CTV Targeting Best Practices: 4 Tips for Higher Performing Advertising Campaigns

How can your brand achieve extensive advertising reach without putting valuable marketing dollars at jeopardy? Create a smart CTV targeting strategy. 

TV advertising is a high impact advertising channel for building awareness and increasing share of voice by reaching your target audience in a non-skippable environment. However, the landscape is shifting. 47% of the U.S. TV viewers are already cordless and, by 2025, there will be over 235 million connected TV viewers. Is your brand reaching them? 

In this article, I’ll lay out how you can leverage the targeting and addressability benefits of connected TV in your large-screen video advertising plan. By the end, you will be able to apply four key learnings to your CTV targeting strategy to improve both your marketing ROI and your audience’s experience with your brand:

  • Pair cable and streaming for optimal reach and frequency
  • Diversify streaming platforms based on your CTV campaign goals
  • Leverage the addressability of CTV audience targeting
  • Lean into the power of contextual CTV targeting and premium placements

4 CTV Targeting Tips

#1 – Pair Cable and Streaming for Optimal Reach and Frequency

Before we dive too deep into specific CTV targeting strategies, let’s get one thing straight. We aren’t saying you should ignore linear (cable) television to go all in on digital. Linear TV is still one of the fastest ways to effectively reach mass audiences. However, the best way to achieve comprehensive consumer reach at an appropriate frequency is having the right mix of CTV, OTT, and linear. 

Traditionally, marketers would pour the majority of their big-screen budget into linear TV, and save a small fraction for CTV. There was a misperception that CTV had limited efficiency and reach. It was also more difficult to control ad frequency and compare measurement between linear and streaming. That has since changed. Today, these channels are beginning to speak the same language in terms of measurement, allowing for cross-platform comparisons and omnichannel reporting. 

Treating CTV as simply an incremental tactic is not only outdated, but inefficient. Connected TV ads can offer much greater control in regards to reach and frequency versus linear buys. To maximize results, pair linear and CTV/OTT in your media plan to create an omnichannel video strategy. Then, use cross-channel integration platforms to avoid siloes or ad fatigue, as well as understand impact. 

Hear why there should be a more equitable distribution between traditional and streaming television from our President, Sean Cotton, in this short video clip:

#2 – Diversify Streaming Platforms Based on Your CTV Campaign Goals

CTV targeting success comes down to knowing your marketing objectives and aligning that with placements that make sense based on where your audience consumes television content. You may be understandably concerned by the fragmentation of connected TV. There are so many streaming services and devices that it feels challenging to unify the experience. 

When evaluating targeting decisions, you have to evaluate what you value most: 

  • The streaming platforms on which your brand appears (Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, etc.)
  • Reaching audiences on a 1:1 basis

If you really want to advertise on a select few premium streaming platforms, you should be open to targeting a broader audience. Layering multiple audience segments on top of strict inventory limitations causes difficulties with achieving scale. But, you can leverage research to justify this strategy knowing that your audience spends time on platforms like HBOMax or Hulu, and take comfort knowing your ads are running on quality inventory. 

If your priority is reaching a highly specific audience, cast a wider inventory net. Look beyond the Hulus and walled gardens like Amazon Prime and YouTube TV, and instead lean into an omnichannel CTV buying strategy. While this will require more due diligence to ensure brand safety among lesser known CTV services, it creates an opportunity to take a more holistic approach to the opportunity across your consumer base.

#3 – Leverage the Addressability of CTV Audience Targeting

The golden rule of marketing – do everything in your power to avoid wasting media dollars. At least that’s our philosophy at Coegi. Needless to say, the typical “spray and pray” approach often used to reach broad audiences with linear TV makes us cringe a little. By using data-driven CTV partners, you can still reach broad audiences without overspending. 

There are a lot of data providers that can be activated to reach users on a 1:1 basis. This audience-first approach reaches high-value, addressable segments without overspending on mass media buys. Plus, you improve the user experience by serving relevant content in an engaging, large screen format.

You can also gain greater addressability through automated content recognition – an effective technology to simultaneously improve your audience targeting, ad personalization, and measurement in a privacy preserving way.. Automated content recognition (ACR) technology captures and identifies audio and visual on-screen content. It can capture any content being viewed on a smart TV screen: linear, streaming, video-on-demand, commercials, video games, etc. This data is fingerprinted and can be tied back to IP addresses, creating unique user IDs for specific devices 

The primary ACR targeting methods include:  

  • Target based on ad exposure (competitive conquesting)
  • Content affinity (live tentpole events, shows watched, games played)
  • Viewership behavior (cord-cutters, sports fans, etc.)

ACR data empowers you to better understand and reach your unique audience, as well as personalize messaging. 

#4 – Lean into the Power of Contextual CTV Targeting Strategies and Premium Placements

Audience targeting offers many benefits in the ability to drill down to specific behaviors, purchase history, and more. However, to maximize CTV targeting success, it’s important to balance audience-based and contextual targeting strategies. 

Why? Households share devices, so you cannot always be sure the person you are trying to reach is the one in front of the screen. Additionally, third-party cookie deprecation will impact overall addressability. Contextual CTV targeting does not rely on third-party cookie data, making it a more future-proof solution. It is also a valuable tool to achieve scale by targeting specific networks and content genres using audience affinity data. 

If you want to put a true stake in the ground, secure premium CTV placements through programmatic or direct publisher buys. Think live sporting events, award shows, or an ad spot on the latest Netflix series taking the world by storm. 

These premium placements are more expensive, with CPMs often ranging between $40-50. But, it’s critical to understand the value of running your brand’s message alongside highly recognizable content. If your audience is made up of huge sports fans, the impact of running a thirty-second ad spot during the NBA Finals could be invaluable to your long-term brand performance. Premium CTV placements both elevate trustworthiness for newer brands and energize existing brands. 

Learn more about how to optimize your CTV budget with quality inventory from Coegi’s Director of Programmatic Operations, Hannah Schatz, in this clip: 

The ways in which viewers consume TV are changing, but the overall love of programming remains. Knowing your brand and how your target audiences index against specific content is essential in the future of CTV targeting strategies. Implementing these data-driven targeting tactics will give you access to higher-quality ad space. 

For more information, view our OTT/CTV Advertising Webinar here or access our TV 2.0 Guide to gain a better understanding of the CTV ecosystem. 

Targeting Tourism Audiences With CTV Advertising Campaigns

The Brief

A state tourism client tapped Coegi to implement a CTV advertising campaign with the primary goal of driving awareness. We used a test-and-learn bidding strategy to identify optimal bid numbers across platforms. This allowed us to allocate the client’s budget across the most impactful CTV channels. Using this strategy, we achieved more even spend, higher unique views, and improved cost efficiency.

Highlights

2.75MM
Total Views


470,867
Unique Reach


$0.31
Cost per Unique Reach

Challenge

In programmatic CTV advertising campaigns, platforms will often optimize spend distribution towards total views. This oversimplification causes premium placements like Hulu to consume a disproportionate amount of the budget.

That risk was actualized when early reporting showed 99% of campaign spend going to Hulu and only 1% driving views on other high-indexing channels. As a high-impact platform, Hulu was important, but we wanted to ensure we were using other channels to expand the audience reach and maintain cost efficiency. 

Solution

Our specialists manually adjusted and optimized bids across different channels to create an even spend distribution. The goal was to identify the “sweet spot” that would give each strategic channel an appropriate amount of the budget.  Once the optimal channel mix was identified, the spend evened out to be 60% in Hulu and 40% distributed among other channels.

By serving ads to more niche channels such as Travel Channel, HGTV, and Discovery, we were able to reach key audience segments and boost overall ad performance. This generated 2,750,490 total completed video views, a cost-per-view of $0.05, a unique reach of 470,867 and a post-per-unique-reach of $0.31. 

Premium CTV channels can consume a disproportionate amount of budget. Correcting these standard optimizations with a manual test-and-learn strategy is necessary to find the ideal budget spend and maximize cost efficiency.

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How to Prove ROI for CPG Brands Using Loyalty & Purchase Data

The Brief

Bahlsen partnered with Coegi to relaunch their brand across six geographic locations in the United States. Partnering with Catalina, a consumer data company, the teams were able to target, measure, and optimize CTV and display campaign results in real-time across multiple platforms. This resulted in significant incremental sales lift and an increase in new buyers and repeat purchases. 

Highlights

28%
Sales Lift


38%
New Buyer Base


8%
New Buyer Repeat Purchase Rate

Challenge

Measuring marketing campaign ROI can be complicated for CPG brands. Data from online and in-store sales combined with the cyclical purchasing habits of consumers can significantly blur the lines of marketing attribution. It can also handicap a marketer’s ability to make informed optimizations throughout. Without these insights, a true understanding of campaign success can be out of reach for most brands without the assistance of advanced measurement. 

 

Solution

We knew the key to success for Bahlsen was gathering real-time sales data to inform quick optimizations and gain feedback on sales lift. It was also important to reach audiences across multiple channels to facilitate consideration and keep the brand top of mind. 

We looked to Catalina to assist with this challenge. With almost 40 years of consumer data and one of the largest in-store media networks, Catalina has built an activation, measurement and attribution model. This allows CPG marketers to build and target hyper-focused niche audience groups across multiple channels. 

Using Catalina’s measurement technology and data, we developed and activated highly segmented first-party data lists across CTV and digital display platforms. These audiences consisted of current customers, lost/lagged customers and potential consumers. These rich targeting segments were more likely to engage with and purchase the product than the broader U.S. population. This set the foundation for campaign success. 

However, the real key to driving results for our client was in the cross-channel targeting of these lists to keep the brand top of mind at point of purchase. To do this, our team activated CTV and display campaigns using Catalina’s in-house network. Simultaneously, we were targeting the same audiences on Facebook and Instagram. 

The seven week campaign resulted in an incremental sales lift of 28% (16% benchmark) with a 38% increase in new buyer base and a repeat purchase rate of 8% in those new users. For CPG brands looking to prove advertising ROI, prioritize collecting high quality customer sales data to accurately track and measure sales lift throughout campaigns. To amplify results, use segmented audience lists with a cross-channel strategy to increase reach and frequency among key consumer groups.

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