Measuring TV advertising effectiveness has evolved. Thanks to Connected TV (CTV), brands now have access to advanced targeting and precise performance tracking. In this article, we’ll explain what CTV measurement is, how it works, and why it’s critical for advertisers looking to understand real brand impact across modern TV platforms.
What is Connected Television?
Connected TV (CTV) is a television with direct access to the internet. Also known as a “smart TV,” it allows you to watch films or series via streaming platforms, or check out the latest updates from your friends on social media.
CTV has become a constant and permanent feature in homes around the world. According to the CSA, 81% of homes with a TV now have a television with an internet connection and 56% of French consumers watch VOD (video on demand) content each week on their CTV. Meanwhile, in the US, about 88% of households now watch CTV.
Why CTV measurement matters for advertisers
The boom of connected television in homes has created new opportunities for advertisers.
The main advantage for advertisers is the ability to target consumers with incredible precision through advertising campaigns.
Traditional television offers fairly limited targeting variables: standard audience for a channel or program and broadcasting time, for example. Conversely, CTV offers impressive finesse when it comes to targeting—up their with other digital formats.
Despite the tightening of personal data protection and the progressive disappearance of cookies, you can still reach individuals with greater precision, using social-demographic criteria or even some online behavior criteria.
Broadcasting advertising campaigns and their messaging can be increasingly customized to improve consumers’ experiences with your brand.
Naturally, advertising budgets tend to be much higher than for traditional televised spots, and brands are taking on the challenge of optimizing the return on investment for their campaigns. This means going beyond short term metrics such as impressions and measuring long term impact on brand impact metrics such as brand image and consideration.
How to measure advertising effectiveness on Connected TV
Advertisers can measure connected TV ad effectiveness by launching a Brand lift. A Brand lift that involves surveying people about an ad. Typically, this involves collecting responses from an “exposed group” (people who were exposed to the ad) and a “control group” (people who weren’t exposed to the ad).
By comparing the responses of the two groups, advertisers can measure the ad’s effect on key performance indicators such as attribution (the audience share that recalls brand or product’s name), interest (personal interest in the brand of product), and consideration (considering a brand or product as an option).
When you take a brand lift measurement, you’ll first need to select the main key ad performance indicators. For example:
- Adveritising recall: Whether people remember the ad.
- Consideration: Whether people consider the brand or product as option when it comes to making a purchase.
- Purchase intention: Whether people intend to buy the product or service.
This selection should be made to align with the specific challenges you’re tackling, such as:
- Broadcast performance
- Message relevance
- Impact on commercial memorability
Once you’ve set up your dashboard, you’ll be able to analyze the performance of your campaigns in real time and compare them with campaigns in the same format for similar industries.
How CTV measurement works without cookies
To measure Brand lift in a world without third-party cookies, we’ve developed a “cookie-less” pixel with our DSP partners—purpose-built for environments like connected TV, where cookie-based tracking simply doesn’t apply.
Instead of cookies, the pixel uses a combination of the device’s IP address and user agent — including details from the operating system and browser—to determine ad exposure. In CTV scenarios, only the device’s IP address is used, which remains effective due to the stable nature of household IPs.
This cookie-less measurement approach enables fully GDPR-compliant tracking. It does not store personal data, and the identifiers it uses—such as IP address and user agent—are pseudonymized. Because no cookies are involved and no individual can be directly identified, the method ensures privacy without sacrificing the accuracy of exposure measurement.
Using benchmarks to evaluate CTV campaign success
To truly gague the success of a CTV campaign, whether you’re analyzing brand lift or calculating ad recall lift , it’s important to understand where it sit in the context of industry norms. By comparing against similar campaigns, you’ll be able to understand how well it performs in terms of overall impact as well as a range of specific KPIs.
We’ll enable you to take you measurements even further by providing benchmarks based on all of the campaigns we’ve measured for more than 2,000 advertisers.
These benchmarks will allow you to position your performances in relation to other, similar commercials across a business sector or a specific media, such as CTV.
CTV ad benchmarks provide context about your Connected TV campaign performance, helping you to identify your relative strengths as well as areas for improvement.
How Happydemics measures the performance of commercials broadcast on Connected TV
Happydemics has become a key player when it comes to measuring advertising performance.
Our clients are easily launching Brand lifts for all their campaigns to measure the impact of a commercial broadcast on connect TV in terms of real exposure.
We give you the ability to identically survey two groups of individuals with similar profiles. One will have had real exposure to your commercial via CTV, and the other won’t have been exposed.
This method means you can be sure that you’ll gain understanding of the real impact of your commercial for your brand by comparing results from two populations.
A real world example of Smart TV advertising measurement
For its initial brand lift measurement for a commercial on connected TV, Happydemics has worked with Rommatic, a trading desk based in the U.K. specializing in programmatic advertising and part of the Freethinking Group.
Thanks to this partnership, Rommatic can use specific results from a trusted third party on the performance of its campaigns in order to provide better advice to its clients and hence deliver better support as a result.
Connected TV is quickly becoming a key advertising channel—one where precise measurement is not just possible, but essential.
With Brand lift measurements and real exposure tracking, advertisers can understand how their CTV campaigns influence KPIs such as brand perception and purchase intent.
Want to learn more about how to measure your advertising effectiveness on Connected TV?
