5 quick and dirty facts about TV tracking in 2018

Mobile attribution is our cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean we limit ourselves to just mobile devices. Broadcast TV remains the top media channel worldwide, and more than 8 in 10 internet users turned on a tv last month – so it makes sense that Adjust is fully integrated with various TV partners (such as Admo.TV, sambaTV and Teads) to provide accurate TV advertising attribution.

For mobile marketers who want an omnichannel look at their campaigns, or who want to know about how TV attribution models work, here’s a short overview of the most important things to be aware of:

There are multiple ways to perform TV advertising attribution

As our former Head of Communications, Simon Kendall, explained in a 2016 article for The Drum, there are at least three different ways to measure the effect of TV campaigns on mobile app behavior. Each leverages TV ad technology differently.

The first approach is based on the idea that a burst of users will engage with an app after seeing a TV spot for it. According to Blair Robertson, the CTO of TVSquared, “Close to 90% of viewers watch TV with second-screen devices in-hand or nearby. This, in turn, has made TV advertising a major driver of digital response – especially app activity. In fact, eMarketer found that a third of all smartphone users discover apps due to TV ads. For advertisers, quantifying and then optimizing TV’s impact on app activity is crucial.”

With this in mind, some attribution providers simply measure the size of the burst as it exceeds the typical volume for a particular region, time, and/or day. Another option, known as user-specific attribution, uses an algorithm to analyze the probability that a user was part of the burst influenced by the TV spot. A third method applies audio fingerprinting technology to identify the audio track of a TV spot, a technique first pioneered by Shazam.

Mobile marketers use TV ads to reach a variety of KPIs

Marketers don’t just turn to TV to boost installs. TV campaigns can be highly sophisticated and targeted towards specific demographics or campaign goals. Here are some client stories that TVSquared shared with us:

• A U.S.-based, app-driven home rental service used TV ads to reduce their app CPA by 30% in three months.
• An auto sales company was able to test various creatives to meet its goal of moving its customer base towards apps and away from web usage.
• A European online gambling company reconfigured its TV buys in order to maximize app reactivation among lapsed customers.
• A global online dating site not only found that TV was effective for acquisition, but that it could also be used to get existing customers to engage with the app more often.

TV attribution models are simpler than you think

When Garanti Payment Systems, a subsidiary of Turkey’s Garanti Bank, launched their finance app BonusFlas (a one-stop shop for credit card users), their top priority was to work with an attribution provider with a simple integration and the ability to track all of their marketing channels – including TV – in a single platform. They used one of our integrated partners to receive all of their TV install data in their Adjust dashboard.

TVSquared, for example, has a ‘one click’ integration with Adjust. What does this mean? Mutual clients can automatically send their app data to TVSquared for TV advertising attribution. The end effect, according to Blair, is that “brands running TV campaigns that are designed to drive web and/or app response can vastly improve the sales performance of their campaigns.”

Cohort analysis is key to measuring the success of a TV campaign

In our case study with Netmarble, we spoke with the makers of the very popular game Travelling Millionaire about how they met their aggressive goal of acquiring one million new players during their initial launch in Turkey.

Their approach combined mobile acquisition campaigns, banners, outdoor advertising, a combination of viral videos and influencer marketing, and TV ads that ran during some of Turkey’s most popular television shows, including the Beyaz Show and Survivor Show.

Using our cohort analysis tool, Netmarble were able to measure the uplift of organic installs coming directly from their TV activity. Specifically, they found that after being featured on the Beyaz program, their user base increased from 933 users to over 18,000 – in a matter of hours.

Quantity doesn’t equal quality

In our webinar with TV tracking partner wywy (now a part of TVSquared), we learned from Christopher Wendels, (formerly wywy’s Head of Product Development), that TV marketing campaigns don’t necessarily need primetime slots in order to be effective. He gave us a great example:

“We had a food delivery service we worked with in the US, and what was really clear was that their best-performing TV slot was primetime, so they got the most installs during primetime. However, from a cost perspective (what they were paying per TV ad) the most efficient placements that they had were actually in the early afternoon. So we definitely recommend not just looking at the absolute numbers, but taking the cost data for the different types of bookings and the different channels into account to see how the next TV flight, or how the next TV booking can be improved.”

Those are our top resources and tips for TV advertising attribution, unifying your TV advertising campaigns with your mobile presence. Want to learn more about the ins and outs of mobile marketing? Check out our mobile marketing glossary for an introduction from A to Z.