Tips for running successful performance CTV ad campaigns
TL;DR: How to run ads on CTV to drive outcomes, not just awareness
- Running a successful performance CTV campaign starts with defining your goals, setting your budget, and choosing the right inventory.
- Avoid overly restrictive targeting, set frequency caps, and adjust your bids based on inventory costs to reach more viewers without wasting ad spend.
- Once your campaign is running, monitor performance, test different strategies, and use what you learn to improve results.
Understanding how connected TV (CTV) advertising works is one thing. Knowing how to successfully launch a campaign is another skill set entirely.
Unlike traditional linear TV, CTV advertising gives marketers greater control over who they reach, where their ads appear, and how they measure their impact. That’s part of the reason why 52% of US technology, financial services, retail, and healthcare brands have shifted at least one-quarter of their paid media budgets to CTV over the past three years.
But getting a campaign up and running involves more than simply bidding on inventory or securing placements through programmatic guaranteed deals. It involves setting campaign objectives, allocating budgets, deciding who to target, and determining how CTV fits into your broader media strategy.
Eeach decision plays a role in how effectively your campaign reaches viewers and achieves its goals.
Historically, CTV has been viewed as an upper funnel channel. But programmatic advertising platforms like StackAdapt are bringing advanced targeting, optimization goals, and measurement solutions in platform to allow marketers to properly leverage the channel in their mix.
Read on for a step-by-step guide to planning, launching, and optimizing CTV advertising campaigns, with expert-backed best practices and tips to help you make the most of your ad spend.
How to define the goals of your CTV campaign
Before you start building your campaign in a programmatic advertising platform like StackAdapt, it’s important to take a step back and think about what you want to get out of it.
Are you looking to build brand awareness? Reach new audiences you aren’t reaching through other channels? Drive more people to your website to make a purchase?
Your campaign objectives will determine how you approach everything from the ads you create to how you’ll measure their performance.
For example, a car manufacturer launching a new SUV in the market might use CTV advertising to showcase the vehicle’s features and capabilities with footage of it navigating rugged terrain or winding mountain roads—something that’s harder to do effectively with static banner ads.
Meanwhile, a retailer promoting a winter holiday sale might focus on reaching local households with time-sensitive offers that encourage them to visit a nearby store.
It’s also important to consider how CTV fits into your broader advertising strategy. Will it be your primary channel for reaching new audiences, or will it work alongside other channels like display, native, and ChatGPT advertising to reach customers?
StackAdapt supports a variety of goals in-platform for CTV, including CPA for lower funnel performance.
Ultimately, knowing what role CTV is expected to play makes it easier to build a campaign around the results that matter most to your brand.
How to plan your CTV advertising campaign
Once you’ve established your campaign goals, the next step is figuring out what you’ll need to achieve them.
That means determining how much you’re willing to spend, when and where your ads will run, and how often you want viewers to see them.
You’ll also need to consider which streaming publishers you want access to, what creative assets you have available, and how you plan to measure performance.
These decisions shouldn’t happen in isolation.
For example, if you’re working with a limited budget, targeting a highly specific audience across a small geographic area or restricting your ads to a handful of premium publishers could make it difficult to reach enough viewers to achieve your campaign goals.
Even worse, without proper frequency capping or pacing controls in place, you risk showing the same ads too frequently—wasting your budget and frustrating viewers (EMARKETER reports that 33.7% of viewers find seeing too many ads annoying).
On the flip side, dividing your budget across too many audiences or inventory packages can spread your spending too thin, making it difficult to understand what’s actually working.
This is especially important if you’re new to launching CTV campaigns.
Rather than trying to accomplish everything, consider what you want to learn from your initial campaign. Are you testing whether CTV can help you reach new households? Which creative performs best?
Establishing those priorities early can help you make more informed decisions about where to focus your ad spend while leaving enough flexibility to adjust as needed.
Read More: Learn expert-backed CTV marketing strategies and see examples of campaigns that do more than build awareness.
How to choose the right audience for your CTV campaign
With your campaign plan in place, the next step is deciding which audiences to target.
Is your goal to introduce your brand to new customers? Re-engage people who have already visited your website? Reach households that share similar characteristics with existing shoppers using lookalike audiences?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help determine which CTV targeting options make the most sense for your campaign.
Unlike traditional linear TV, CTV advertising also gives marketers access to a wide range of targeting capabilities to choose from, including demographic (such as age, gender, and household income), behavioral, and contextual targeting. As a result, instead of buying ad placements that reach everyone watching a particular channel, advertisers can focus on reaching households most likely to care about their products or services.
Depending on the platform, publisher, and region you’re running ads in, you may also be able to use first-party data from your CRM, website visitors, or existing customer lists to reach specific households.
But just because you can layer multiple targeting options together doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
For example, reaching potential car buyers across the Midwest gives you a much larger audience to work with than targeting first-time homebuyers in a single city, which could significantly limit how many households you’re able to reach.
Before combining additional targeting criteria, consider how much of your potential audience you’re excluding by narrowing your targeting further and whether the remaining households are enough to achieve your campaign goals.
It’s also important to know that not every targeting option is available in every market. Privacy regulations and publisher restrictions, particularly in parts of EMEA, can limit how audience data is used.
Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to reach relevant audiences with CTV advertising. The right approach ultimately depends on who you’re trying to reach and what audience data is available.
How to get your CTV ad creative ready
Although audience targeting and campaign setup are important, it’s your creative that ultimately determines whether your ad captures viewers’ attention and gets your message across.
Unlike display ads or other digital formats that often run on smartphones or computers, CTV ads often appear on large television screens. That means a creative originally designed for social media or smaller screens may not translate as well to CTV.
Before launching, consider whether your existing video assets are suited to the CTV viewing experience, meet the technical requirements of the streaming publishers you’re buying inventory from (StackAdapt’s free CTV transcoding feature can automatically adjust video specifications, such as resolution, bitrate, and aspect ratio, to meet the dozens of different requirements publishers may have), and have messaging that aligns with your campaign goals.
Ask yourself: Is your branding easy to recognize? Does the ad make sense with both audio and visuals? Is there a clear call to action that viewers can follow without clicking directly on the ad?
Planning out your ad creative early can also help you avoid delays and give you more room to test different options and strategies. For example, if you’re planning to compare two different messages or offers, you’ll need separate creative variations to do a true A/B test and see which one performs better with your target audience.
Don’t have a CTV asset? StackAdapt’s AI Video Builder can help simplify that process by turning inputs like a website URL or existing brand assets into video ads, complete with scripts, scenes, voiceovers, and music. Because it’s built directly into the StackAdapt platform, advertisers can create and adapt video ads for CTV and other channels without having to manage a separate production process. Speak with our team to learn more.
Read more: Learn CTV creative best practices from StackAdapt and our award-winning creative team.
How to choose the right CTV inventory for your campaign
Once you’ve decided who you want to reach and what creative you’ll use, the next step is determining where your ads will appear.
With a demand-side platform (DSP) like StackAdapt, advertisers can buy inventory across a wide range of publishers and streaming services, from premium ad-supported options like Paramount+ to free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) services like Tubi.
Each streaming service offers different opportunities to reach viewers, so it’s important to consider what makes the most sense for your campaign goals.
For example, premium streaming inventory can help advertisers reach audiences watching popular TV shows and movies, while live sports offer opportunities to reach highly engaged fans as they watch their favorite teams or major sporting events like the FIFA World Cup.
FAST services, on the other hand, can help expand your reach across a wider range of on-demand titles and streaming channels, including news, entertainment, and specialty programming.
Before narrowing down your inventory selections, consider whether reaching viewers on specific streaming services is essential to your campaign goals or whether a broader mix of publishers could help you reach more of your target audience. StackAdapt’s forecasting tools can help you make that decision by showing your estimated reach based on your campaign’s location, flight dates, budget, and selected CTV inventory.
Need further help? StackAdapt’s managed services team can help you choose the right inventory, plan your campaign, and optimize performance based on your goals. Learn more about our client services.
How to set up, QA, and launch your CTV campaign
With your campaign strategy in place, it’s time to put everything together.
Before launching, double-check that your campaign objectives, KPIs, budget, flight dates, targeting, and inventory selections are set up correctly.
You’ll also want to make sure your creative assets have been approved, your tracking is working, and any brand safety requirements are in place.
Even small setup mistakes during this stage, like overly restrictive targeting or incorrect tracking configurations, can prevent your campaign from delivering as expected or make it harder to measure results.
How to measure the success of your CTV campaigns
One of the biggest advantages of CTV advertising over traditional TV is the ability to measure performance in near real time.
But not every campaign should be evaluated using the same metrics. What you choose to measure should ultimately be informed by the goals you established prior to launching your ads—whether that’s reaching as many relevant households as possible, increasing brand awareness, or driving performance by re-engaging previous website visitors and encouraging them to make a purchase.
For awareness-focused campaigns, metrics like unique household reach and average frequency can help you understand how many households you’re reaching (and how often), while effective cost per thousand impressions can be used to evaluate how efficiently you’re spending your budget.
It’s also important to avoid relying on metrics that aren’t suited to CTV. For example, click-through rate isn’t a useful metric to track because viewers typically watch CTV ads on a television screen rather than interacting with them directly the way someone browsing a website on their computer would.
Similarly, because most CTV ads are non-skippable, a high video completion rate doesn’t necessarily mean viewers are more engaged with your ads, but it can be used to confirm that your ads are playing through as expected.
Instead, for conversion-focused campaigns, metrics like cost per acquisition and attributed conversions may be more relevant, provided you have the right tracking in place. For example, StackAdapt is integrated with leading third-party measurement vendors and Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs), which make it easy to track the impact of your campaigns.
Even if conversions aren’t your primary goal, it’s worth setting up view-through tracking before launch to understand whether people visit your website after seeing your CTV ads. While these visits don’t necessarily mean your ads caused someone to take an action, they can provide additional insight into how CTV contributes to your campaign performance.
To understand the impact of your campaigns beyond impressions and website visits, you can also use more advanced measurement solutions like brand lift studies, incrementality testing, and cross-channel attribution.
StackAdapt also offers vertical-specific measurement solutions to determine impact, such as ABM Measurement for B2B marketers and NPI Measurement for those in healthcare.
These solutions can also help you understand whether your ads increased brand awareness, contributed to additional sales, or influenced customers who interacted with your brand across other channels. Reach out to our team to learn more.
Read more: Learn how CTV attribution works and how advertisers can connect ad exposure to online conversions.
How to monitor and optimize your CTV campaign
Launching your CTV campaign is only the beginning.
Once your CTV ads are running, you should regularly monitor performance to see what’s working, what isn’t, and where adjustments might be needed.
StackAdapt lets you track these results directly in dashboards or through AI-powered tools like Ivy Studio™, so you can make adjustments while your campaign is still running. Ivy Studio™ also explains the reasoning behind its recommendations, helping you understand why certain changes might improve performance before deciding whether to make them.
As you monitor performance, pay attention to how quickly your budget is being spent, which audiences and publishers are performing best, and whether your ads are reaching enough households without appearing too frequently.
If you decide to make adjustments, just be careful not to change too many things at once. Adjusting multiple campaign settings like your targeting, bids, and creative at the same time can make it difficult to understand which changes actually improved performance.
Instead, start with focused tests—changing one thing at a time where possible—and keep track of which adjustments improved performance and which didn’t, so you can make more informed decisions when planning future CTV campaigns.
What are some common CTV advertising mistakes to avoid?
Even with the right campaign strategy in place, a few mistakes can limit how effectively your ads run—increasing costs and making it harder to achieve your goals.
Here are some CTV advertising mistakes to watch out for when setting up and managing your campaigns:
Not setting frequency caps
Without frequency caps in place, you risk showing the same ad to the same households too often—wasting your budget and potentially frustrating viewers.
Setting household-level frequency caps can help prevent overexposure while preserving more of your ad spend to reach new audiences.
Using the same bid across all CTV inventory
The price of CTV inventory can vary significantly. Using a single bid across every publisher can lead to overpaying for some placements while bidding too low on others, making it harder to compete for more expensive inventory.
Adjust your bids based on the publishers and inventory you want your ads to appear on. For example, live sports and premium streaming inventory may require higher bids than FAST services, which are often more affordable (EMARKETER reports that FAST advertising CPMs increased just 1.2% year over year in Q3 2026, compared to 4% for US streaming overall).
Restricting your ads to overly specific times
Unlike traditional linear TV, CTV advertising allows you to target specific households rather than relying on broad viewing patterns to reach your audience. But limiting your ads to a few hours each day or running unusually short campaign flights can unnecessarily restrict reach, increase competition for available inventory, and require higher bids to deliver your ads.
Instead, consider running your ads across a wider range of hours (while avoiding overnight periods when someone might be fast asleep with Seinfeld playing in the background) and using frequency caps to control how often households see them, rather than restricting delivery to traditional primetime viewing hours.
Not knowing where your ads are appearing
Just because your campaign is delivering impressions doesn’t mean you should overlook where those ads are running. Regularly reviewing publisher-level reporting can help you understand which streaming services are showing your ads, whether those placements align with your brand, and whether you should direct more of your budget toward certain publishers.
Expecting immediate conversions
CTV can help drive conversions. But that doesn’t mean everyone who sees your ad will immediately visit your website or make a purchase.
Because CTV often plays an important role early on in the customer journey, you should set realistic expectations for how quickly viewers might take action and give your campaigns enough time to build awareness and influence future website visits, purchases, or other conversions before evaluating their overall success.
Treating CTV as a one-off campaign
Running a single CTV campaign can help you test the channel. But treating it as a one-time effort can limit your ability to build on those results and continue reaching potential customers after the campaign ends.
Instead, consider incorporating CTV into your ongoing advertising strategy, using it alongside display, native, social, and other channels to reach audiences across multiple touch points and stay visible as they move closer to making a purchase.
Get more from your CTV advertising campaigns with StackAdapt
There’s no single formula for running a successful CTV advertising campaign.
What works for one advertiser might not work for another, which is why it’s important to approach each campaign with a clear goal in mind, test different strategies, and use those insights to improve performance.
Having the right platform in place can make the whole process a lot easier.
Whether you’re launching your first campaign or looking to expand into new streaming services and premium inventory, StackAdapt brings together the tools, technology, and support needed to manage your campaigns from start to finish—all while giving you the flexibility to connect your CTV campaigns across other channels to reach customers beyond the TV screen.
Speak with our team to learn how StackAdapt can help you get started.
FAQs on how to set up and run CTV ad campaigns
CTV advertising inventory can be purchased through programmatic auctions or direct deals with streaming publishers. With programmatic buying, advertisers can bid on available impressions in real time through a top-rated DSP like StackAdapt, while direct deals involve negotiating inventory and pricing with publishers. Advertisers can also use private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed deals to access premium inventory through automated buying.
Advertisers can measure CTV campaign performance using metrics like household reach, frequency, impressions, and video completion rates to understand how effectively their ads are being delivered (and if they’re being delivered at all). For a better understanding of how campaigns influence business results, marketers can also use brand lift studies, incrementality testing, and cross-channel attribution to measure changes in brand awareness, conversions, and sales.
Performance CTV refers to CTV advertising that focuses on driving actions like website visits, leads, purchases, and app installs, rather than just measuring reach and video completion rates. StackAdapt helps advertisers achieve these goals through outcome-based bidding, household-level retargeting and attribution, and cross-channel measurement, all within a single platform.
As a general starting point, StackAdapt recommends running a CTV campaign for at least two weeks before conducting a full performance evaluation. This gives optimization algorithms in a programmatic advertising platform like StackAdapt time to adjust and allows enough campaign data to accumulate and identify early performance trends.
That said, you should still monitor delivery and pacing throughout the campaign to identify any issues that need attention.
There’s no set timeline for how quickly a CTV campaign will start delivering results. An established brand may see engagement sooner than a lesser-known advertiser. Factors like your campaign budget, creative messaging, ad frequency, and whether you’re also targeting viewers through other channels can also influence performance. Because CTV often helps build awareness before someone takes action, it’s important to set realistic expectations for how quickly you might see website visits, leads, or sales.
A common starting point for CTV advertising is around three to five impressions per household per week.
That said, the right frequency depends on your campaign goals, audience, and flight duration.
For example, a short campaign promoting a limited-time offer may require more frequent exposure than a longer awareness campaign in an industry with longer consideration cycles, like B2B.
Monitor reach and frequency together to make sure you’re showing ads often enough to build familiarity without repeatedly reaching the same households at the expense of new viewers.
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