Embracing Outcomes-Based Measurement for Your CTV Campaigns: Insights from Kochava
Connected TV (CTV) is continuing its evolution from a brand marketing medium into an equally potent performance marketing engine. This shift is largely due to the rise of outcomes-based measurement, wherein CTV campaign performance can be directly tied to lower-funnel outcomes, as opposed to reliance on total impressions, unique reach, or brand sentiment metrics.
Lower-funnel outcomes can include mobile app installs and in-app purchases or subscriptions, website activity, CTV app engagement, and streaming episodic tune-in. Even offline outcomes such as footfall/store visitation or consumer purchases can be measured and quantified. As advertisers gain the capacity to connect the dots between their CTV campaigns and the direct outcomes they’re aiming to drive, they can more confidently spend on CTV and optimize for maximum efficiency and ROI.
Here are 5 key considerations marketers should think about when adopting outcomes-based measurement:
1. Identify CTV Campaign Goals
Define your CTV campaign goals, whether it's to boost mobile app installs, get more subscribers, increase website traffic, or drive other specific conversions. It’s only after you’ve identified your campaign goals that you can go about implementing a measurement strategy to support them. Ensure your measurement tools can track these goals and relevant KPIs to avoid misalignment at the campaign's end. There’s nothing worse than realizing you didn’t have a strategy in place to measure against the KPIs you were looking to drive.
2. Measure All User Engagement Touchpoints
For online conversions, be sure to measure all connected device interactions relevant to the outcomes you’re trying to drive on your CTV campaigns.
For example, if you’re a streaming entertainment app, users can engage with your service across smart TVs, CTV devices and sticks, game consoles, tablets, and mobile phones. You’ll want to measure app engagement across all of those platforms and devices to capture both same-screen and cross-screen conversions. Kochava serves in this capacity for many of the largest streaming services, helping them measure omni-channel campaigns (including those on CTV) and how they drive outcomes across all connected devices where the streaming service can be used.
A Real-World Example
When a major streaming entertainment app launched a user acquisition campaign with a leading CTV platform, significant incremental lift in installs was observed on the CTV platform where the ads were served.
However, the bigger incremental lift overall was actually seen in app engagement across other CTV platforms within the same households exposed to the campaign. If the brand’s measurement strategy had incorporated measurement only of same-screen conversions on the CTV platform of activation, the greater performance impact of the campaign would’ve gone completely unnoticed.
Install Lift by Platform
Percent Change In Propensity To Act
3. Adjust Lookback Windows
Give your CTV campaigns the time to capture the credit they deserve. Kochava has measured countless CTV campaigns on behalf of brands, and while the conversion demand curve shows the bulk of post-CTV ad exposure response happening in the first day, continued performance (albeit gradually declining) is seen over the next 6 days.
Many marketers are likely accustomed to mobile direct response ads where the demand curve typically ‘hockey sticks’ the first day, with a flat demand curve afterward (chart). In CTV, we see a more continual decline, suggesting that the attribution window for conversion outcomes should be held open longer than for mobile ads.
4. Data Clean Rooms and Marketing Mix Modeling
As signal loss continues, particularly in the mobile marketing ecosystem, connecting the dots between CTV ads and cross-device conversions on mobile or other platforms is becoming more challenging.
Kochava is witnessing growing interest in our data clean room measurements, which offer options to transact measurement in a privacy-first manner that leverages the first-party data of both media seller and buyer, without the need to share any data between parties.
Additionally, next-generation marketing mix modeling (MMM) tools now have the capacity to provide near real-time, always-on insights that are dynamic enough for UA managers and digital marketers to act on. MMM is a future-proof form of measurement that ditches any reliance on row-level data signals and instead leverages market-level data to quantify the incremental impact of omni-channel media (CTV included).
5. Ask for Help
Be sure to discuss your campaign goals with your measurement partner well in advance of campaign launch. They can share best practices and helpful insights that will make sure your measurement strategy hits the mark.
Where are Streaming and CTV headed?
Average Time Spent per Day with TV vs. Connected TV (CTV) by US Adults, 2019-2024 hrs:mins
In 2023, for the first time, streaming surpassed linear TV in total viewing hours. This shift from linear to streaming will only accelerate, with brands growing their investments in the channel due to its next-level targeting capabilities. More and more streaming channels and services catering to every nook and cranny of consumer interests are poised to launch, which will enable advertisers to reach potential and existing customers with highly contextual and relevant content. Hyper-personalization driven by AI, shoppable ads, QR codes, and other interactive ad formats will serve to further increase the efficacy of CTV as a marketing channel.
During an onstage fireside chat between LG Ads and Kochava at the 2023 Cynopsis Big TV Conference, LG Ads’ CMO spoke about the ‘performance storytelling’ that is increasingly possible through CTV, thanks to outcomes-based measurement. LG and other Smart TV OEMs are continuing to expand their own ad offerings—making their endemic in-menu ad placements more robust, launching their own free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels, and standing up outcomes-based measurement support across their owned and operated inventory. These CTV operating systems and platforms, plus the channel app stores they host, have earned their seats at the media sellers’ table along with other major programmatic and publisher-direct CTV advertising offerings.