TV Attribution: The 5 Things You Need To Know
Here are the five things you need to know if you want to start attributing your TV ads.
With more and more viewers using a second screen device in parallel to watching TV, this shift in consumer behavior allows TV advertisers to track TV’s impact more directly. TV attribution - measuring TV’s impact on website visits, conversions, or app installs - has become the new craze for marketers.
Here are the five things you need to know if you want to start attributing your TV ads.
1. TV Attribution Works
TV ads drive website traffic. Obviously, not everyone watching your ad will immediately visit your website. But the numbers speak for themselves:
37% of viewers have researched a product they saw in a TV commercial online, 31% have visited a product’s website after watching a TV ad. At wywy, we regularly see huge uplifts in paid search, organic search and direct website traffic immediately following a TV ad’s airing.
2. TV Attribution Is Only As Good As Underlying Data And Model
As a marketer, you need to pay attention to the details to get meaningful results. There are two things you need to consider:
First, only work with real-time TV ad detections or post-airing data logs. Media schedules are not accurate enough as 80% of TV-inspired visits happen with 90 seconds of the airing – a slight change between the actual airing and the scheduled airing will give you misleading results otherwise.
Second, you need a specialized TV attribution model. Ask your vendor about variable baseline and attribution window calculation and overlapping TV spot handling. If the model does not take these into account, the results will be misleading at best.
3. Interpreting Results
As a marketer you have the option to use your existing tools (e.g. by integrating the TV airing data into your web analytics tool) or to use dedicated TV attribution tools. While the existing tools are usually cheaper, faster to set up and easier to use (because you already know them), they also require in-house knowledge to do the analysis and to interpret the results. Dedicated TV attribution tools do the analysis automatically and help you with the interpretation. At wywy, we often see clients choosing the first option for cost and timing reasons but then unfortunately failing at the analysis as there is no in-house knowledge to do the proper analysis. Ask yourself: Who is going to do the analysis and interpretation?
4. Can You Act?
The ultimate goal of TV attribution is to optimize your TV spendings. You need to be ready to act upon your analysis. Do not book the entire budget at once as changing it might be impossible. Rather, split it up into several smaller budgets. Have different TV creatives ready to see which one performs best. Do your analysis while the campaign is running, then shift the next part of the budget towards better performing day parts, channels, creatives. While this booking process today is still a manual job, programmatic TV will help you automate the TV buy in the future.
5. Direct Attribution vs. Overall Attribution
TV advertising has a directly measurable effect on your website traffic but there are also two other effects you need to be aware of:
For one, there will be spill-over effects on all other marketing channels. For example TV ads drive search traffic which positively affects your paid search, organic search and affiliate marketing channels. If you do not account for TV and look at each channel separately, you might find that your paid search marketing is working exceptionally well but in fact that might only be driven by your TV ads.
Second, TV advertising also has a long-term branding impact. As more and more people know and trust your brand, they will choose your product or service directly, tell their friends about it etc. While this effect is hard to measure, we have seen large differences in direct traffic before and after a TV campaign with our clients.
Marketing attribution solutions help you include TV into your marketing mix with partial attribution across all channels.
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Find out more on the future of Content Marketing at our DLUK - Trends briefing on the 24th September 2015