TV streaming has the power to boost the other channels in your media mix. But how do you measure the impact of TV streaming on your other advertising channels? More importantly, how do you determine TV streaming’s influence on sales when viewers purchase on other screens?
The answer is cross-channel analysis. Here, we’re going to show you how to do cross-channel analysis with TV streaming, search, and social.
The meaning of cross-channel analysis is right in the name. It enables you to visualize the customer journey to understand touchpoints across TV streaming, social, and search that result in conversions. This can be hard for growth marketers and advertisers, though, because unlike other digital media channels, TV streaming drives conversions without trackable clicks.
The nature of TV streaming is that viewers take action on a different device than where the ad displays. This can lead to misattributing conversion and underestimating the role that TV streaming plays in each customer journey.
TV streaming is where customers spend most of their time. The average is 99 minutes per day on streaming vs. 53 minutes on social and just 11 minutes a day on search.* Yet a model that favors last-click attribution won’t tell the whole story of TV streaming’s role in driving clicks because users don’t interact with TV streaming content the way they do with social and search.
*eMarketer, 2019; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019
Consumers are spending more time on TV streaming
And streamers report that they’re often shopping on other devices while streaming: 62% of Roku direct-to-consumer (DTC) subscribers (defined as Roku streamers who subscribe to a DTC product or service) say they purchased/signed up online using their mobile device, and 50% say they did so on a desktop or laptop.
With cross-channel analysis, you can glean insights into customer behavior at every stage of the buyer’s journey without having to decipher the origins of a last-click attributed conversion.
Roku Internal Survey Results, November 2021
Cross-channel analysis helps you understand the relative contribution of each channel to a specific campaign outcome and other channels. This includes TV streaming and its impact on search and social advertising.
The key advantage of cross-channel analysis is that it helps you parse out where your conversions are coming from and how the individual channels in your media mix are contributing to your results.
OneView, the ad-buying built for TV streaming, implements advanced cross-channel analysis that includes TV streaming, social, and search to help marketers better understand the paths to purchase. With these insights, a growth marketer can develop strategies for right-sizing media investments in mid-to-upper-funnel tactics. Many advertisers have learned that they should spend more on them.
As shown in the reporting example below, cross-channel analysis creates transparency by illustrating how OneView participates in a typical conversion path and where OneView is exclusive to a particular touchpoint.
From there, you can develop audience profiles based on your insights into the TV streaming behaviors of converter segments.
A D2C beauty subscription brand was looking to drive incremental signups for its subscription box beyond those driven by always-on search and social spend.
The brand used OneView to reach and engage women with a TV streaming campaign and re-targeted exposed viewers with digital video to reinforce engagement.
The results:
Upon analysis of conversion paths, the brand realized that TV streaming played a vital role in converting consumers.
Cross-channel analysis was the key to interpreting this marketing win and capitalizing on it.
Understanding the customer journey is a key element of effective omni-channel marketing. Cross-channel analysis is how you gain that understanding, by determining overlap across search, social, and streaming.
Operating from this framework will not only lift conversions across all your channels in the short term, but cross-channel insights and in-depth audience profiles will also inform your TV streaming strategy moving forward.
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