After-Ad Influence: Measuring CTV Impact on User Research

You can’t click on a TV ad. And in industries with long sales cycles — like auto, finance, or travel — that makes campaign measurement tricky.

You can’t click on a TV ad. And in industries with long sales cycles — like auto, finance, or travel — that makes campaign measurement tricky.

Buyers in these industries don't make $50,000 purchase decisions with a simple click. They research. They compare. They read reviews on third-party websites. They may spend weeks — even months — weighing options before setting foot in an auto dealership or booking a trip.

As such, traditional attribution tools fall short.

Knowing impressions is important. Monitoring website visits is vital. But what about the browsing behavior that happens in between — after an interested buyer has seen your ad, yet before they’re ready to check out your website?

Cue in After-Ad Influence, an attribution solution designed to measure this middle-of-funnel activity.

After-Ad Influence tracks how users behave after seeing your connected TV (CTV) ad to understand whether viewers are researching your brand, product, or category across the open web. That way, you can measure the impact of your campaigns while your audience is still in the consideration phase.

What Is After-Ad Influence?

After-Ad Influence is a mid-funnel attribution tool that connects the dots between seeing an ad and conducting online research related to the product or services — even when that action doesn’t happen on your website.

While most attribution tools capture either the beginning of the customer journey (ad impressions) or the end (website visits or conversions), After-Ad Influence tracks what happens in between.

After-Ad Influence works by monitoring visits to URLs containing specific keywords related to your brand or products. For example, a luxury car manufacturer could use After-Ad Influence to track when users visit automotive review sites that mention their specific models after seeing a CTV ad.

Benefits of After-Ad Influence

By shifting the focus from clicks to keywords, After-Ad Influence measures user engagement that happens prior to conversion. This provides a more comprehensive view of campaign effectiveness by:

• Recognizing intent signals that occur on third-party websites
  
  
• Measuring brand impact during the consideration phase
  
  
• Capturing the research behavior that precedes major purchase decisions
  
  
• Providing a mid-funnel KPI to inform campaign optimization
  
  
• Enabling advertisers to retarget high-intent users to drive conversions
  
  

There are two primary reasons why this is valuable:

1. It fills a major measurement gap. Many buyers don’t convert right away. They poke around the web, explore options, and take their time. After-Ad Influence captures this behavior, making it a great solution for advertisers in industries where research is a major part of the buyer’s journey.
   
   
2. It gives you visibility into off-site engagement. Most attribution tools focus on owned channels. After-Ad Influence instead looks at how people who’ve been exposed to an ad interact with the broader digital landscape. Because this is often where real consideration begins, After-Ad Influence is a valuable KPI to track.
   
   

How Does After-Ad Influence Work?

So, how does After-Ad Influence actually connect that CTV ad impression to off-site research? It involves three straightforward steps, and a fourth optional one to retarget high-intent buyers.

Step 1: Define Keywords

Our CTV experts start by working with you to create a list of keywords relevant to your brand, products, or category. These are the terms buyers would use in research mode on third-party sites. We recommend keeping this list to about 20 highly relevant terms per tracking pixel. 

Step 2: Monitor Browsing

When a user sees your ad, our dashboard takes note. We then monitor individual users’ browsing activity, looking at the URLs they visit in the hour before they see the ad and the hour after they see it.

The one-hour measurement window is designed to isolate the immediate impact of your ad and reduce the likelihood of other marketing touchpoints influencing the results. This creates a clearer picture of how your CTV campaigns directly affect research behavior.

If a user visits URLs containing one of the keywords we identified after seeing the ad, it’s counted as a conversion.

Step 3: Connect the Dots and Optimize Accordingly

These keyword-matching visits act as mid-funnel signals — indicating that an ad drove users to learn more, even if they haven’t visited your site yet. We report on these conversions alongside other campaign metrics, providing additional insight into which tactics and placements are driving interest.

Step 4: Retarget High-Intent Buyers

Beyond measurement, After-Ad Influence offers another valuable capability: audience building. Users who trigger an After-Ad Influence conversion can be collected into a custom audience segment for retargeting. This allows you to reach back out to these high-intent researchers with more targeted messaging to move them further down the funnel.

Examples Across Industries

Attribution should never be approached as one-size-fits-all — and the same is true for After-Ad Influence. At Strategus, we work with advertisers to determine the right mix of attribution solutions so that we can track the right touchpoints and signals.

After-Ad Influence specifically shines for businesses where the path to purchase involves significant research off the brand's owned channels. Here are a few prime examples.

• Automotive: Car buyers seldom head to a dealership on a whim. Most spend weeks comparing makes, models, and features — often on third-party review sites, forums, and comparison tools. After-Ad Influence helps automotive marketers track when users visit these sites after viewing a CTV ad, signaling mid-funnel interest that wouldn’t otherwise be captured.
  
  
• Political: Voter behavior is driven by curiosity and concern, not clicks. After-Ad Influence allows campaign teams to track when constituents begin researching a candidate or political party across the open web after viewing a political ad. It’s a powerful way to measure message resonance and fine-tune targeting strategies during key phases of the election cycle.
  
  
• Financial Institutions: Whether it’s a new credit card, mortgage, or brokerage account, financial decisions are rarely made instantly. Prospects tend to do their homework comparing interest rates, reading reviews, and researching terms. With After-Ad Influence, financial marketers can track when someone begins that research journey post-ad exposure, even if they haven’t landed on the institution’s website yet.
  
  

Get Started With Strategus

In an industry focused on first- and last-touch attribution, the middle of the funnel tends to get overlooked. But with After-Ad Influence from Strategus, advertisers can measure online browsing activity correlated to their campaigns.

Want better insight into how your audience is progressing  through the funnel?  Contact us today.