has its own regulations and restrictions to limit access to certain user data. Recent privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA have limited the accessible amount of data available from viewers.
You’ll also need to navigate platform limitations like closed ecosystems or a lack of standardized metrics. Working with a third-party like Levy Online will get you set up with customized metric tracking parameters and unifying fragmentation processes to help make your CTV attribution easier.
Levy Online implements a centralized attribution strategy that combines deterministic and probabilistic tracking methods to build a complete picture of user behavior.
When Is the Best Time To Use CTV Attribution?
With traditional TV cable declining and the rise of streaming on different platforms, apps, and devices, marketers, agencies, and business owners need to be investing in CTV attribution today.
CTV becomes incredibly important when you’re looking to launch brand awareness campaigns, drive app installations, and promote limited time offers.
It’s also ideal for businesses targeting specific audiences like local service providers or ecommerce brands running cross-device campaigns.
Leveraging CTV Attribution for Marketing Success
The popularity of streaming and its eventual takeover from traditional cable TV means you need new ways of tracking the impact of your ads. CTV attribution gives you the clarity you need to make smarter decisions, optimize campaigns, and scale your marketing efforts with confidence.
Trust Levy Online with your CTV ad strategies and stay ahead of your competition which refuses to update with the changing times. Optimizing CTV campaigns since the innovation of the technology, no one is more experienced than Levy Online to help you turn CTV insights into business action.
