Attribution for over-the-top advertising campaigns continues to develop.

Now providing campaign insights previously unavailable with traditional TV.

OTT refers to “over the top,” film and television content provided via a high-speed internet connection instead of a cable or satellite provider. The video streaming market is on a roll, with now-10-year-old Netflix continuing its domination in the OTT market.

Competition abounds, with the likes of Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Hulu, Quibi (for now), Peacock, and others joining the party. A lot of Internet users are logging in to over-the-top services and taking in content.

OTT is giving traditional broadcast and digital advertisers a run for their money, especially as people homebound by COVID-19 thirst for more content to watch. If you are a broadcast advertiser, you need to pay attention to OTT and attribution.

OTT Attribution Support Now Available from LeadsRx

LeadsRx has added support for OTT advertising within our impartial multi-touch attribution (MTA) capabilities. You can benefit by now being able to compare the cost-effectiveness of the medium alongside other mediums.

You cannot “compare” OTT point solutions since they only look at a single medium without regard for others. To truly measure “cost-effectiveness,” it requires return on ad spend (ROAS) analysis that correlates revenue to the spend that earned that revenue.

OTT is Now Part of Your Multi-Touch Attribution Landscape

As we’ve always done, LeadsRx evaluates data across ALL marketing touchpoints together, including organic and paid search. This cross-channel approach of analyzing your OTT campaigns means you can better measure their effectiveness, as oftentimes those advertisements drive prospects to engage with other marketing channels (i.e., Facebook and Google).

OTT is an impression-based medium, and it influences consumers to visit an advertiser’s website, which typically is found via search. Organic and paid search results often get credit for these visits; however, the OTT spot likely convinced the consumer to take action. It takes impartial multi-touch attribution data to determine which OTT campaigns are successfully pushing conversions.

OTT Attribution: How it Works

You now have a way to measure commercial spots airing and streamed to connected devices that includes “smart” televisions as well as any screen that has the capacity to display OTT content, including those using Chromecast, Firestick, or Roku. Here’s how it works:

1. Our Universal Conversion Tracking Pixel™ is installed on the advertiser’s website
2. The pixel captures 100% of the advertiser’s inbound marketing programs and tracks critical conversion points – like form fills or ecommerce sales
3. When an individual streams an OTT episode, LeadsRx receives information from a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR) and advertising data
4. Advertising spot log data is automatically ingested. This eliminates human intervention and typographical errors, as well as faster, more-accurate insights
5. Depending on how and where the stream is consumed, anonymous identification data may include an IP address, timestamp, channel, episode, and ad ID
6. This OTT advertising data is fed back to LeadsRx and compared against all the other marketing programs
7. By evaluating this data across all channels, LeadsRx is able to attribute online conversions to the OTT campaigns that influenced them
8. Optimization insights are made available in real-time, allowing for in-flight marketing changes to OTT advertising campaigns.

You’ll want to make sure your marketing efforts are focused and strategic, especially if you are new to OTT advertising, are launching a new brand, or are trying to rev up an emerging or existing brand. Attribution eliminates the “spray-and-pray” stigma often attached to broadcast advertising.

If OTT is the right fit for your brand, it should definitely be a part of your marketing campaigns. As a provider of impartial MTA, we believe providing content and messaging across multiple channels – and accurately measuring their effectiveness – is essential. And attribution can tell you, pretty quickly, if OTT is indeed a fit for your business.

OTT and Addressability

OTT advertising is unique and here’s why:

Addressability: OTT is getting closer to dialing in on addressability in advertising, meaning you can advertise within the same content but provide different ads to different people, focusing in on their likes and wants.

Personalization: If you know a certain show matches well with your content, wouldn’t it be great to have viewers of those shows seeing your ads? With attribution’s impartial, accurate measurement, you can deliver the right message to the right people.

OTT Customer Journeys: The more you know about your customers through attribution insights, the easier it is to target them in the future. By gathering accurate data, and identifying their customer journeys, you not only reach the right people, you give them a better customer experience.

Cross-Device Tracking: You can identify cross-device IDs with OTT viewing patterns, in addition to IP-matching, to help define who the customer is and what they are looking for. This is done through web and mobile traffic tracking, thus ads can boost addressability by using accurate customer data to better segment the viewing audience.

Personalization: Advertisers can deploy ultra-personalized, targeted ads that are more effective and relevant to specific users with attribution solutions for OTT.

Granularity: OTT allows tracking at a more honed-in level than traditional TV. It’s possible to connect an ad view to a specific website visit, download, or purchase. You can then focus your ad dollars on the channels and campaigns that are working.

Cord-Cutting Increases: The Future of OTT is Bright

More and more people are cutting the cord, dropping traditional TV viewing methods. Not surprisingly, there is a growing population (millennials, Gen Z and younger) who will never know what it’s like to have cable or satellite TV.

Regardless of content consumption trends, we continue to preach that you need to meet consumers where they are taking in information – broadcast (TV and radio), online, on their phones, OTT, podcasts (another burgeoning channel), on social media, and more. Not all consumers are the same – which is why MTA is so vital – and they use certain channels, or a combination of them, to take in content.

LeadsRx supports the following list of growing ad mediums:

• Digital advertising, such as Facebook, Google, display ads
• Traditional broadcast (AM/FM radio, satellite radio, TV)
• Email marketing
• Podcasts
• Social networks
• Influencers
• Affiliates
• OTT

For more on OTT attribution, schedule a demo.