Know what to measure, how to test, and improve your conversion rate to get the most out of this powerful and exciting revenue stream.
Growth marketers live by one rule: Always. Be. Testing. That means exploring emerging channels, and continually optimizing those you already leverage for maximum ROAS. But what exactly does a growth marketing strategy entail, and how can you test new channels without blowing your budget? It turns out, there’s a pretty foolproof methodology.
In this post, we’ll use the example of connected TV to get you thinking about growth marketing strategy for emerging channels. CTV adoption has skyrocketed over the last few years, with over two-thirds of the US population using CTV on a regular basis. In addition to providing access to a massive audience that continues to grow, CTV advertising offers unique measurement and attribution capabilities — making it a growth powerhouse. Here are five growth marketing strategy tips that will help you maximize ROAS on CTV or any other channel.
Dig deeper with "What Is Growth Marketing? A Complete Guide."
One of the most important growth marketing strategies is to decide on what you’re testing before you start testing. Unless you’ve set specific goals beforehand, you won’t understand how effective your ads really are.
Here are a few growth marketing KPIs to keep in mind:
Completion rate: Compares the number of viewers who finished watching the ad versus those who skipped/did not watch the video.
Cost per completed view: The most common metric for CTV, which divides the total campaign cost by the total number of completed views.
Cost per acquisition (CPA): Measures cost to acquire a single conversion, whether that’s a sale, download or other action.
Average order value (AOV): Derived from dividing sales revenue per order by total number of orders, it’s helpful in determining buying habits or trends.
Once you understand which metrics are the best measurement of your current goals, you can begin crafting your testing method.
CTV poses a unique challenge compared to other programmatic advertising: Users can’t click on their TVs. Because of this, advertisers have to get creative with how they measure — and test — their campaigns.
One way to get past last-click attribution is to implement incrementality testing before you commit to your ad campaign. Incrementality testing is similar to A/B testing, with one key difference. Instead of testing between two different versions of an ad, you’re testing the effectiveness of your ad against a control group that isn’t getting your ad at all.
The idea behind this is simple: you want to make sure the channel you’re running ads on will be a valuable use of your advertising budget. If your ad’s performance is greater than the control group in a statistically significant way, then the channel provides a positive incremental lift — that is, contribution on audience behavior — and is potentially worth expanding into. Likewise, if your control group outperforms your ad, you know it’s time to look for a different channel to test on.
You’re probably not going to know the best path forward after a single test. Adopting a “test-and-learn” mindset is key to determining the most effective growth marketing strategy to maximize your ROAS.
Test-and-lean is used by marketers, software developers, and Fortune 500 companies, and it involves understanding that you’re going to have missteps — and that a certain amount of failure is baked into the process of sustainable, long-term growth. Internalizing that concept and using it to refine your strategy with smaller test audiences before you roll out your entire strategy will provide you with more concrete information, more actionable data, and ultimately, better results.
After you’ve completed your first round of incrementality testing, look at your data and see if there are areas that need improvement, or other channels you haven’t tried yet. Test again, then examine the data from those results, making adjustments as needed. Continue to test and learn from the results until your KPIs are within the goals you’ve set for your campaign.
Once you’re happy with your testing results and have launched your campaign, it’s time to harness what makes CTV advertising so powerful.
Linear TV has a massive reach, but it can be prohibitively expensive (especially during prime TV watching hours), leaving all but the largest companies out of the loop. Even if you have the money to spend, the lack of effective tracking tools makes it impossible to know whether or not those ad dollars are leading to successful conversions.
On the other hand, CTV combines the attention and immersion commanded by linear TV advertising with the tracking of web-based advertising through retargeting. Now, you can rely on first- and third-party data to know whether a consumer has visited your website, engaged with your ad content on other platforms, or even filled an online shopping cart with your product. Then, you can display your CTV ad while consumers are most ready to be entertained, keeping your brand top-of-mind and increasing the opportunity for a successful conversion. Plus, you’ll have data that tells you exactly where that conversion took place, allowing you to hone in on the aspects of your marketing campaign that work.
The advent of CTV advertising and the wealth of data it brings finally means the days of wondering whether your ads are making an impact are over. It also brings new challenges to overcome, and the right partner can help you sift through the data so you can craft a marketing strategy that hits all of your marks.
As the world’s most sophisticated CTV advertising and attribution platform, tvScientific is uniquely positioned to provide insight for your growth marketing strategy and help you maximize ROAS. With fully integrated data and targeting for over 15,000 unique targeting segments, built-in incrementality testing and retargeting, and real-time reporting on critical metrics, we can help you adopt a test-and-learn approach to your ad campaign so you can get the most out of your budget.
Contact us today to learn more, and see how incrementality testing can help you achieve your ROAS goals.