Best Practices with OTT Metrics. Tips from Pro
It's time to decide which metrics align best with your campaign goals. Navigating the world of OTT advertising can be overwhelming, but the right approach can turn these metrics into invaluable insights. We’re here to share our best practices to help you make sense of the numbers and transform complex data into actionable strategies.
Thomas Spilker, Senior Director of Client Success at Simulmedia, shares insights on achieving even better results.
By the way, feel free to check out our complete guide on Streaming Metrics and Methodologies.
Understand the viewing habits of your strategic audience
It’s crucial to identify your strategic audience: Who are they? What are they watching? When are they watching? How are they paying attention? For performance campaigns, focus on when your audience is watching and which times drive the best outcomes, like visiting your website.
Metrics to monitor: Average watch time, peak viewing hours, and binge-watching behavior.
How can aligning with your audience's CTV viewing habits improve campaign effectiveness?
Importance of understanding audience habits. AnalyzingUnderstanding the viewing habits of your target audience is crucial in connected TV (CTV) campaigns. While CTV viewership traditionally peaks during prime-time hours, it’s essential to realize that not all of your audience will follow this pattern. To maximize campaign effectiveness, analyzing specific audience viewing behaviors beyond general trends is crucial to maximize campaign effectiveness.
Fragmentation and platform switching. Audience behavior is highly fragmented, with viewers frequently switching between different platforms and apps. For example, audience numbers might spike when new shows are released on one platform. However, once they’ve finished watching the series, they may cancel their subscription and move to another platform. This dynamic shift means that audiences are constantly in flux across platforms.
Continual re-evaluation of audience behavior. Marketers must regularly re-evaluate their audience’s behavior, focusing on what they are watching and how they are engaging with content. Since audience preferences change over time, particularly with the emergence of new content, advertisers need to remain flexible and adaptive.
Optimizing engagement campaigns. It’s vital to continually optimize CTV campaigns to align with the moments when audiences are most likely to engage. This means consistently monitoring viewing patterns and adapting campaigns to ensure they reach the target audience at the right time and platforms, maximizing engagement and ROI.
Concentrate on big screens.
While you might sometimes buy ads on OTT for desktops and mobile, the best viewing experience for your ad is on the big screen.
Big screens tend to drive better engagement and results because viewers are more likely to be in a “sit-down” environment, entirely focused on the content they intentionally chose to watch. This contrasts with mobile or desktop viewing, where audiences may be more distracted or multitasking. The purposeful nature of big-screen viewing often leads to higher engagement with content and better response rates to ads.
Metrics to monitor: Device usage statistics, and platform-specific engagement rates, focusing on smart TVs and other large-screen devices.
Best practices for running CTV campaigns on big screens
Focus on targeting that's just right: CTV allows for highly specific audience targeting due to its one-to-one relationship. However, when targeting too narrowly, there is a risk of over-delivery and ad fatigue.
Avoid over-frequency: Overexposure to the same ad within a single show or session (e.g., multiple times in a 60-minute show) can lead to audience frustration. To combat this, it’s crucial to cap frequency, ensuring ads aren’t shown too frequently to the same viewers.
Diversify publishers: To avoid over-delivering the same ads to the same audience, advertisers should use multiple publishers and spread their budget across a broader range of audiences. This strategy helps maximize reach and avoids overwhelming viewers with repetitive ads.
Focus on unique users
In Connected TV (CTV) context, ad delivery works on a one-to-one relationship, allowing advertisers to target unique users and strategic audiences with a high degree of specificity. This capability enables brands to customize their ad messages based on different audience segments, enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of each ad. Rather than sending out a general message to a broad audience, advertisers can strategically tailor their creatives to resonate better with specific segments, maximizing the impact of their ad campaigns.
It is also very important to differentiate between unique users and total views.
How to leverage unique user metrics to refine targeting and reduce churn
Experiment with creatives
In Connected TV (CTV) advertising, choosing the right video length, format, and call-to-action strategy is essential for success. Advertisers can experiment with different creative formats, such as animation, live-action, or AI-generated content, to see what works best.
What are the best practices for choosing the correct CTV ad format and length?
CTV offers an efficient way to test and learn about creative and media strategies. Advertisers can perform A/B testing by delivering different messages to small audiences to identify what resonates. They can also experiment with contextual relevance by testing ad performance in different program genres and exploring various audience segments to determine which are more likely to engage with the ad. This process can be done cheaply, providing valuable insights in just a few days before scaling up the campaign with a larger budget.
Optimal frequency of connected TV ad
Determine the optimal frequency that drives action. Sometimes, moving someone from frequency 0 to 1 is the best option. However, some brands need repetition to drive their propensity to visit the site, so calculating the optimal frequency is crucial.
How to calculate the optimal frequency for driving conversions without overexposing the audience?
In Connected TV (CTV) advertising, maintaining optimal frequency is key, as it can take multiple exposures—often three to 12 times—before a viewer takes action. However, it's easy to overexpose the same viewer multiple times within a short period, so frequency caps are essential to avoid ad fatigue. Testing and learning are necessary, as the ideal frequency varies by advertiser and industry. Once the optimal frequency is determined, expanding the campaign to additional publishers can help broaden reach while maintaining the desired frequency, ensuring the ad is seen by a wider audience.
Isolate the lift and impact of CTV advertising
CTV typically has a halo effect on other channels. People might see your brand on TV, then Google it or check it out on Facebook. One way to measure that is through an incremental lift measurement study.
How can advertisers effectively isolate the lift and impact of CTV advertising, considering its halo effect on other channels?
Incremental lift studies help isolate the effect of CTV by comparing audiences who have seen your ads with those who haven’t, keeping all other things as equal as possible (including non-CTV marketing channels). Best practices include analyzing performance across different publishers, testing various creative executions, and determining when viewers begin to take action. These insights can help refine future campaigns.
Find out more from the video
Ready to create OTT advertising campaign that converts? The key is experimentation and adaptation. By diving into these best practices and testing different metrics, creatives, and audience strategies, you'll uncover what truly works for your brand. Stay flexible, optimize regularly, and let these insights guide your journey to finding the perfect formula for success.