CTV campaigns are available for US, Canada, and Australia
Your CTV target audience must be located in the US, Canada, or Australia. You can physically be located anywhere in the world, though your audience must be in one of the aforementioned regions.
On Connected TV, contextual targeting decides where your ads appear rather than who sees them. Instead of matching people, it matches the programming - so your video ads run during shows and content that fit your brand.
AdRoll Connected TV (CTV) campaigns combine the storytelling power of TV with the targeting precision of display advertising to deliver high-impact video ads through streaming apps, either built-in or through devices like Roku, Apple TV, and gaming consoles. For an overview of AdRoll's CTV offering, see CTV Overview Guide.
CTV content categories
You can choose from our 90+ curated CTV content categories to showcase your ads during programming your ideal customer is interested in. It is an effective way to attract new customers watching programs that align with your brand and products.
- Some categories are country-specific. Ensure the correct location is selected to use them.
- Available categories differ between the Web and CTV channels, so a category you use on Web may not exist for CTV.
CTV and campaign objectives
Connected TV is not tied to a single objective. You can run CTV with Build Awareness, Drive Engagement, or Maximize Conversions to retarget people who visited your website but did not complete your conversion action. We recommend running CTV alongside your Web display awareness and retargeting campaigns rather than on its own.
Whichever objective you choose, contextual categories and your audience targeting are set separately, in the same Targeting section of your ad group.
Requirements to launch a CTV campaign
A $165/day minimum budget is enforced for each individual CTV campaign. For budget and audience size requirements based on your AdRoll package, see CTV budget and audience requirements.
For the best results with CTV ads, we recommend following AdRoll's CTV Ads Format Guidelines, which cover ad duration, resolution, format, bitrate, file size, and creative best practices. Keeping CTV ads within the suggested duration and loading the most impactful content in the first few seconds can significantly improve performance.
Our guide to CTV creative best practices covers creative strategy in depth, whether you are new to CTV advertising or refining an existing approach.
Add contextual targeting to a CTV campaign
Contextual targeting is set per ad group. These steps cover what is specific to CTV; for the rest of the builder, see Create Your Campaign.
- Create a campaign and, under Campaign Settings > Channel, select Connected TV.
- Set your Locations. You must positively target at least one location, and it must be within the US, Canada, or Australia.
- In your ad group, under Targeting, open the Contextual Categories & Keywords card and add the CTV content categories you want.
- Add your video creative in the Ads section.
- Set your budget, then select Submit. Select Finish Later to save the campaign as a draft instead.
Locations
For contextual campaigns you must positively target at least one location, and it must fall within the United States, Canada, or Australia.
Set Locations to Manual to choose your own within those three countries, including country, state or region, city, or zip code. In the example below we are targeting the United States, excluding the state of Hawaii.
Audience options
Contextual categories control which programming your ads run during. Your audience targeting is separate, and what you see depends on your objective. Under Targeting, open the Audience section.
With Build Awareness, select one of the following:
- Lookalike - We find people similar to your existing customers.
- Third Party Audience - Target based on interests, demographics, or life events.
You can only select one audience type per ad group. If you need to run more than one, add a separate ad group for each.
With Drive Engagement or Maximize Conversions, choose the audience you want to retarget by selecting an audience segment you already created, or creating a new one - for example, all website visitors from the last 90 days.
Check your estimated audience size
Once you have set your categories, audience, and location filters, the estimation widget shows how many households are eligible to see your CTV ads. This figure can change over time, depending on how many users we track in your selected audience and on your audience duration.
Bid settings on CTV
Under Bid Settings and Advanced Options, CTV uses Impressions:
- Due to the nature of CTV campaigns and how users interact with them, performance cannot be measured through Clicks, CTR, or CPC. Click data is not collected for CTV.
- Leave Target CPM blank to let BidIQ automatically maximize impressions within your budget.
- If you set a Target CPM, we suggest a target of $15 to $32 for CTV. We optimize toward your target, though actual CPM may vary.
- We suggest launching with AdRoll's default settings. To customize Frequency Capping or Campaign-Specific Placement Exclusions: CTV Apps, expand Advanced Options.
Budget
You can use Ad Credits for CTV campaigns
If you have Ad Credits as part of your contract, they can be used towards your CTV campaigns.
- A $165/day minimum budget is enforced for each individual CTV campaign.
- Your budget is automatically allocated among your ad groups by BidIQ.
For details on choosing between a daily and monthly budget, see Campaign Budget & Spend.
Measure the impact of your CTV campaigns
Because click data is not collected for CTV, measure performance on impressions and reach rather than clicks or CTR. Read our CTV Overview Guide to learn which CTV reports are available to you and which metrics to use.