What is TV attribution?

In TV, advertising attribution refers to the set of touchpoints of a viewer as they convert into a buyer, also known as a pathway. The goal on the part of the advertiser is to predict and analyze how an impression, or seeing an ad, influences a viewer to take the next steps, such as entering a relevant term in a search engine, clicking on the product page, or purchasing the product.

Advertisers harness data to understand the relationships between marketing efforts and a target audience’s behavior. This clarifies the effectiveness of a television campaign and helps brands better strategize for future campaigns or when going to scale.

TV Attribution Measurement

A common metric of a campaign’s success is return on ad spend, or ROAS, which directly measures campaign revenue or loss. Every ad campaign has a different metric for success based on company goals – some common metrics include cost per visit (CPV), cost per converted viewer (CPCV), and lower funnel events that the Simulmedia pixel can track.

Today, marketers have a multitude of methods for measuring TV advertising’s effectiveness. Attribution can be measured in myriad ways, but it can hardly be done without the arm of data providers and a TV ad buying platform that can aggregate a report to show cause and effect. One way to measure attribution is to collect audience data, target those audiences, and track their behavior across platforms.

Thanks to the evolution of data-driven technology, marketers can partner with a TV buying platform and their data partners to link first or third-party data sets to mobile, digital and even in-person purchasing behavior. From set top boxes, to automatic content recognition technology (ACR), to mobile tracking technology – software can give you a 360 view of every touchpoint across all consumer actions and directly attribute it back to a TV ad exposure.

For example, we at Simulmedia have several first-party data providers who can help you gather intel on who is watching and when. We can then unlock those datasets via our TV+® platform and our integrations with partners like LiveRamp to create target audiences and lookalike audiences for your campaign.

Once the campaign is run, it’s time to look at the effect. Our integrations with providers like Kochava, AppsFlyer, and Google Analytics can be used to track the behavior of audiences exposed to an ad, and link it to app and site activity.

Any advertiser launching a TV ad campaign, whether linear TV, connected TV (CTV) advertising, or both, should be ready for the effects of their work. Attribution, with the right targeting and strategy, can be very high, so you should be prepared to accommodate the influx of traffic and sales that can be traced back to a recent ad airing.