When Pinger, a startup that develops messaging and communications apps, began experimenting with CTV promoting final 12 months, it discovered lots – about what to not do.
Pinger’s apps embody Sideline, which supplies customers a secondary telephone quantity on their smartphone, and a free texting and calling app referred to as TextFree. Collectively they’ve greater than 140 million downloads.
For Pinger’s first try, a promotion for TextFree, it labored with a CTV company that shall stay anonymous as a result of the marketing campaign “didn’t go tremendous effectively,” stated Brook Lenox, senior advertising supervisor at Pinger, talking on the MAU Vegas convention in Las Vegas final week.
“Mistake primary is that we actually thought a CTV company might information us by the method … and I might encourage you to not assume that,” Lenox stated. “I might encourage you to ask loads of questions.”
Ask “till they get just a little pissed off with you,” he stated.
For instance, don’t assume that an company goes to share marketing campaign information: Affirm it.
“That is new, they usually’re doing the perfect they will,” he stated. “However that doesn’t imply it’s essentially all there.”
Expertise is the perfect instructor
And so errors will probably be made.
Pinger didn’t do any focusing on, together with geotargeting, for its preliminary TextFree CTV marketing campaign. That method was a “large miss,” Lenox stated. Pinger additionally solely ran one piece of video inventive throughout the marketing campaign and didn’t observe metrics apart from monitoring the CPMs.
Pinger’s most important takeaway from its first CTV rodeo is that YouTube is a cheap CTV channel.
However, apart from that, “on the finish of the check we understood nothing,” Lenox stated.
And so Pinger ran one other CTV marketing campaign for TextFree and began working with Tetra TV, a CTV advert community and analytics platform launched in 2019 by two former Roku executives, together with Jim Lombard, now Tetra TV’s CEO and beforehand Roku’s head of advert gross sales and enterprise growth.
Final 12 months, when Pinger was operating its CTV experiments, Tetra TV was a brand-new scrappy startup, and Lombard would simply hop on the telephone with Lenox. “He educated me on all of the stuff I didn’t learn about CTV,” Lenox stated.
For its second TextFree marketing campaign on CTV, Pinger ran two completely different video creatives throughout YouTube, Tetra TV and Fb cut up throughout 4 geos. Pinger additionally added a branded search component utilizing Google Adverts and partnered with MNTN (previously SteelHouse and presently that advert tech platform Ryan Reynolds loves shilling for).
Pinger tracked account creation within the cities it focused (each earlier than and after the CTV marketing campaign ran) and ported the outcomes from its search marketing campaign into Google Information Studio so it might see the influence of its CTV marketing campaign on branded searches in these geos.
Each YouTube and TETRA had a optimistic influence on account creation, whereas Fb and MNTN’s influence was muted, he stated.
However Pinger didn’t have any management geo, solely check geos, which made it exhausting to discern whether or not there have been different elements that affected the outcomes. Its video creatives had been additionally too comparable to attract any conclusions about which was extra profitable. The one distinction was a minor variation within the textual content overlays.
Pinger additionally didn’t have a mechanism in place to trace engagement, which is necessary if you wish to deal with CTV as a efficiency channel.
Cellular app builders are accustomed to monitoring clicks, installs and sign-ups, however, to state the plain, there’s no option to click on on a CTV advert.
“At this level, we began to appreciate that CTV shouldn’t be your typical channel,” Lenox stated. “There are methods to trace a few of that [engagement] now, however, on this case, it was a reasonably large fail.”
Studying, rising
One option to observe engagement on CTV is to make use of QR codes, which made a comeback in the course of the pandemic and have develop into a go-to for efficiency entrepreneurs.
For its third check, Pinger added QR codes to its video creatives and ran them throughout the 2 best-performing channels from its earlier check (YouTube and Tetra TV) in 4 geos, which included three check cities and one management group.
Pinger additionally made certain that the creatives it ran this time round had been completely different sufficient from one another that it might study one thing from the check. One of many movies had a fairly small QR code positioned within the backside proper nook, whereas the opposite had a big QR code that took up nearly half the display screen. Each QRs had been static and remained on-screen throughout the advert.
Pinger tracked QR code scans and value per scan. Unsurprisingly, the advert with the bigger QR code carried out higher. However Pinger additionally discovered a couple of extra nuanced classes.
For instance, including a management geo to its focusing on gave Pinger extra confidence that its marketing campaign was truly having an influence within the check cities. Pinger additionally discovered refined variations in efficiency between its two greatest channels. Though YouTube was significantly better at driving searches, Tetra TV led to extra QR code scans.
And that was one in all Pinger’s largest takeaways: Know what you need to measure out of your CTV marketing campaign earlier than you begin.
All of it “depends upon what metric feels most necessary to you,” Lenox stated.
App Developers, Watch Out For These CTV Advertising Blunders