Back in the days before GPS on every phone, drivers on long trips often had to print out directions on paper before they left. If you’re one of the folks who remembers this period, you remember what a pain it was if you went off-course, took the wrong exit, or made the wrong turn.
The piece of paper you printed out six hours ago didn’t automatically recalculate your course, after all, leaving you scrambling to get back on a proper heading. That meant digging around in a road atlas if you had one (and praying it was updated enough), and trying to figure out where you were. Ultimately, these misadventures often ended with a stop at a gas station to get directions back to the highway.
In short, having accurate, real-time data is a game-changer when it comes to getting where you want to go.
This is especially true in Connected TV (CTV) advertising campaigns, where reliable real-time data is often the dividing line between success and failure. With real dollars on the line, how do you reach your goal?
In this blog post, we’re talking all about accurate metrics, attribution, and why they’re so important for success in CTV/OTT advertising. Read on:
Table of contents
Case Study: How Cool Media provided an in-depth brand analysis revealing a 21% ad recall rate for Suzuki. Read More
What is CTV Attribution?
CTV Attribution is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but the simplest definition is drawing a line between your advertising efforts and the outcomes they drive. Essentially, proper CTV attribution is the difference between “correlation” and “causation.”
In old-school models, being able to accurately connect conversions back to specific ads was a somewhat opaque process. The “spike analysis” model basically measured whether there was a spike in traffic to your website immediately following the airing of an ad.
This worked great with linear TV, where the ad you purchased aired at the same time everywhere it showed, but with CTV’s distributed viewing model, spikes may not be obvious. And even if they are spikes, they may come from sources different from where you ran your ads — how do you separate mere coincidence from a new customer responding to an ad they saw?
Why Is CTV Attribution Important?
Better, more-accurate CTV attribution is critical because it helps advertisers make informed decisions based on consumer behaviour. With accurate CTV attribution, advertisers can:
- Track Campaign Impact: getting more conversions is good, but knowing where those conversions are coming from is better.
- Reach Specific Audiences: better attribution also means better targeting. As you realise your ads are hitting harder with a specific demographic, you can double down on your messaging.
- Improve Efficiency: Knowing where to spend your money also means knowing where not to spend it.
- Gain Insights: all of this allows you to A/B test creatives more effectively, to hone your messaging and improve how you talk to your target audience.
Rather than flying blind, accurate CTV attribution allows you to know what’s working, with who, where to find them, and why it’s effective. I’d say you can’t put a price on that, but you absolutely can.
The Limits Of Attribution
Do you remember the first time you heard of Coca-Cola? Or McDonald’s? Probably not. And yet, there was a moment where you saw your first Coke ad or McDonald’s billboard, setting in motion a growing brand recognition that has accumulated over your entire life.
In that sense, every time you pull up to a McDonald’s drive-thru and buy a Big Mac meal with an ice-cold Coca-Cola on the side, credit for that sale should be divvied up among roughly a million ads going back to before you were born.
Sometimes, the gears of a sale move slowly. A customer may finally decide to give you a try because of an ad they saw years ago, or because several ads over a longer period of time than we usually measure. Single-attribution marketing channels aren’t, in short, really single-attribution marketing channels. No one snowflake takes credit for an avalanche.
All that being said, better attribution is something we should always strive for — and once we understand the caveats of attribution, and the place it should hold in your strategy, you can use it to help make better decisions for your brand.
Types Of CTV Attribution
CTV is still, in some ways, a new and exciting frontier. That means different outlets will analyse their results in different ways. They all have their ups and downs, of course, but the point here is that we haven’t settled entirely into a concept of an “industry standard” yet.
- First-Touch Attribution: This one gives the weight of any conversions to whichever ad the user encountered first. Even if they saw dozens in different places. This is kind of like when you go into a store and whichever salesman hits you up first gets dibs on the sale.
- Last-Touch Attribution: More of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” model, this one applies the conversion to whatever the most-recent ad encountered before the sale. Of course, the problem here is that it downplays the contributions the rest of the ads may have made to the customer’s journey.
- View-Through Attribution: This one is a little more vaguely-defined, but it attributes spikes in conversions to ads during a specific window after the ad was seen. This has accuracy issues much like the others, because it can underestimate how long an ad lingers, or the cumulative effect of multiple creative efforts.
- Click-Through Attribution: This works by setting up a specific website that corresponds to the ad, so that clicking on that ad goes directly to that landing page. This isn’t without problems: for one, it’s still a last-touch attribution model since it ignores any previously-seen ads. For another, aside from specific interactive ads, CTV ads can’t generally correspond directly to a single page source like that.
- Multi-Touch Attribution: This is an attempt to address the weaknesses of the other models by combining them, and using various formulas to apply weight to each touch the user encounters on their sales journey. It’s obviously a fairly time-consuming process compared to the other, more-automated methods.
Clearly, of all the models referenced here, the multi-touch method seems to be the most likely to develop accurate results. But every house performs that particular alchemy in their own proprietary fashion. As such, some are going to get closer to the truth of the thing than others.
So what’s the best way to do it?
Conversion Mapping
At COOL Media, we try to approach conversions from multiple angles. While bidding on adspace, we capture various forms of data on individual users, including their IP address, Device IDs, location data, and more.
That’s where our universal onsite pixel comes into play. We gather impression data as we go so that if anyone in that household converts, we’ll be able to match that conversion data to all the impression data we’ve gathered throughout.
We can check to see if (and how many) ad impressions were served to that IP address and compare timestamps. If the conversions happened after the impressions, we can safely apply that result to our dashboard as a conversion.
That sounds pretty straightforward, but the upshot is this: we can attribute conversions across an entire household. If an ad was served on the user’s CTV, but the conversion happened on a phone or iPad on the same network, we can still track the conversions back to the impressions that drove them.
When all is said and done, we’ve got a complete postmortem from the customer’s journey, from their first exposure to their later research to their final conversion. Pretty cool, right?
Final thoughts
In conclusion, getting the most accurate information possible is the key to success for CTV/OTT campaigns — but there’s been some disagreement on how to do it properly.
If you’re looking to get the most-accurate information out of your CTV advertising, COOL Media is a solution that demands a look. With our cutting-edge attribution dashboard, you can gain deeper insights from the same campaigns, and make smarter decisions as a result. You can get started today by reaching out to our team. In a complicated industry, knowledge is power.
