5 Tips for Setting Up a Successful Programmatic Retargeting Campaign on TV

The rise of CTV has helped bridge the best practices of digital and TV advertising. Now, advertisers can replicate one of digital’s best-performing tactics – retargeting – on the biggest and most engaging screen in a consumer’s household. In doing so, they can leverage all of the bidding mechanisms available to digital advertising, bringing a new level of efficiency to TV advertising while also incorporating a critical data-led targeting element that drives performance.

"At Tatari, we have seen TV retargeting spend grow 4x YoY among clients."

Given that CTV is still a relatively new medium for many brands, and that retargeting on TV may represent a new strategy entirely, Tatari is here to help build out your initial campaigns. When constructing a programmatic retargeting strategy, we recommend starting with the following five actions.

1. Segment audiences by website activity

In a basic digital retargeting strategy, segmenting based on unique website activity lets advertisers reach the right users with the right messaging at the right time, because you are serving ads based on past behavior. 

Thankfully, the same capabilities are available for TV. TV happens to be one of the most inexpensive ways to prospect for new customers when taking a data-driven approach. There are many different ways to think about segmentation, but two of the most effective are: a user’s behavior on a website and a user’s level of engagement.

• When segmenting based on user behavior, consider breaking down audiences into stages of purchase. This would entail bucketing users into categories such as website visitors, visitors that have added an item to their cart, and visitors that have signed up for a promotion. You could also consider segmenting visitors based on the specific items they have viewed, such as clothing or home decor. Following this segmentation, cater your messaging to each unique segment. Tatari has found that by taking this approach, we’ve helped clients reduce their CPAs by upwards of 50%.

• In addition to segmenting based on levels of engagement, you can also factor in recency and number of visits. Bucket visitors based on the number of times they visited your website, grouping those with 1-3 visits separately from those with 4-6 visits. Then factor in recency, grouping those that have visited in the past seven days separately from those that visited in the past 30 days.

**At Tatari, we leverage our client’s 1st party data to segment audiences in numerous ways and customize each client’s retargeting campaign accordingly. The larger the audience and the more information we have, the more ways the data can be sliced.**

2. Focus on high-quality, premium inventory

Many people think of TV retargeting as video retargeting; however, that’s not necessarily true. While at Tatari we arduously work on curating online video inventory content lists via our direct to publisher relationships, we strive to first launch all our retargeting campaigns in the most premium environment, full episodic player content, a.k.a. Streaming Apps. 

This device-agnostic and content specific strategy means that retargeting ads run on high-quality, premium networks such as ESPN+, Hulu, Discovery, NBC, AMC, and A&E. Because these premium content apps are viewed across devices (you can watch ESPN+ on CTV, as well as on your desktop, mobile, or tablet), brands have the ability to target users regardless of the device they are using. This opens the door to make optimizations based on performance broken out per streaming app or bundle ID.

3. Leverage sequential retargeting

Retargeting allows brands to use data signals to determine the kind of message the consumer receives, which allows for different messages to appear depending on where the prospect is in the buying journey. Aligning creative messaging to the different stages across the sales funnel is invaluable. 

With the help of Tatari’s DSP features and ACR partners, brands can re-engage users that have previously received a TV ad, but have not visited your website. These users would receive a different creative to increase their brand recall and help drive them to the site. If they did see a TV ad, and visited the website, brands can also re-engage these consumers with a different, lower-funnel message to drive them across the finish line to conversion.

4. Test out different creatives

Building off of aligning messaging with the sales funnel, TV retargeting also provides the opportunity to run different creative tests and then optimize based on the performance results. We recommend A/B testing different creative permutations in every retargeting campaign. Each creative should have a strong call-to-action to incite users to convert and should be adjusted to the various ways that brands structure their retargeting campaigns.

5. Partner with companies with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR)

We talked a little about this above, but ACR is a technology built into smart TVs that identifies what is playing on a TV. Thanks to Tatari’s partnerships with ACR providers, we can isolate the households that have been served a TV ad and retarget them accordingly. This way, brand partners can capitalize by targeting users that are most likely to engage with the ad content on TV. This results in higher performance and more efficient spend. Consider working with companies that have relationships with ACR providers to either reach incremental users for your TV campaigns or increase the frequency and engagement per user.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Tatari can help you integrate retargeting into your media plans, please reach out to Tatari to schedule a demo with our team.