5 ways to measure your OTT campaigns

Updated October 04, 2021

With linear TV, advertisers are often left guessing the impact their TV campaigns have on their brand. But with Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns, also known as over-the-top (OTT) video ad campaigns, when brands are asked to show the impact of their advertising investment, they can do just that.

Below are a few of the ways you can tie results to your media investment using our suite of exclusive first-party metrics and third-party measurement studies.

1. Brand reach

Reaching audiences at scale is key to creating awareness for your brand. Content consumption has changed with the introduction of new video formats—in 2020, US adults watched an average of 140 minutes of digital video per day.1 A brand reach study will help you understand whether your OTT ad campaigns are reaching relevant audiences for your brand.

What can a brand reach study tell me?

Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) can help you determine the marketing reach, frequency, and gross rating points (GRPs) of your OTT ad campaigns. And if you’re running ads on both streaming and linear TV, you can use a Nielsen CTV Analytics study to measure the incremental audience reached through Fire TV, linear TV, or a combination of the two.

Why does that matter?

With today’s fragmented video consumption landscape, you need tools to effectively measure the total reach, incremental reach, and unique reach of your OTT ad campaigns, and how that compares to your linear TV buys. In a 2019 CTV Analytics study commissioned by Amazon for a global telecom brand, we saw that 61% of 18- to 49-year-olds reached by Amazon Streaming TV ads were exclusive to Amazon; this audience would have been missed with linear TV alone.2

2. Brand lift

OTT ads are a great way to drive brand awareness across audiences, and with our third-party measurement providers, you can measure brand lift.

What can a brand lift study tell me?

With a brand lift study, you can answer questions like: Did my OTT ad campaigns change the perception of my brand? Did they drive brand awareness, favorability, or purchase intent?

Why does that matter?

Armed with this information, you can better understand how your campaign messaging helped with awareness, perception, association, and purchase intent for your audience. For example, we conducted a brand lift study for a cereal brand and found its OTT ad campaign drove a 6% increase in ad awareness, 6% increase in brand favorability, and a 9.5% increase in purchase intent3— exceeding all category benchmark norms.

3. Branded search and new-to-brand metrics

Advertising on linear TV allows you to share your story and reach audiences at scale, but measuring whether those campaigns led to shopping activities can be difficult. With Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns, you can use our exclusive metrics, like branded search and new-to-brand, to help you understand the actions audiences take on Amazon after seeing your ad.

What can these metrics tell me?

Branded search metrics tell you whether your campaign drove branded shopping queries on Amazon. New-to-brand metrics can help you to understand how you're acquiring new customers on Amazon.com.

Why does that matter?

These marketing metrics help you measure whether your campaign messaging is spurring audiences to learn more about your brand. If your goal is to engage new customers, they can tell you whether that’s working. If your intent is to drive loyalty, they can tell you whether your campaigns are driving repeat customers. In a recent Amazon Streaming TV ad campaign, for example, Garden of Life saw a 12x increase in branded searches with 32% of purchases considered new-to-brand.4

4. Online visits

If you sell on Amazon, it’s important to understand how your advertising is driving engagement with your products. You can use detail page views and the detail page view rate as a way to measure this.

What can these metrics tell me?

With these metrics, you can compare product detail page views before and after your Amazon Streaming TV ad campaigns. This allows you to see if your product detail page views increased as a result of your campaign.

Why does that matter?

This helps you understand if your campaigns are driving engagement and shopping activities. For example, a food brand increased their detail page views by 29% year over year and 18% month over month as a result of their Amazon Streaming TV ad campaign.4

5. Off-line lift

Customers shop everywhere, and we know the importance of seeing how your campaigns drove off-line lift. To understand this, you can use third-party measurement studies, like Ninth Decimal.

What can it tell me?

With these studies, you can answer questions like: How did my campaign impact visits to physical stores? Or, how many of those visits occurred only as a result of my OTT ad campaign?

Why does that matter?

Being able to tie in-store visits to advertising has always been a challenge. With OTT ads and third-party lift studies, you can connect the dots. A quick-service restaurant saw an incremental increase of 26,000 store visits after OTT ad exposure, with nearly 29% of those visits occurring only because of the OTT ads.5

Conclusion

As the video landscape continues to change, you can turn to Amazon Ads to help you navigate with confidence.

quoteUpWith Amazon Ads, we get reach, we get insights, but most importantly, we get measurement tools so that we can actually see that our advertising is working.quoteDown
– Suzanne Ginestro, Chief Marketing Officer, Quest Nutrition

Want to learn more about Amazon Streaming TV ads and our suite of first-party reporting tools and third-party measurement studies? Check out our video ads page.

1 eMarketer, 2019.
2 Custom Nielsen CTV Analytics study commissioned by Amazon, 04/01/2019 - 06/30/2019.
3 Kantar Millward Brown, 2019.
4 Amazon internal, 2019.
5 Ninth Decimal, 2019.