CTV Targeting: How to Reach the Right Audience with Connected TV Ads
There’s a myth holding advertisers back from Connected TV (CTV): targeting options are limited, meaning your ads will reach an irrelevant, misaligned audience.This myth is patently untrue. CTV’s targeting is a significant leap from traditional TV ads, which relied on broad demographics and lacked granular control. With CTV targeting, you have many of the same capabilities that you would with any other digital ad.
This shift means more personalized campaigns, bridging the gap between traditional TV and digital advertising. Welcome to the new age!
Better targeting gives you several competitive edges, including:
Greater control: You have greater control over who sees your ads, when they see them, and what they see.
Relevance: Viewers who are more likely to be interested in your product see the ad.
Improved ROI: You reduce wasted ad spend by targeting the right viewer with a relevant ad.
So, what targeting strategy are advertisers using to engage viewers? Here’s how CTV empowers them to reach the right audience with precision.
Let's demystify how an advertiser targets a user with CTV with a walkthrough from AdRoll:
Campaign setup: After selecting a CTV campaign, advertisers are prompted to configure campaign parameters like scheduling and bid strategy.
Audience targeting: Just like digital ads, when an advertiser arrives at the audience targeting configurator, they can select any audiences and geographic locations as they normally would.
All audiences available for web are also available for CTV. This means demographic targeting, behavioral data, interest-based targeting, and so on are all options. Through RollWorks, we can also target at the account or contact-level to ensure an ad reaches the right audience.
Audience size estimation: After an advertiser has selected their audiences and locations, the audience size estimation tool will display the maximum estimated number of homes that can be reached by their CTV campaign. Based on frequency controls and ideal number of impressions, this feature can help inform the ideal length of your flight needed to reach the maximum number of targets.
CTV targeting allows for highly specific audience segmentation. Audiences can be targeted using the following segments:
Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, etc.
Behavioral data: Past purchase history, website visits, app usage, etc.
Interest-based targeting: Hobbies, interests, and passions.
Geographic targeting: Location-based targeting down to specific zip codes.
Psychographic targeting: Values, lifestyles, and attitudes.
Contextual targeting: Targeting based on the content a viewer watched.
Account-based targeting: Targeting based on contact lists.
Essentially, most targeting options available for digital ads are also available for CTV, and the possibilities are expanding. For instance, our partnership and access to Experian’s data marketplace lets us target US users based on interest.
“We’ve watched CTV evolve from a broad strategy to recover reach lost on broadcast TV to an environment where advertisers can precisely target and measure engagement across streaming platforms. By utilizing audience insights and advanced addressability, brands can now deliver personalized ads to the right homes — making CTV a truly data-driven channel that bridges the gap between linear TV and digital precision.”
— Doug McLennan, Sr. Director of Product Management at Experian
Pretty simple, right? The types of audience segmentation you can use don’t differ from other web advertising channels, and that’s because of a cookie-less identity resolution technology we’ll get into: the device graph.
Another crucial component of CTV targeting is the device graph, also enabled by Experian. Device graphs mean you can show your ad to different devices of the same user.
This technology maps all the devices and identifiers within a household, connecting one device to another. This shows which devices belong to a member of a data segment and target ads across multiple devices within the same household.
While we’ve explained the essentials of CTV targeting, advertisers are also using more advanced techniques to reach their campaign goals. These strategies help target CTV audiences at different funnel stages and create the appropriate content for that stage. If you’ve been advertising on other channels, some of these techniques will be familiar:
Mobile/web retargeting: You can retarget users who have interacted with your website or mobile app on CTV devices, or target users on web who have seen your CTV ad—hence why the device graph is handy to identify all the devices belonging to a user.
Holdout groups and lift analysis: A holdout group is a randomly selected segment of your target audience that won’t see your ad. With this group, you can see if your CTV content had an impact on viewers—did they behave differently than your holdout group? A lift analysis calculates the difference between the exposed and holdout CTV audience.
Broad and narrow targeting mixes: While you’re familiar with running different types of ads for other channels in your marketing mix, the same holds true for CTV. Running both awareness campaigns (broad targeting) and Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns (narrow targeting) concurrently, and segmenting your audience into funnel stages prepared to view this content, improves your chances of converting shoppers.
Predictive analytics: CTV ads have high viewer engagement, but they’re less plentiful than other digital ads to avoid viewer ad fatigue. Predictive analytics expand segment size, increasing the chances of reaching a target when they are engaged with content.
Experimentation is key to digital advertising, and CTV has many of the opportunities to diversify your advertising strategy that you’d expect with other mediums.
CTV targeting can be highly granular, down to the ZIP code level. While targeting is at the household level (due to shared TV usage), it provides precise reach.
Some companies see the household targeting as a fringe benefit, particularly if their product is family-oriented and meant to appeal to a larger crowd. Known as “co-viewing,” this means one CTV ad served often equates to multiple impressions.
This precision is what makes the options above possible. But how do you get a hold of the right data for precise targeting?
CTV devices have unique identifiers, but these IDs alone are not very informative. CTV IDs are in play regardless of the video content you watch or the apps you visit, but the IDs don’t mean much to anyone besides the device manufacturers.
Instead, robust datasets are required to augment the ID for advertising purposes. Data partnerships and ownership of consumer data play a crucial role in connecting data to CTV devices and activating them for targeted campaigns.
With AdRoll’s data and partnerships, we’re able to connect our data to the IDs associated with the streaming devices in a household, activating them for use in targeted marketing campaigns.
You can gather a range of data types for effective CTV targeting:
Email addresses
Purchase history
Demographic information
These can be tied back to a TV user for better relevance. All this data can be used by a programmatic platform for more cost effective targeting.
Programmatic platforms can enable you to set granular targeting parameters and automate the ad buying process with those parameters. CTV is one of the many channels these platforms typically offer, but it’s important to choose one that uses your CTV ad spend effectively.
The right programmatic platform for CTV will have:
Efficiency: Automated buying and targeting.
Scalability: Reach a large audience with ease.
Cost effectiveness: Optimize ad spend and avoid wasted impressions.
Cross-channel management: Manage CTV campaigns alongside other digital channels.
Managed service options: Account management to introduce you to new channels and optimize strategies.
CTV is a high-value channel, but costs add up without proper management. Using a single, cross-channel platform with managed service options can maximize your ROI all in one place. This lets you navigate CTV targeting without deep technical expertise. Thankfully, we know who your next CTV programmatic partner is: Give AdRoll a try!
Last updated on March 20th, 2025.
