Good marketing is all about creating an emotive connection with your target audience. And one of the means to achieve it is by personalizing user experiences. Every industry was quick to adapt to the increasing inclination towards personalizing customer journeys, but the advertising space was quicker to develop its own creative ways to make it happen. This new endeavor introduced the ad industry with the concepts of cohort-based targeting, customizing sales funnels as per acquisition channels, creating in-app events as per engagement rates, etc. All of the innovative ideas in the ‘now’ personalized ad industry found its culmination in the uprise of OTT – a highly intuitive platform that allows users to stream the kind of content they want to watch, anytime and anywhere. Given the specificity of its user engagement, OTT serves as the best platform for advertising campaigns, allowing you to tap into the customer journey at the highest attention stage. You can place your ads in the beginning, midst, or end of videos-on-demand and live-streams, to reach viewers who have expressed interest in your industry and its products. Coupled with the support of robust attribution platforms, like Trackier’s Mobile Marketing Platform, you can efficiently track the traffic garnered from an ad campaign, and quantitatively measure its ROI. Sounds interesting, right? So, let’s take a deep dive into this dynamic space, and how you can quantify your OTT ad campaigns!
Before we proceed further, let’s understand what is OTT. Over-the-top platforms offer digital content streaming services, wherein users can watch video content via mobile devices and desktops at their own convenience. Users are expected to register on the OTT platform, and initiate the streaming manually, while the ad spaces are filled by the publishers’ content as per the user activity. Since it is a form of programmatic advertising, OTT tracking needs to be conducted externally through the support of an attribution provider. Below is the list of OTT measurement and monetization strategies popularly used by brands:
AVOD (advertising-based video on demand): Freemium or discounts are offered as rewards for watching ads.
BVOD (broadcaster video on demand): Ads published on traditional TV. While they don’t come with incentives, BVOD has a higher chance of being noticed.
SVOD (subscription video on demand): Users are expected to subscribe to a platform, and in exchange, they are expected to view a set number of ads.
TVOD (transactional video on demand): Used by non-comitting users. Allows them to pay for selected content based on their interest.
OTT Advertising Metrics to Track
Excluding the dynamic nature of its content, every OTT ad campaign has the same features as the others. They’re set to achieve any of the given motives – increase brand awareness, boost traffic to the website, increase sales for all or certain products on the website, or publish big announcements about the brand. You can choose the KPIs to measure based on the goals you’ve set for a marketing campaign. It’s safe to say, you can never go overboard with OTT measurement. Here’s a list of the essential OTT advertising metrics that marketers vouch for:
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): Profit garnered from OTT campaigns. Calculated after deducting the expenses from total revenue.
Lifetime Value (LTV): The total sum a user is expected to spend in in-app campaigns, over a set period of time.
Cost Per Install (CPI): Calculated by dividing ad spend by total installs. Cost to generate one install from a campaign.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Amount invested by a brand on media platforms to acquire or convert one user during a campaign.
Click Through Rate (CTR): Average clicks received on an ad in ratio to the number of times it was visible to a user. This is only an indicative OTT measurement metric. Make sure you don’t make it your cornerstone for campaign optimization.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): Revenue amount projected to be received from a user. It is an estimate measured by dividing total revenue by the total number of acquired users in a campaign.
Putting it Together
OTT offers an equal amount of agency to both the users and marketers. So, while it may look like a tough job, your OTT tracking strategy would essentially depend on the nature of your ad campaign. Marketing campaigns that are oriented towards increasing outreach should aim to track the usual KPIs like Cost Per Mile (CPM), and Click Through Rate (CTR), while campaigns that are conversion-focussed must monitor their installs, or sales rate facilitated through an attribution platform like Trackier’s mobile marketing software. These initial set of KPIs can be further complimented by advanced metrics, like retention rate, and in-app engagement to assess the quality of users acquired through OTT campaigns. Just like the saying goes – the more you measure, the more you benefit!
