CTV might still be thought of as the shiny medium, but it’s been around for a while. The first smart TVs came out 20 years’ ago and CTV has been a household staple since 2015. Statista forecasts that 62.6 million millennials and 56.1 million Gen Z users in the US will watch CTV in 2025. And where the eyeballs of these valuable audiences go, so too do the advertisers.

According to eMaketer, between 2018 and 2022, mobile ad spend grew by 186%, while CTV ad spend increased by a whopping 1,300%. With the launch of ad supported tiers on Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video, more and more CTV ad inventory has opened up. CTV has thus become one of largest sources of new video ad inventory and spend on this channel is set to overtake traditional TV ad spend by 2028.

Brands know that to capture highly sought after Gen Z and millennial audiences, they need to be advertising across the right content on CTV. However, measuring the true performance of CTV campaigns has become increasingly challenging for advertisers.

The privacy movement and loss of user-level tracking has left brands with limited ability to target ads and track their success across all channels, but it’s particularly hard on CTV, which due to its advertising nascency, has struggled with these metrics from the start.

As with any medium where there’s big budgets at stake, multiple players are entering the market claiming they can prove the performance of CTV campaigns. But is it even possible, and if it is, how can brands be sure of using the most effective solution?

Let’s start with the tools to avoid.

Defective measurement methods

One of the most flawed methodologies we’ve seen for measuring CTV campaigns is QR codes. The principle of this measurement tool is similar to a tracking link on the internet. If a user sees an ad for a product or service they like, they can scan a QR code using their smartphone to purchase it.

Sounds simple, but here’s the issue: consumers using their smartphones to watch streaming services – which is most of us – can’t then simultaneously use their phone camera to point at a QR code on the screen. Moreover, if a consumer has to interrupt their viewing to download an app or product, it impacts the user experience. As such, conversions through QR codes are low and the result is that advertisers using this approach typically end up shutting down the majority of their CTV ad buys, thinking that CTV had low performance, which is not necessarily the case.

Then there’s geolift tests for TV measurement. The old methods of incrementality measurement relied on this approach, which involves turning advertising on in some regions, and off in others, and comparing the performance.

While the methodology itself is sound, it relies on the advertiser to create a sterile environment in order not to “taint” the ability to measure CTV campaigns, and marketing is far from a sterile environment. Marketing performance can be affected by dozens of variables – anything from weather, to competition, to promotion and so on. Not to mention the multiple changes in marketing tactics implemented by brand marketers on a daily basis.

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There are many reasons geolift experiments don’t work. Firstly, they require access to users’ location data, which raises significant privacy alarms. They are also cost and resource intensive, and create waste by requiring advertisers to pause campaigns that could be delivering significant returns. It’s important to point out here that no effective measurement solution requires testing or experiments, and for this reason geolift tests are out.

Another measurement tool we’ve seen brands use on CTV is user tracking via IP triangulation, otherwise known as fingerprinting. Not only is this an extremely unreliable methodology of measurement, mainly as all users on the same network share the same IP address, it also goes against most privacy regulations. What’s more, trying to apply a user tracking approach to CTV measurement will lower the match rate substantially. If a user is using mobile internet while the CTV device is on the wifi network – the two devices will not have the same IP. In that case, even if the user sees an ad on TV and immediately goes to purchase the product or service advertised, IP tracking will not attribute the sale to the CTV campaign.

Is it even possible to accurately measure CTV ads?

CTV viewers are not trackable by advertisers, but that does not mean that CTV advertising is not measurable. If marketers can move away from the notion that tracking users is the only measurement method, then they open themselves up for highly effective alternative solutions that don’t breach consumer privacy laws.

In a way, the loss of user-level data is beneficial for CTV, as it’s forcing advertisers to move away from user-level attribution to campaign level measurement. And this is where CTV has an opportunity to shine, as opposed to attribution measurement, where due to the nature of last-click methods, it would undoubtedly lose in a race to the bottom.

We’re already seeing key CTV players such as Roku integrating measurement solutions that provide marketers with a clear view of CTV performance. Roku’s Ads Manager utilises advanced incrementality to give its advertising clients real-time insights into the revenue impact of their ad spend. The self-service performance solution is also working to set new benchmarks for measurable, data-driven advertising on CTV, which will bring much needed clarity to this space.

It’s only by implementing effective and privacy-safe measurement solutions that can understand the cause and effect of every single marketing tactic online and offline – that marketers can really tell if their video campaigns on these mediums are driving results for their brand or are simply an expensive waste of time.

Every brand is unique, so the marketing channels and tactics that work for one, may be different for another. Moreover these can change from month-to-month or even day-to-day depending on any number of factors such as the news agenda or the weather. This is why it’s essential for brands to measure all of their activities on a daily basis and not pause for experiments. It’s the only way brands can be sure they’re making the right decisions when it comes to advertising on CTV, so they can truly understand which ads are turning valuable Gen Z and millennial audiences on and which are making them switch off.

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