Which Channels Scored for Our CTV Test?

Going into our first B2B CTV ad campaign, we were curious to see which publishers would give us the greatest reach for our niche audience of media professionals and B2B marketers. 

We had our suspicions — given some of the greater trends occurring in the CTV landscape — but it was interesting to see it play out even for our highly specialized audience. 

While our ad had robust impressions on channels like ESPN and CBS News, two categories really stood out: 

These content providers are growing in popularity amongst viewers, and across the board they're rising in the ranks for many of our clients, too.   

While many advertisers like to create a campaign with specific publisher parameters, we didn't know much about our audience's viewing habits beforehand, so we decided not to set any limits. Instead, we focused on audience targeting, and set out to see where the Madhive persona is watching content. 

We included both retargeting and third-party data sources when creating our audience targets, focusing on C Level Executives and Business Decision Makers in sales & marketing and media.  

For the first two flights, our campaign matched to viewers on FAST and vMVPD channels almost half the time; 40% of our impressions were delivered on these channels. This is similar to what we see with our clients, who are mostly running B2C campaigns. 

If you're familiar with this category, the list of our top publishers for impressions probably won't surprise you: 5 out of the top 10 are FAST or vMVPD. Sling has been our number one publisher throughout the entire campaign. 

The top channels: 

Because these channels were driving our impressions, they're also responsible for many of our conversions too, which we defined as a visit to our site after viewing the ad. 34% of our unique conversions were from the above channels, and 16% were from Sling alone. Additionally, Xumo's conversion rate checked in above the baseline average for the entire campaign. 

Early in the campaign, we noted that several prospective Madhive clients told us they had seen our ad during a sporting event. This was exciting to hear, and made us wonder if sports were a good fit for our message.  

Looking at publishers with the top conversion rates, this might hold true. Both Fox Sports and ESPN were trending above the average conversion rate, with .16% and .09%, respectively.

While there were other publishers that also proved very efficient at conversion, these two were notable winners that align to what we're seeing in the industry of late. Every major streamer is trying to gobble up the rights to air sports content, because the audience is particularly engaged — and our test seems to prove that out. 

Our test is coming to a close, and we're analyzing all the data to see what else we can learn.  

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