How to Measure the True Value of CTV Campaigns

Measurement is meaningless without a plan

There’s a reason CTV is projected to be one of 2025’s fastest-growing advertising channels, and it’s the same reason CTV revenue is projected to overtake linear TV revenue by 2029.

That reason is not easily attributed revenue. It’s not a predictable, linear surge of direct traffic and conversions every time an ad runs for your target audience.

Yes, CTV can and often does lead to measurable bottom-funnel actions. But if that’s the only metric you’re watching, you’ll never hit your ROAS goals, and you’ll turn off your campaigns before they have a chance to prove themselves.

So where do you look to understand CTV’s real value? Look at your other channels – specifically, look at your SEO, paid search, paid social, and offline campaigns and how life gets a whole lot easier for them when you have CTV campaigns running in tandem.

Holdout tests: your first step to recognizing CTV’s value

I recently hosted a podcast with measurement expert Tom Leonard, who described incrementality as the difference between what happened and what would have happened in the absence of that ad.

That – incrementality – is what we need to use to measure the impact of CTV ads. My favorite method of measuring incrementality is a holdout test that takes two similar geos and splits them into test and control groups, then measures the performance of the market with CTV ads running vs. the performance of the market with no CTV ads running.

At worst, that holistic delta (assuming you’ve set up your test well) is a good approximation of CTV’s value. But that value shows up very conclusively by measuring the deltas in other metrics as well – specifically, KPIs in the channels that capture the actions influenced by CTV ads.

Since, at least at the time of writing, users can’t just push buttons on their remotes to buy something right off of their smart TVs, it’s the actions they take on other channels as a result of those CTV ads that we need to measure.

Those digital channels are usually SEO, paid search, and paid social. When brands have local franchise or brick-and-mortar locations in the geos where CTV ads are being run, those are in the mix as well.

How to measure CTV’s cross-channel influence

Let’s start with search. For SEO and paid search, your holdout test will show you the details in direct traffic, CTR, CVR, acquisition of unique users, and volume increases in brand or product search.

Paid social doesn’t carry the search volume element, but CTR, CVR, and unique user acquisition are very much KPIs to measure. I also recommend adding brand lift – and, as a bonus, running surveys in test markets to get qualified data on how users hear about the brand or product.

Lots of digitally native advertisers forget about CTV’s offline impact, but local CTV ads and CTV ads for franchise businesses can have a tremendous influence on growth. The metrics are very different – I’m talking store traffic, store sales, and service phone calls – but you can still track them with a fair amount of precision by using unique URLs and phone numbers in your ads, testing QR codes, and using unique promotional codes in your CTV ads. Before you start any local or franchise-based CTV campaigns, though, make sure you have a baseline for the metrics you’re trying to influence with your ads, and put a plan in place to measure the difference once the ads are live.

Wrapping Up

More often than not, brands who come to me claiming that they haven’t been able to get CTV to work don’t have an effectiveness problem; they have a measurement problem. That’s not to say that CTV works every time (a lot of its value hinges on great storytelling and audience targeting), but marketers who are willing and able to roll up their sleeves and take a more nuanced look at its real impact are generally a whole lot more persuaded to keep the budget flowing.

Want to learn more? Contact us to discover how we can help you make an impact with CTV advertising.