Connected TV

Connected TV Advertising: The Performance Marketer’s Guide to Digital Advertising in a Cookie-less World

Why Connected TV advertising offers a way around (and better results) through its IP approach.

Connected TV Advertising:  The Performance Marketer’s Guide to Digital Advertising in a Cookie-less World

5 Min Read

A recent survey of advertisers around the world found that 80% of U.S. advertising and agency executives believe that creating a relevant campaign starts with reaching the right audience – yet only 21% believe they’re doing it effectively. Where’s the disconnect, and how can advertisers improve their targeting capabilities?

As big tech continues to battle it out over growing data privacy concerns on mobile and desktop, this poses challenges for advertisers who want to leverage audience data in an effective and compliant way. Connected TV sidesteps those challenges and uses IP addresses layered with third-party audiences, as well as first-party CRM data, to target consumers. Studies show that IP-targeting can reward advertisers, with an average 40% more time spent on site, 79% higher response rate to call-to-action and a 50-100% higher conversions. Not to mention that you eliminate any wasted impressions since you’re always getting human views (50% of publisher traffic is bot activity) on your CTV ads. Continue reading to see how (and why) this form of targeting can help you reach the right users, and ultimately drive value and ROI for advertisers.

1. Scale your targeting efforts without relying on cookies

IP targeting is the most accurate geo-level targeting out there, since leveraging DMA or cookie data is subject to inaccuracies. The former – DMAs – are so broad that it can actually be more harmful to your targeting efforts, and drain a big hole in your ad budget. Therefore, a great way to scale your targeting without sacrificing precision is through layering interest-based targeting with hyper-local targeting. IP address data is the cleanest way to both target and report within a specific city or state, since all IPs are tied to a geographic region.

We recommend staying away from targeting only based on age and gender. This is because with IP targeting, which is household based, you generally end up serving ads to the entire household, regardless of the viewer’s age you are targeting. Similarly, we don’t want to rule out households because they don’t have someone in that age-range in them. There’s a better way to approach targeting, and that’s through a combination of IP addresses with in-market and/or consumer purchase data. MNTN Performance TV partners with leading data provider, Oracle Data Cloud, to help bring these audiences to life. Once you’ve set your targeting parameters, our automated media buying technology will optimize your ad spend and your creative to the audience/s most likely to convert.  

In the example below, we show how easy it is to target at a state level (although you can get as granular as as zip-code level), add in third-party audience segments relevant to in-market/interests and apply this audience to your prospecting campaigns. You can also leverage IP-data for your A/B testing efforts by using the same CTV creative and applying them to different groups of audiences to see which group responds best to your message. We recommend making only small changes to your target parameters, changing one criteria at a time to identify which parameter has an effect on your campaign.

2. Deterministic vs Probabilistic attribution

What does attribution have to do with this, you might ask? We’ve noticed that attribution measurement can vary a lot. Other competitors base attribution on post-view lift (after a CTV ad is served) and take generous credit for any organic or direct traffic after a specific time frame. However, MNTN’s Cross-Device Verified Visits attribution model isn’t based on an estimate. It is deterministic, which means it’s a direct one-to-one IP match. This means if we serve an ad, we have to see the same device ID/IP address at the point of conversion for it to be credited to the CTV campaign. 

Other digital advertising platforms mix both cookies and IP data, which puts a lot on the line once it comes to D-Day (the day that cookies will be extinct, by 2022). You’re basically at risk of losing all of your targeting data. Connected TV platforms like MNTN leverages third-party data sourced from purchase history, demographics, geographic location (among others) and combines this with IP addresses, which allows advertisers to serve ads with precision on television. If you go down the other route, you’re limited to serving ads on cookie compatible devices like phone and laptop, which is not a true CTV advertising experience – nor one we would want our users to have. 

Our video below shows how advertisers can view a breakdown of their first-party audience, in addition to reporting on attribution and conversions on both a high level and detailed (per day) level. Advertisers can also view overall versus TV retargeting performance, down to an order ID level. Note that all of the data that you see in our reporting is purely based on IP-data.

3. Industry leading accuracy on geo-reporting

MNTN Performance TV provides reporting aligned to your audience targeting. This feature can be utilized across multiple use cases, for e-commerce brands, industries with a longer sales cycle and even lead/service based companies (like insurance for example). Perhaps you’re trying to increase foot traffic to a local business, spread the word about a local event/promotion only available to people in certain cities or states, or increase business within a certain demographic? All of these examples would benefit from geotargeting and georeporting.

Advertisers can access this data at any time after launching a campaign on Performance TV. Take our example below, which shows geo-level reporting across five states. Our reporting interface captures the impressions on a per-state basis, down to a conversions level, taking into account which of these conversions are attributed to your Connected TV efforts.  

For even more up-to-date information about Connected TV’s impact as a performance channel, check out our new Post-Holiday Report, a look at how Connected TV activity surged in the latter half of 2020. This is a trend that isn’t going to let up anytime soon, and we’re excited to share more best practices with you throughout the year – watch this space!