Note: Launching CTV campaigns backed by Terminus segments is currently in beta testing. If you would like to get access to the beta, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Overview
Over 150+ million households are currently available through connected TV and it's the fastest-growing channel in video advertising. Here are a few benefits to incorporating Connected TV in your programmatic media campaigns that are worth exploring:
- Easily diversify both your arsenal of creative assets and advertising channels
- Advertise at scale - reach customers within your target accounts while they’re watching Hulu or other ad-supported streaming platforms
- Drive engagement with visually stunning video in the right place and time (non-skippable inventory)
- Maintain brand awareness, educate, or upsell/cross-sell. CTV ads are the perfect complement to traditional display campaigns.
Prerequisites
In order to leverage the newest Connected Television abilities, you will need to launch your campaigns using the Multi-Campaign Builder.
What is the Multi-Campaign Builder?
- The multi-campaign builder allows users to create and manage campaigns (including CTV campaigns) from a streamlined interface. This tool simplifies the process of building campaigns by guiding users step-by-step through the configuration process.
- The feature is designed to save time and reduce complexity for marketing teams running digital campaigns. By utilizing a simplified interface, users can easily create multiple campaigns with minimal effort, reducing the need for repetitive configurations.
Article Contents
- Creating a Connected TV Ad
- Measuring Performance with CTV Ads
- Use Cases
- Best Practices
- Media/Publisher Placements
- Creative Specs for CTV Ads
- Sample CTV Ad Creatives
Getting Started with CTV Campaigns
Select "Create Campaign":
- From the main dashboard, click the "Create Campaign" button in the top-right corner of the screen.
- Select the “CTV Advertising” tile and then select “Multi-Campaign Builder” in the top right corner.
Choose Campaign Type – CTV:
- A list of campaign types will appear. Select "Connected TV" as your campaign type.
- Click "Next" to proceed.
Creating Campaign Groups
To start, you will need to configure your campaign group. A Campaign group consists of multiple campaigns (and/or campaign types) launched to the same segment.
Name Your Campaign Group:
Your campaign group name should convey the overall goal the campaigns are aiming to achieve or the audience you are trying to reach.
Select Campaign Objective:
This will allow you to align your campaigns to our ABM playbooks and give your DMM an idea of how to best optimize your ads. (For more information on our playbooks, contact your CSM).
Choose a campaign objective from the drop-down menu. You can select from the following options:
- Brand Awareness: Create awareness and drive initial engagements from best-fit target accounts
- Build Pipeline: Nurture aware target accounts into more meaningful engagements and high-potential sales opportunities
- Pipeline Acceleration: Engage best-fit target accounts during the deal cycle to influence win rates, deal size, and deal velocity
- Retention: Retain revenue by monitoring risk and strengthening relationships among priority customer accounts
- Expansion: Identity and nurture high potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities among existing customer accounts
Please note that your campaign objective will apply to all individual campaigns within the campaign group.
Select Your Segment:
Next, you will select your campaign audience. Whereas in our legacy campaigns audiences came from multiple sources, the new display ads use our segment builder for sophisticated and flexible targeting. For more on creating segments, see the How to Create a Segment article.
Use the drop-down menu to choose the segment you wish to use. You can select your desired segment from the list or type the segment's name into the search bar.
After selecting your segment, you will see a preview of that segment. You can review the segment by clicking on "View Segment Details". Please note that at this time this preview only refreshes every 12 hrs, so there might be a delay between when you update a segment and what you see here.
Be sure to review the information to ensure it is the correct audience for your campaign group.
Target specific accounts in a segment:
After selecting your segment, you can narrow your audience to specific accounts within that segment by selecting the "target specific accounts" toggle below the summary. (Note: you will be able to select options like contextual, geographic or title targeting in the next section.) Focusing on a specific account allows you to create one-to-one (1:1) bespoke ad sets that are tailored to an individual account, and personalized to match their use unique case, pain points, or market.
Once you have selected the specific accounts within the segment, you can click the Next button. Your selections will autosave.
Configuring Individual CTV Campaigns
If you selected the CTV tile on the “Create Campaign” Start screen, you will see that the configuration for the CTV campaign type will already be selected for you in the builder.
Note: if you plan on launching multiple campaigns and/or campaign types, you can select the desired campaigns in the “Campaign Type(s)” section. This will allow you to configure and launch multiple campaigns at once.
When selecting the CTV campaign type, you will see a notification appear to remind you to upload your creative for the campaign. If you already have CTV creative in the Ad library that you plan on using, you can close this message.
If you do not yet have your CTV creative upload, select the “upload assets” button on this message. This will open our Ad library uploader in a second tab.
Note: The purpose of this is to allow for adequate upload times of CTV creative, as they can tend to be bigger files that take longer to upload. Additionally, pre-loading them into the library allows the platform time to run all the needed validations in order to ensure the best experience for your target audience.
Once you have uploaded your content, you can return to your original tab to continue the campaign configuration.
Step 1: Name your campaign
In the first box, enter the campaign name. The name must be unique and will help define the overall goal of the ad. For example, "Technology Vertical - Marketing Personas."
Step 2: Set the Budget and Duration
This section allows you to specify the budgets and the run times of the campaign.
- Budget: You are required to select a daily budget for the campaign, and you also have the option to set a total budget or a max spend per account. To get recommendations on budgeting, contact your Terminus CSM or reach out to support through the Terminus Support Portal. Both daily budgets and total budgets can be adjusted at any point while your tactic is running. Note: no total budget is set, the system will default to $200,000
- Duration: You have the option set a specific start date for your campaign 48hrs from now, or have it start as soon as possible. Additionally, you can choose an end date for your campaign, or you can let it run "indefinitely". This means the campaign will run until it is paused, archived, or 730 days has passed. Note: If you set a total budget and a specific end date, your campaign will stop running based on whichever setting is reached first.
If your campaign run times won't allow you to spend your whole budget or you would run out of money too soon, the system will give you a warning and let you know what adjustments need to be made.
Step 3: Audience Targeting
Within each individual campaign, you can narrow the reach of the selected segment by using specific department targeting, contextual keywords, specific location, or time of day targeting.
Narrow reach through department and contextual targeting
The first selection lets you determine how you want to refine the audience based on audience characteristics. Having different levels of targeting granularity allows Terminus customers to decide whether they want to stay at the broadest level and target an entire company, or drill down deeper and only target specific departments and/or senior-level decision-makers within specific departments. Note: while these tools are key parts of any advertising strategy, they can also drastically limit reach if used improperly. For guidance, please reach out to your DMM or account representative.
- By default, we will maximize your reach by targeting all departments in a non-contextual manner.
- You also have the option to narrow your reach by department. Note that this option is cookie-only, so this will prevent the ad from serving based on IP addresses.
Department Targeting
- When this option is selected, you will see a dropdown list appear for you to select your desired department. You can choose the department from the dropdown list or you can use the search bar to find what you are looking for.
- When selecting the department option, you will have the option to select one or more of our 27 functional groups specifically designed for B2B audiences. For a list of included functions in each department, see the Department Targeting table at the end of this article. This is a good option for customers who want to deliver function-specific messaging into different departments within their target accounts, and who are also targeting companies that have greater than ~200 employees. Within the department options, Terminus also provides the option to target the C-Suite and VPs. Selecting one of these two options will target the C-Suite and/or VPs across all departments in the company, and is not impacted by other department selections. Any specific department selections will include personas from the C-level and down. Selecting both "C-Suite" and/or "VPs" with additional departments will neither negate nor duplicate any personas included in any of your selections.
- You can also choose to narrow down to senior decision makers by checking the box. This option targets manager-level and above (specifically Manager, Director, Senior Management, VP, CSuite, Board and Ownership levels)for the selected department(s), or across the entire company. Seniority targeting happens behind the scenes at the job level or function, and is not based on specific job titles. Filtering the data in this way ensures that we don’t leave out key decision-makers, particularly at larger companies where a manager can have significant decision-making power. This is generally a good option for customers that are targeting companies that have greater than ~200 employees.
Contextual Targeting
Additionally, you may choose to use contextual targeting. Contextual targeting leverages a collection of keywords and phrases that scan ad site placements for textual content. This allows for your ads to be delivered across an infinite palette of content, and serve beside relevant browsing topics for your target audience.
Within contextual targeting you have two options:
- You can select specific keywords from our standard keyword list to narrow your reach by title or industry.
- If the Terminus keywords do not meet your needs, you can create your own custom lists of keywords, and have your DMM or CSM load them to Terminus. They will then be available in the custom lists drop down for selection. Please note that any customizations made in TTD will be overridden by these settings.
For more information on Contextual Targeting, please see the Contextual Targeting for Ad Experiences article, or reach out to your DMM.
Geo-targeting
The second section allows you to target specific locations. Geo-Targeting leverages location data to narrow targeting to only deliver impressions to audience members located within a specific location.
US and Canada Locations
- The first (recommended) option will allow for the broadest reach and target all locations.
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The second option will allow you to select specific locations directly from the campaign. Within the campaign, geo-location can be applied at the country (US and Canada only), region (state, province or territory), or city level directly in the campaign. Note that only the top 200 cities in the US and the top 50 cities in Canada are supported at this time.
- To select your location(s), choose city, region or country in the first drop down, and the corresponding location in the second one. You can choose as many locations as you want.
International Locations
Previously, all global campaigns had to be launched as a standalone campaign using our legacy functionality. With the new Multi-Campaign Builder, you can now easily launch your display campaigns to international locations when configuring your campaign.
To create a Global Display Campaign, select International Locations.
Once selected, you will see drop-down menus for each international region appear.
- To select an entire region, select the checkbox to the left of the search bar
- To select specific countries within a region, you can use the search bar to find a specific country, or you can scroll through the list of options
Custom Geo Targeting
In the event that you need to target cities or regions in the US or Canada not included in these options, you can choose the third option for custom geo targeting. If this option is selected, the campaign will launch in a paused state so that your DMM can make the desired location adjustments.
Time and Day Targeting
The third section allows you to refine the times and days at which your ad is displayed.
You can choose to display the ads during waking hours (recommended), business hours or all day. Additionally, you can choose to display every day (recommended) or only on weekdays.
Once you have selected all of your targeting options, hit "Save and Continue" to continue to the next section.
Measuring Performance with CTV Ads
Connected TV is a more premium channel with CPM’s averaging between $30-$60 across the industry. Common ways of measuring CTV include:
- Completion Rates- Measures the average completion rate of an ad. Completion reports are also available upon request from Customer Support
- Conversion Data: Conversion pixels can be placed to measure engagement. You should be able to collect data like identifiers for advertising (IFAs), CTV IDs, device IDs, IP address, and order value to better match the pieces. In addition, you can retarget those users through mobile and digital ads
- Control Groups are also highly recommended to measure the efficacy of CTV as a channel. Control groups can be configured in Data Studio to suppress audiences that are not receiving CTV ads to compare the performance of audiences who are receiving CTV ads.
*Please note that CTR’s are not a viable metric to analyze performance as CTV Ads rarely result in users clicking the actual ads.
Consult your CSM or DMM on how to configure control groups and Customer Support for custom reporting
Use Cases
Connected TV ad campaigns are best suited as part of strategies that include awareness and advocacy tactics. For example, always-on campaigns, brand or product awareness, and even retargeting are all ideal plays to include this highly engaging video ad that will increase engagement across all channels.
Best Practices
- Align CTV with Display efforts
- CTV can be used as full-funnel channel
- Be sure to craft a strong compelling message
- If possible, consider A/B testing CTV creatives across your target audience
Media/Publisher Placements
CTV Ads are run mostly pre-roll and mid-roll across streamed tv content. CTV is available for both US and International audiences. CTV Inventory in the United States consists of the following:
- Inventory from TV content owners (specific CTV apps and networks)
- Inventory from premium distributors (aggregators of TV content from multiple networks)
- Inventory from CTV SSPS (video-focused SSPs)
Top Providers include: Hulu, DirectTV Now, Pluto, Sling, Tubi, Discovery, SpotX, A&E, NBC, Fox, Newsy, Fubo, MLB TV, NFL TV, and NBA Tv.
Creative Specs for CTV Ads
CTV requirements recommended -
File Type: .MP4
Resolution: 1920x1080
Length: Up to 60 seconds, 15-30 seconds has most available inventory
*Bitrate range: 4000 kbps to 6500 kbps
Maximum File Size: N/A
Frame Rate: 23.98 or 29.97
Audio sample rate: 48 kHz
You can also see the PDF at the bottom of this article for more information on CTV specs.
*Creative within the bitrate range of 4000 kbps to 6500 kbps meets requirements for most CTV inventory. However, this requirement may range per many publisher, like Hulu which requires a bitrate range of at least 15,025 kbps. We recommend referencing here for additional kbps sizes that you should include.
Sample CTV Ad Creatives
You can also click here or here for CTV creative examples.
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