A look under the hood: Click-throughs from streaming do not drive sales (and related measurement algorithm improvements)

At Tatari, we are continuously monitoring, analyzing and interpreting data to ensure high quality TV ad results for your business. We offer ads on streaming platforms that are shown through connected TV, mobile, and PC. For some ad deliveries on mobile and PC, platforms are enabling users to click through to your website URL that we’ve provided them. 

We’ve been analyzing traffic that comes from click-throughs across all streaming platforms and are observing zero to low conversions from click-through traffic which we don’t deem as high quality visits. 

Pictured above: Of the people who responded to the streaming commercials on CNN, 35.2% of them did so by clicking through on the ad itself. However, none of those responders ended up converting (or purchasing).

Source: Data collected January 2020 across all Tatari advertisers 

While these are actual clicks to your website, the placement of the link on these ads by the publisher could be causing people to accidently click through to your website, resulting in over-attribution (or a lower incremental cost per visitor (CPV) and cost per acquisition (CPA)), paired with a high bounce rate. 

Example view of bounce rates from website traffic

Our incremental measurement methodology is the most precise methodology in the industry to show true CPV and CPA as a result of the TV ad because we subtract out a control group of those who would have visited your website regardless of seeing the ad. We’re continuously improving this metric to make sure your results are high quality.  

Click-through and non-click-through responses should be separated out in our incremental measurement because those who visit your website by directly clicking through are lower quality traffic and we do not believe that’s the most accurate view of your campaign results.

To that extent, we are making the following changes to the algorithms to account for this. 

• In the streaming dashboard, your historical (from October 2019 to present) and future incremental CPV and CPA metrics will increase for certain platforms including NBC, CBS, CNN (and others) because we are separating out click-throughs from non-click-throughs (per the above, we deem them to be low-quality, despite the fact that there was a visit!). 
• In your offline reports, we will break it further down i.e. you’ll be able to see the visitor lift for click-through and non-click-through performance metrics.

A clear way forward

As the streaming TV advertising market evolves and grows (fast!), so do our products and measurement algorithms, as demonstrated above. We break new ground every day. The foundation, however, remains the same i.e. incremental measurement. We stand by this, yet rest assured that Tatari will continue to publish view-through measurement (with 1-, 7-, and 28-day attribution) along the side. These are there to provide you with an apples-to-apples comparison across your other digital channels.