With the rise of internet-based businesses and e-transactions, digital engagement has become a key factor while measuring return on investment. This makes it increasingly important to understand the impact of different mediums such as TV, OOH, Radio, etc. on a brand’s digital metrics.
Despite the 90% overlap between India’s digital and TV viewing populations, both mediums operate in silos and TV’s impact on digital has been hugely underestimated. Advertisers still spend the largest slice of their ad budgets on TV, even though they cannot measure how it impacts their bottom-lines. As a result, 25% of overall ROIs which should be accounted to TV end up being attributed to other mediums. This makes it very difficult to optimize both TV and digital media plans through integrated efforts.
Can TV advertising become more than just a branding exercise? How can we give this medium credit for critical bottom-of-the-funnel metrics?
Zapr has now made it possible to accurately attribute people’s TV commercial exposure to digital actions such as website/app visits, installs, downloads and in-app sales. The attribution is made in near real-time and a report is shared on a daily basis.
This advanced way of detecting TV commercial viewership in real-time is powered by audio content recognition (ACR) technology developed in-house. Each user is identified with their Google Advertising IDs (GAID) and not any personally identifiable information.
How does the attribution process happen?
- Understanding objectives: The advertiser tells us exactly what digital actions/metrics they want to attribute to their TVC. This includes website traffic, app installs, search engine and social media. Eg: Finding the number of app installs on a daily basis during a TV campaign.
- Setting up benchmarks: Zapr sets up baselines for each metric to identify how it improves with the TVC campaign. Eg: An app sees an average of 5 installs per day without running TVCs.
- Precise attribution: The advertiser shares metric data with Zapr and we map it with actual TV viewership. Eg: The brand shares daily app installs during TVC. Zapr shares daily attribution reports by specific ad creatives (ad spots, language), performance on shows/channels, genres, time-slots, and geographical insights (states, Socio-cultural region and city levels).
Here’s a more detailed breakdown from the attribution process - right from setting up audience profiles for specific TV commercials to daily reports on different metrics:
What digital actions can be tracked to TV commercial viewership?
Our attribution process can track namely three kinds of digital metrics and attribute them to people’s TVC viewership: website / app traffic, social media and search engine analytics.
For tracking website traffic, the client is also required to share the GAIDs of website visitors in order to find accurate correlation.
What does the final attribution report contain?
There are three types of insights that a brand can get from the attribution report:
- Performance insights: this breaks down how the specific digital metric, for example app installs, performed when exposed to TV commercials on different channels, shows, genres and time bands (eg: 8 PM - 9 PM).
- Geographical insights: we look at the TVC performance at state, socio-cultural region, city and hyperlocal levels vis-a-vis the specified digital metrics.
- Ad creative insights: This looks at which TV ad creative or language edit gave the best digital results, and the analysis is conducted at an ad-spot level.
These insights can be used to optimize TV campaigns in such a way that they would boost a brand’s digital metrics.
What goes into making a fool-proof attribution model?
- We follow a time decay based model which attributes a digital action to the closest time frame of when an ad was aired on TV. For example: If a user made an action closer to 6:45pm than 6:30pm, the 6:45 ad-spot gets higher weightage for attribution.
- Secondly, we take a channel-reach based weighted average where we don’t directly correlate a channel’s reach number to its digital impact owing to varied viewership. This prevents data skewing towards or against heavily watched channels.
- And thirdly, we choose the optimum attribution window based on previous campaign data. While we start with a default window of 30 minutes before and after an ad airs on TV, we do this analysis to understand the most effective time-frame for calculating digital actions in relation to TVC exposure.
For app based businesses, a similar solution called 'Convex' helps track TV commercial exposure among app users and its impact on user behaviour on the app.
TV to digital attribution is exactly what the industry needs to bridge its offline and online mediums. By tracking the buyer’s journey right from awareness on every marketing platform right to the final act of purchase, brands can hugely optimize their ad dollars and back every decision with data that’s accurate, immediate and reliable.
If you’d like to learn more or request a demo, click the GET IN TOUCH button on the top of this page!