CTV is getting a ton of headlines in marketing these days, many of them regarding its projections as one of the fastest-growing channels in digital.

CTV’s promise is real; we’ve helped it come to fruition for a number of clients. Its blend of targeting, placements, and context – when measured accurately – has shown uniquely effective at both bringing new audiences into the purchase journey and increasing overall conversion rates, at efficient costs.

Now, how to measure its impact accurately…that’s where performance marketers can stall out, leading either to a lack of adoption or inability to determine whether CTV is worth continuous investment. With this post, we’d like to change that.  

To truly understand how your CTV campaigns are performing, you can’t only depend on click-based conversions and bottom-funnel actions. Instead, digital marketers should employ the following key reports:

• Ad Group Performance
• Spike Lift
• Halo Analysis
• Overall Business Lift
• Always-on Incrementality

Let’s get into the details of each.

1. Ad Group Performance

Breaking out your overall performance, by week, across ad groups helps you to examine how your budget is performing toward specific audiences. This report gives you insights to help identify which creative strategies and/or audience segments deliver the best and worst returns, which informs budgeting reallocation.

2. Spike Lift Analysis

Running spike lift analyses helps to look at immediate surges in website traffic following the airing of your CTV ads. This determines exactly how much traffic increases after ad exposure, usually within a couple of minutes, which provides concrete evidence of viewers’ engagement linked to specific ad creative and placements.

3. Halo Analysis

Halo analysis assesses the wider impact of your CTV ads on other marketing channels. By tying the surge in searches, social media interactions, and direct visits that occur alongside and after your CTV campaign, you can accurately attribute CTV’s impact on the conversion. 

Note that you won’t get this data by simply monitoring platforms like GA4. Partners like our choice for CTV measurement and management, tvScientific, can put a special conversion event within the pixel on the site that corrects GA4 data by cross-referencing user activity with user CTV impressions at the IP address level. Essentially, this means that GA4 thinks a user who lands on a site five minutes after seeing a CTV ad simply did a brand search on Google, whereas tvScientific and Playbook Media can definitively fill in the data picture and show CTV’s impact on that site visit. 

4. Overall Business Lift

We monitor the overall Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC) as we scale up spend to ensure the investment in CTV is returning profitable yields and driving overall sales.  

We do this by adding up spend across all media platforms (Google Search, Paid Social, as well as CTV) and then dividing it by the overall, deduplicated “source of truth” reporting in the client’s CRM or sales database.  

Depending on the business goals, we can either maximize spend (and volume) until we see diminishing returns or reallocate/reduce spend in different channels to improve the cost to acquire a customer.

Directionally, we almost always see that adding strategic upper-funnel channels like CTV and fueling those campaigns with budget from non-incremental spend in lower-funnel channels helps increase scale at similar or lower CACs. From that initial reallocation, it’s a matter of continuous monitoring to reallocate as the data warrants.

5. Always-on Incrementality 

We value incrementality as one of the purest measurements of a channel’s contribution to growth, so we continually assess CTV’s contribution of incremental revenue by testing CTV audiences against lookalike control groups. (Note: these tests are meant to be directional, with PSA tests recommended to measure truly incremental results.)

In our always-on incrementality tests, we compare the CTV test group (won bids resulting from ad exposure) to the lookalike control group (lost bids resulting from no ad exposure). 

Our formula is simple: Incrementality % = (Total – Control) / Total Purchases. It’s not exact, but we’ve found it incredibly valuable in estimating the revenue CTV is responsible for contributing to our clients’ campaigns.

Wrapping Up

Performance marketers have probably noticed a theme in these reports: they’re outside the usual performance measurement scope. At Playbook, we see this as a good thing; developing a more holistic understanding of a marketing channel’s impact on your full purchase funnel, including the bottom line, is a preliminary step toward a healthier marketing mix. The reports above can help your marketing team build CTV campaigns that deliver sustainable, quantified growth, not just direct-response reactions.

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