At Roku, we are constantly striving to improve our ad platform.
We’re excited to share newly released OneView capabilities that will give marketers more control over how they reach TV streaming audiences.
These enhancements cover a few areas. First, we’re helping advertisers who want to reach as many unique new households as possible to achieve that in a more effective and seamless way. Second, we’re making it easier for advertisers to set and optimize to a desired ad frequency per household. Finally, we’re enabling advertisers to leverage OneView performance and optimization tools to identify and bid on the most desirable opportunities across a range of streaming ad impressions on programmatic guaranteed deals.
Let’s dive in to each of these new features.
1. Our newest algorithm: Maximize Reach
We're excited to announce our new optimization algorithm in OneView that dynamically adjusts ad exposure distribution to provide the greatest possible audience reach while lowering the cost of acquiring new household viewers. With Maximize Reach, marketers can drive brand awareness and unique reach while delivering in full.
For example, when presented with an opportunity to deliver an ad to household A, which has seen it already, or household B, which has never seen it, the Maximize Reach algorithm will automatically deliver the ad to household B. There’s no need to manually optimize your ad campaign — OneView can now make this decision automatically.
Furthermore, to measure the effectiveness of Maximize Reach, Roku has introduced a new KPI metric, Cost Per Unique Reach (CPUR) — which refers to an advertisers’ cost to reach new viewers. In a 90-day test involving a number of customer campaigns, brands using the Maximize Reach algorithm saw:
Optimizing for reach has been a persistent challenge in TV media. On linear TV, advertising on a popular show was for decades a dependable way to get in front of large audiences, but did not reveal whether an ad reached unique households or the same ones found in other channels and dayparts. TV Streaming offers more visibility but until now lacked an easy way to optimize for reach in a simple and direct way.
Getting started is easy. There are no prerequisites to use the algorithm. Just go into OneView and select Maximize Reach from the “Optimization” drop-down list.
2. OneView’s Target Frequency setting
In addition to Maximize Reach, advertisers can also leverage Target Frequency to set the desired number of times their ads will reach a household. By efficiently attaining optimal ad exposures, marketers can reduce wasted impressions, boost effectiveness and improve the ad experience for viewers.
Target Frequency is best for products or services with a higher price point or lengthy consideration window. Marketers are more interested in reaching their audience more than once and at different points within the consideration window. Target frequency allows marketers to achieve this effectively. Another use case is for seasonality, as marketers may choose to set a Target Frequency for big events like Black Friday or Back-to-School sales. During big sale events, it can be helpful to reach your audience multiple times during the event to help retain awareness of the sale you're trying to drive. No matter the scenario, if you’ve done the market research and know your optimal number of ad exposures, you can use Target Frequency to optimize your campaigns.
Before the Target Frequency enhancement, many advertisers would set their ideal frequency as a frequency cap because most streaming partners do not offer a frequency optimization solution. The benefit of using target frequency instead of frequency caps is that your campaign will optimize towards that value, not just be capped at that value.
In a seven-day experiment we set the Target Frequency at five — and it worked to perfection. A test group was served five ads per week per household and 25x more households were reached five times.¹
3. Enhanced Programmatic Guaranteed
Finally, Roku is excited to announce a significant upgrade to our programmatic ad-buying platform. Called Enhanced Programmatic Guaranteed (ePG), the new offering is designed to give marketers the best of both worlds: run on programmatic guaranteed deals, and automatically buy the most desirable programmatic ad opportunities to optimize ad spend. ePG still paces for full delivery but allows OneView to make decisions on which opportunities are best, without sacrificing spend or pacing.
For example, if a bid request is expressed for a household that isn’t likely to convert or engage, OneView will pass on the opportunity. If a more attractive bid can be made for less, it will go with the less expensive option.
This feature represents a major enhancement to the Programmatic Guaranteed offering, which allowed real-time automated purchasing of ads. While marketers liked the offering because it most resembles traditional buying and provides the safest route to full delivery, it required the buyer to accept every incoming ad opportunity — limiting optimization capabilities and the benefits that come with it.
With ePG, advertisers get access to campaign management and optimization tools that were previously locked out of programmatic campaigns. They can set frequency caps that consider all PGs and private marketplaces (PMPs) on a campaign, as well as drive increased reach and reduced CPUR.
Contact us to learn more about the power of OneView.
¹ Source: A/B test run for seven days, where the only variable changed was the target frequency. Test group had a target frequency of 5, control group had a target frequency of 1
