How to Set Your TV Ad Campaign Up for Success & Measure the Impact

TV remains the most powerful medium to reach audiences and tell your story. While long-form ads provide a vital opportunity to personalize your brand, emotionally connect with people, and move them to action, it only works when the right audience sees those ads.

Foursquare’s Audience and Attribution solutions help brands achieve targeted campaigns across all TV inventory. After launching your TV campaign, Foursquare provides the TV advertising analytics necessary to analyze your ads’ real-world impact and optimize them to drive more potential customers into stores.

How to Set Your TV Ad Campaign Up for Success

A successful TV ad campaign requires intentional crafting. Here are a few tips to help you create ads that resonate with your audience and increase conversion rates.

Clear Vision

Have a clear vision of your marketing KPIs. These should align with your marketing strategy, goals, and activity, as well as be specific to your historical performance data.

Target Audience

Define a desired target audience consisting of the people you wish to reach with your marketing. You define your target audience by surveying current customers, analyzing the competition’s customers, reviewing past marketing metrics, and closely examining your social media following.

Storytelling

Tell a compelling brand story with your creativity. Ensure that your ads are simple to understand, meaningful to your audience, and personal enough to connect with them emotionally. However, don’t try to be something you’re not just because you think your audience will relate to it. Your story should always be authentic to your brand identity.

Call to Action

Always use a call to action in your marketing. CTAs prompt users to take action, driving engagement for brands that use them. Your CTA doesn’t always have to push viewers to buy a product; you can also give promotional or QR codes, repeat your telephone number or website address, or have them opt into your SMS messaging list.

Measure, Optimize, Repeat

Launching an ad is not the end of your campaign. You must learn how to measure the effectiveness of tv ads and optimize them based on the results. Over time, you’ll repeat this process as often as necessary to maximize your long-term return on ad spend. 

In addition, make sure to choose a consistent time frame to gather tv advertising analytics data on your KPIs and interpret that data in light of your strategy. You should then identify areas for improvement and specific actions you can take to reach your ultimate goal.

The Importance of Measuring Across All Media Channels

With TV campaign tracking, Foursquare allows you to understand the true impact of your advertising across all media channels, including linear, connected, and addressable TV.

Linear

Foursquare combines Inscape’s Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) feed with Kantar’s ad schedules. In so doing, it provides national linear TV attribution to help marketers learn how ​​to measure the effectiveness of television ads. 

It is critical to know whether and in what way  linear ads drive a consumer’s real-world behavior. This knowledge allows you to optimize and maximize your return on investment.

Connected

Studies show that 70% of the audiences reached via OTT/CTV could not be reached by linear-only campaigns, making connected TV a powerful complement to linear TV. Foursquare can pixelize your CTV campaign at the DSP/SSP or publisher level or ingest exposure logs for CTV inventory. 

Either way, CTV campaign results populate in real-time in the Attribution UI. This allows you to see who’s viewing your ads, how long they’re watching, and what actions they’re taking after exposure.

Addressable TV

Foursquare can ingest client-supplied MVPD exposure files for addressable TV measurement. With the unmatched customization that addressable TV offers, advertisers can reach a highly targeted audience with personalized ads for more granular attribution. For this reason, addressable TV data provides extremely reliable insight into true campaign performance.

How to Effectively Optimize Your TV Advertising Campaigns

Learning how to optimize and measure the effectiveness of TV ads based on the data you receive is a process. As you work to adjust your campaigns, ensure you include the following steps:

  1. Customize your optimization tactics
    • Analyze and optimize your TV campaign by partner, network, daypart, etc.
  2. Shift budget slowly
    • Avoid making major changes all at once
    • Consider any shifts to be a test and learn
  3. Focus on a few adjustments at a time to narrow the impact on performance
  4. Remember that it can take time for performance changes to show in reporting
  5. Keep track of trends in-flight
    • Review FSQ reporting on an ongoing (e.g., weekly) basis
  6. When an overall campaign or partner lift is absent, dig deeper into reporting
    •  Find areas that are performing well
  7. Work with FSQ to create custom reports (i.e., creative, audience, format)
    • Understand which aspects of the campaign are top performers
  8. Optimize toward tactics with strong confidence levels
    • Above 90% is
      • Actionable 
      • The highest incremental visitation attributed to ad exposure

When it comes to TV campaign tracking and optimization, a steady, data-driven approach is crucial to success.

Why Foursquare?

As TV becomes an integral part of your omnichannel strategy, Foursquare’s solutions help you move beyond impressions as a key performance indicator and more granularly select your audiences. 

Foursquare reaches hundreds of millions of people around the globe. With that level of reach, Foursquare Audiences can be activated across linear, addressable, and connected TV inventory. 

Perhaps you want to use the self-service Audience Designer to create your own customized audiences. Alternatively, you might choose to leverage the collection of more than 1,200 ready-to-use audiences. 

Whatever your preferred method is, Foursquares resources allow you to measure all types of TV inventory with store visits and online conversions, optimize in real-time across top-performing segments, and reduce TV campaign waste.

Foursquare allows you to activate Audiences and Attribution together. In doing so, you’ll ultimately gain the ability to use TV campaign tracking data to better understand your customers and their journey.

As a result, you can appropriately target your audience in your marketing campaigns and accurately measure the impact of that targeting. Foursquare does it all while prioritizing privacy through opt-in consent and aggregated results.

Powerful Results

With over 14 years of experience, Foursquare is the industry’s leading multi-touch attribution solution for marketers across all verticals. 

For more than a decade, Foursquare Attribution has produced a return on investment that exceeded 500%, a 671k benefits present value, and an 80% increase in incremental visits driven by each ad dollar spent. To learn more about how to measure the effectiveness of TV ads, talk to a Foursquare location expert today.

More on thought leadership

Protecting Location Privacy: Creating an Ethical Data Landscape

Learn More

In Conversation: Geospatial Analysis to Ensure Sustainability

Learn More

Consumer Privacy & Location Data: A Q&A with our Chief Legal Officer

Learn More