CTV Measurement: The Secret to Tracking Brand Lift Effectiveness

Tracking brand lift gives you more insight into how well your video ads resonate with your audience and drive them to take a particular action.

But it can be difficult to track the exact progression individual viewers take as they go from the first interaction with your brand to subscribing or making a purchase.

It becomes even more complicated when the journey requires multiple touchpoints with specific, sequential messages. Brand lift can't be authentically assessed by past performance or analytics that are adjacent to brand lift attributes. 

But without that insight, it can be hard to devote portions of your video ad budget to where it makes the most impact in reaching and converting viewers.

That lack of insight can even make it difficult to get internal stakeholder buy-in on expensive video ad campaigns in the first place.

In this blog, we'll discuss how to track brand lift and really measure the success of your video ads.

What is CTV MEasurement?

CTV measurements track and analyze the results of your video ad campaigns through OTT/CTV channels.

There are multiple different sets of metrics that advertisers can use to assess the success of different ad campaigns based on the unique goals of the campaign. 

However, brand lift is a unique category within analytics. You're measuring the actions viewers take as a result of seeing your ads and how effective those ads are at driving viewers toward specific, profitable actions.

Since CTV and OTT platforms provide completely personalized experiences to viewers based on their accounts, previous watching behaviors, and IP addresses, they make it possible to create in-depth data profiles.

These can be mapped to individuals rather than populations within a set demographic and geographic reach (as with traditional television). CTV measurement, then, can create far more specific and fine-tuned conclusions.

challenges of tracking ctv data

One of the biggest challenges modern marketing leaders have to overcome is deciding how to make use of CTV data.

The raw data CTV platforms can collect is staggering, and there's a lot of noise mixed into the datasets that can obscure the valuable conclusions and insights you're looking for.

It's important to know precisely which data points to track over time, what the data points actually see about your marketing efforts, and which metrics are simply bad leads.

how to measure success in ctv advertising

To help make sense of all the data your company can gather about your watchers, Strategus has put together an Attribution Suite that focuses on the metrics that measure customer action.

While it's important to know how many viewers see your ads and how those ads change their impression of your brand (for good or for bad), brand lift is entirely separate from those analyses.

To measure brand lift, you need to know exactly what your targeted viewers do after viewing each OTT/CTV ad.

Attribution suite: the eight functionalities

Our Attribution Suite tracks full online and offline attribution visibility. It tracks eight key components that give you insight into the activities of your audience after they view an ad:

1. Post-View Website Visit Attribution: This attribute shows if viewers visit your website after being exposed to an OTT/CTV ad.
   
   
2. Online Purchase Attribution: This attribute shows if the viewer made a purchase, either on your direct site or through Amazon, after watching an ad.
   
   
3. Amazon Online Purchase Attribution: For campaigns run through an Amazon Fire Device, this tool allows you to identify, track, and report on users who later make a purchase on the Amazon marketplace.
   
   
4. Foot-Traffic Attribution: It's important to track the omnichannel engagements and purchases that result from an OTT/CTV ad. This attribute tracks if ad viewers later visit your store or venue in person.
   
   
5. CPG Attribution: Using Universal Purchase Code (UPC) barcodes, this attribute tracks the exact purchases made after an individual views an OTT/CTV ad.
   
   
6. After-Ad Influence: Similar to tracking a site visit or a purchase, this attribute tracks pre-purchase research behaviors to measure viewers' progress along the buyer's journey.
   
   
7. Offline Conversion Tracking: This attribute notes how many times a viewer has been exposed to your ads before making a purchase, as well as promotion times and locations of those ads, to map the most effective ad exposure strategies in a campaign.
   
   
8. Brand Lift & Brand Awareness: This tool provides insight into how exposure to your video ads impacts a target’s opinion and awareness of your brand.
   
   

attribution and brand lift

Unsurprisingly, that final component of the Attribution Suite is the tool we want to focus on for measuring brand lift.

In order to really understand the impression your ad makes on a viewer, you have to be able to track their responsiveness following exposure. 

Here’s how this works at Strategus:

1. You expose a viewer to your advertisement via a CTV/OTT campaign
   
   
2. In the following days, you retarget that viewer with a survey that indirectly measures whether or not your advertisement made them recall your brand. Survey questions can include:
   1. “Which of the following brands have you heard of?”
   2. “Which of the following brands do you most associate with [INSERT MESSAGE HERE]?”
   3. How familiar are you with [BRAND NAME]?”
      
      
3. From here, we record data and responses in real-time and optimize reports with ongoing responses.

By directly measuring the impression your advertisement makes in the days following exposure to your ads, you can better assess which ads lead to effective brand lift.

>>Between CTV and linear TV, click here to find out which is better

track the connection between ads and actions

It's essential that you have the ability to connect audience behaviors to exact ads within a campaign.

This can help you determine which ads should receive the most watch time, which ads are the least effective, and even what 'styles' of ads should be duplicated in future campaigns.

If certain ads lead to certain actions, you can also arrange them in the best order for consistent audience behaviors and to push them through your funnel as efficiently as possible.

Create more impressionable videos

Ultimately, your video ads need to make an impression, and you need to be able to prove that they're doing their job.

Measuring specific attributes, whether they're direct purchases or indications that a viewer is more seriously considering your product, help you determine what ads are valuable performers and how much money should be allocated to creating and publicizing them.

CTV measurement and brand lift support from strategus 

As OTT and CTV platforms allow advertisers to reach more and more granular audiences with highly specific ads, you need equally granular insights so you can make the right strategic moves.

Strategus is here to help with a dashboard that lets you see how your viewers engage with your brand after every ad view. Contact us today to learn more about our dashboards and brand lift services.