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January 29, 20236 min read

Performance marketing on CTV lifts brand awareness 8.6%

> 1.5x

+ Return on Ad Spend

+2.1%

+ Purchase Intent

+8.6%

+ Overall Awareness

THE CHALLENGE

Creating Long-Term Media Exposure

For a majority of large companies and organizations, increasing brand awareness and familiarity long-term is a challenge. This requires staying on top of marketing trends, emerging publishing channels, and audience behaviors - all of which change constantly. When brands invest in awareness campaigns, potential customers have a higher likelihood of committing to low frequency purchases such as annual subscriptions or renewals.

A well-known software company wanted to measure brand lift and customers acquired. The company came to Madhive to leverage CTV advertising to connect top-of-funnel brand metrics, like brand lift, with bottom-of-funnel outcomes, like purchases or website visits.

In partnership with Madhive, this client developed a successful new product launch by fine-tuning daily CTV ad budgets and frequencies to achieve a lift in overall awareness and return on ad spend.

THE SOLUTION

Democratizing Brand Lift Studies

Madhive successfully supported a robust brand lift study, something that has been historically exclusive to large national agencies. Through a strategic partnership with Upwave, a leading analytics platform for brand advertising, Madhive enabled:

  • Brand lift campaign creation 

  • Structured data collection, identifying what KPIs required measurement

  • The creation of KPI-aligned surveys

  • Organized data outputs to provide powerful visualizations of results.

Creating a successful campaign required strategic budgeting, pacing, ad frequency, and agility. Upwave provided the infrastructure and methodologies for accurate data collection while Madhive leveraged these datasets to provide this client confidence in driving mid-campaign changes for the highest impact of ads.

+ An “always on” strategy optimized to produce positive ROAS

Over the course of a year with Madhive, this advertiser profitably placed over $5MM in media to acquire customers at a positive ROAS. The client’s goal was to understand the optimal level of exposure at the top of their funnel for audiences most interested in purchasing an annual subscription for their software. By associating the advertisement campaigns to survey questions validated by Upwave’s data science, they were able to get precise benchmarks for evaluating brand campaign performance and highest likelihood of purchase intent. Alongside this upper funnel understanding of prospects, advertisements were tied into pixels to understand conversion rates and revenue attribution. Within the year, in-flight changes were made to improve on both fronts. The results from a full funnel strategy of this nature led to an average of 1.5x - 1.8x return on ad spend. 

+ An intelligent bidder that can support any goals

Madhive supported the ability to change campaigns in real-time decisively based on the brand’s KPIs. Built entirely in house, the Madhive bidder simultaneously can support large national brand budgets and precise small, local campaigns. For this client, we were able to recommend testing monthly, weekly and daily budget goals across the lifetime of the campaign. Between the three paces, it was established that a weekly pacing allowed a bit more bidder flexibility which normalized market conditions and CPM fluctuations.

+ Objective-based budgeting

In addition to pacing and frequency, Madhive was able to inform optimal spend. This client spent about $500k-$700k per month through 2022 and had been ROAS-positive for each month. But more money didn’t necessarily mean better results. In a “high spend” campaign where spend was $22.5k/day, they monitored a stable 1.5x-1.8x ROAS. In comparison, a budgeting pace of $40-50k/day noticed ROAS dipping below 1.0x, demonstrating a threshold for higher bursts of spend. With objective-based testing, this client was able to optimize efficiency of spend, finding the right audiences at the right cost while avoiding ad fatigue for potential buyers - a win for both sides. 

THE RESULTS

Driving Upper and Lower Funnel Impact with CTV

Madhive created custom reporting to not only understand the best budgeting, pacing and frequencies for the brand, but also advanced causation modeling based on industry benchmarks. Through 2022, Madhive was able to accurately assess the impact of advertisements on perception, purchase intent, and overall awareness for people stacked against the general population, providing the following results:

  • Return on ad spend > 1.5x

  • +2.1% on purchase intent 

  • +8.6% on overall awareness