Watch: What Your CTV Dashboard Isn't Telling You

The CTV dashboard looks great. ROI is up and to the right, and the quarterly review is going smoothly. Then the CFO asks how many of those customers would have bought anyway.

The room goes quiet.

Moments like this are at the heart of a recent ADWEEK webinar with Marketing Architects.

US Connected TV ad spend is on track to hit $37 billion this year and $42 billion in 2027, according to eMarketer. It's one of the most exciting marketing channels. It's also still evolving. And relying wholly on your CTV dashboard to tell you what's working might mean missing a few key details.

So in this webinar, CMO Elena Jasper covers four "gauges" you should check before launching your next CTV campaign.

 

 

Gauge 1: Targeting

CTV targets households, not individuals.

Targeting is the top factor advertisers weigh when deciding where TV and video dollars go. According to the IAB, it jumped from 39% to 49% in a single year, passing content quality, reach, and guaranteed outcomes.

The catch is that CTV reaches a shared screen on a living room wall, not a personal device. You might pay a premium to reach a 42-year-old IT professional in Cincinnati and get her 14-year-old daughter instead. Account sharing still exists, too. Leichtman Research Group found 10% of Netflix subscribers still share their account.

But the data behind this type of targeting is even more fundamentally flawed. Every IP address has to be matched to a consumer profile. Truthset reports email-to-IP matching is accurate just 16% of the time on average. Postal-to-IP drops to 13%.

Then there’s frequency. Marketing Architects’ data shows the first TV impression does the most work, with response trailing off after each one that follows. At a certain point, repeating an ad can actually harm your brand. In an Epsilon study, CTV was the number one place people said they noticed repeated ads. And 58% said they’d decided not to buy from a brand because of it.

Elena’s advice was simple: think broader and test more.

1. Widen your target to category buyers, not just your ideal customer profile.

2. Cap frequency across publishers, since per-platform caps stack up fast.

3. Run a narrow targeting line against a broad one with the same budget and creative, then let performance decide.

For brands with a truly narrow audience, Elena pointed to options that don’t lean on identity data. Geo-targeting works well for brands with physical locations. Smart Targeting combines first-party signals like site traffic and CRM data with marketplace data like ZIP code, genre, daypart, and app usage to find high-value customers.

 

Gauge 2: Media Quality

Not all streaming inventory is created equal.

According to WARC, four in 10 CTV advertisers doubt the quality of their buys even when buying direct. That climbs to more than half for private marketplaces and nearly seven in 10 for open exchanges.

Fraud is a big driver of this doubt. The IAB found invalid traffic is the number one reason advertisers mistrust CTV programmatic inventory. DoubleVerify reports that without protection, more than one in four CTV video impressions are wasted to fraud.

Streaming inventory also has a labeling problem. "Connected TV (CTV)" means an ad served on an internet-connected TV. "Over-the-top (OTT)" includes streaming on phones, tablets, and laptops. Both have a place in a media plan, but they shouldn’t be priced the same. Some vendors mix OTT into a CTV buy, reducing the average CPM and making the buy look more efficient than it is.

Elena suggested three questions for any CTV partner:

1. Can I see an app-level placement report?

2. What percentage of my impressions were independently verified, and how do you manage invalid traffic?

3. Does my inventory include OTT? If so, what’s the cost breakdown between CTV and OTT?

 

Gauge 3: Cost

Fees can cut into media budgets, fast.

Depending on the setup, 40-60% of a CTV budget can go to tech and targeting fees before a single ad airs. That can include SSP fees, ad exchange fees, DSP platform fees, data transfer fees, third-party targeting and fraud data, ad serving, and managed service fees.

This cost problem is why Marketing Architects held off on buying CTV for a couple of years. After testing multiple third-party DSPs, the team kept hitting the same wall. Response rates could look great while the cost to get them made ROI miserable.

So the agency built its own solution. Annika Streaming, Marketing Architects’ in-house DSP, turns three this year and cuts out the middlemen taking a share of every ad dollar.

 

Gauge 4: Measurement

Never trust a single measurement model.

“If you’re looking for a silver bullet to measure your TV and someone tries to sell you that, it doesn’t exist,” Elena said.

One brand came to Marketing Architects with in-platform attribution coming in 4.2X higher than a third-party geo holdout test. And they're far from alone.

This doesn't mean platforms are lying. In-platform attribution connects conversions to exposures. But it rarely has a way of knowing who was going to buy even if they never saw your ad.

Accurate TV measurement takes a system of models working together. Marketing Architects combines incrementality testing, IP matching, econometric modeling, brand studies, and cross-channel analysis. Each has a weakness. Incrementality is rigorous but slow. IP matching is fast but unreliable. Econometrics catches the long tail but needs years of data. Brand studies show what happens above the conversion line but won’t tell you about last week.

You need multiple perspectives to see your CTV campaign's true impact.

 

CTV advertising is worth getting right.

When CTV is set up well, it engages lighter TV viewers. It supports geo targeting for brands with regional audiences. It works well for retargeting direct mail recipients, since you’re matching to addresses from your own CRM. And versioning tools make it easier to swap offers, voiceovers, or calls to action by market.

There’s more good news ahead. Ad loads are rising, which will bring CPMs down. New interactive, shoppable, and pause formats are evolving. Cross-publisher frequency tools are maturing. And incrementality testing is becoming a standard ask instead of a high maintenance one.

“CTV deserves your budget,” Elena said. “It also deserves your scrutiny.”

 

Learn more about the state of CTV today. Tune into this episode of The Marketing Architects Podcast featuring Nikki Erkkila, VP Media Partnerships.