CTV Account Targeting Campaigns

CTV campaigns are available for US, Canada, and Australia audiences

Your CTV target audience must be located in the US, Canada, or Australia. You can physically be located anywhere in the world, though your audience must be in one of the aforementioned regions.

What are Account Targeting Campaigns for CTV

An Account Targeting Campaign is a powerful prospecting strategy designed to drive accounts through increasing levels of engagement, all the way to opportunity creation.

This campaign will reach the buying committee at your target accounts with a high level of precision by layering:

  • Companies in your Account List, leveraging your CRM data and our in-market account insights data.
  • People in the buying committee (i.e., Engineering Function, VP Seniority, etc.) within your Account Lists.

This article walks you through how to set up your Account Targeting Campaign specifically for the Connected TV (CTV) channel.

The CTV channel serves high-impact, non-skippable video ads directly to your target stakeholders through streaming apps and devices (like Roku, Apple TV, smart TVs, and gaming consoles).

This approach takes your ABM strategy beyond the desktop and into the living room, allowing you to build significant brand awareness and influence with a premium, television-like experience. All CTV channel campaigns use video ads to capture attention. Learn more about our CTV ad specifications here.

 

Who can access 

Access to Account Targeting Campaigns for CTV Channel depends on your AdRoll ABM package.

Your Package Account Targeting Campaigns
Account Based Advertising Included
Account Based Marketing + Advertising Included
Account Based Marketing Not Included
Starter (Legacy) Not Included
Standard (Legacy) Yes, requires contacting your CSM for activation
Professional (Legacy) Included
Ultimate (Legacy) Included
Free Tier Included, except Account Targeting Campaigns

 

Step 1. Essentials before you start

Below are the essentials you must have ready before launching an Account Targeting Campaign for Web channel:

  • Install the Pixel to track your website visitors.
  • Create one Conversion Audience for each form submission.
  • Create at least one set of CTV video ads. Your ads must meet AdRoll’s CTV Ads Format Guidelines.
  • Your target audience must be located in the United States, Canada, or Australia.
  • The minimum daily budget for each CTV campaign is USD $165. We strongly recommend running CTV campaigns for at least one month for optimal results.
  • Create an Account List including the companies you want to target.
  • Create an Attributes Audience layering your Account List and the Buyer Persona attributes that make up your buying committee. Watch the video below or read this article to learn how.

 

Step 2. Create an Account Targeting Campaign for CTV

  • Navigate to Advertising > Campaigns & Playbooks.
  • Click Create and select Ad Campaigns in the dropdown.

  • Select Account Targeting as your marketing goal and click Next.

 

Step 3. Configure your CTV Campaign Settings

In this step, you will configure the settings that will be applied to your campaign, including when it will run, how you would like us to prioritize your bid strategy, advanced bidding options, and placement exclusions.

Jump to a specific Campaign setting using the links below

Campaign Name

Click Edit Name at the top of your campaign and choose a name that will be easy to identify across reports and AdRoll ABM platform features. We recommend following a consistent naming convention for all your campaigns.

 

Campaign Channel

Scroll down to the section called Channel to select the channel where you wish to run your ads:

  • Web: Your ads will be served on the Web (Desktop and Mobile) and Apps.
  • Connected TV: Your CTV video ads will be delivered through streaming apps, either built into smart TVs or through devices like Roku, Apple TV, and gaming consoles connected to a TV.

If you want to run the same campaign both in Web and CTV, you will need to launch two separate campaigns, one for each channel.

Please note that this article will guide you through launching a CTV Channel campaign.

Campaign Schedule

Scroll down to the section called Choose your Schedule. The schedule you select will be applied to all AdGroups within your campaign, unless you set up Custom Schedules for specific AdGroups.

  • Specify your Start Date:
    • Here you can specify if you want to launch your campaign immediately or on a specific date.
    • Please note that all campaigns will go through a 48-hour review period before they are approved and go live.
  • Specify your End Date:
    • For evergreen campaigns, select No end date.
    • For time-bound campaigns, set up a specific end date.

Please note that all dates and times you set are expressed in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), this default time zone cannot be changed.

Default Start and End Dates Specific Start and End Dates

 

CTV Bidding Settings

Under Bidding Settings > Bid Strategy you can only choose Impressions:

  • Due to the nature of CTV campaigns and how users interact with it, performance cannot be measured through Clicks, CTR, or CPC. Click Data is not collected for CTV.
  • Leave Target CPM blank to let BidIQ automatically maximize impressions within your budget.
  • If you set a Target CPM, we suggest a target of $15 to $32 for CTV. We'll optimize for your target, but actual CPM may vary.
  • We suggest skipping Advanced Options and launching your campaign with AdRoll's default settings. Learn how to customize Day Partying and Frequency Capping.


 

Step 4. Configure your AdGroup Settings

An AdGroup is a fundamental organizational unit within a campaign. Creating multiple AdGroups within one campaign lets you select specific ads for a specific audience, environments, locations, and custom schedules.

  • At a minimum, a campaign will have one AdGroup you can add more as needed.
  • You can measure performance for each individual AdGroup.
  • Your Campaign budget is automatically allocated across all the AdGroups in your campaign you can't set specific budget allocations by AdGroup.

Jump to a specific AdGroup setting below

 

AdGroup Name

Choose a naming convention that is easy to recognize in AdRoll ABM reports and dashboards.

 

AdGroup Schedule

If you want this AdGroup to run on a different schedule than your main campaign schedule, toggle on Use Custom AdGroup Schedule and select your start and end dates.

 

AdGroup Audience Included

This guide is specific for Account Targeting campaigns for CTV therefore, you must choose the Attribute Audience created in the previous step.

Please note that this is an AdGroup setting, and you can have multiple AdGroups within one campaign targeting different audiences with different ads.

 

AdGroup Audience Excluded

If a user in your target audience completes a conversion on your site, we will keep serving them ads. To avoid this you must manually exclude all conversion audiences from your campaign. Read this article to learn how to exclude audiences from campaigns.

Scroll down to Configure AdGroup > Audience > Exclude and click Choose.

  • Filter by Conversion Audiences only and select them all, then click Choose. Conversion audience names include a dollar sign $ prefix for easy identification.

 

AdGroup Audience Location

By default, our AI-powered BidIQ algorithm will choose the best locations for you to optimize campaign performance based on where the users in your target audience are. We recommend using the automatically targeting the best locations to cover 100% of users in your audience, regardless of where they are located at the moment. This is especially crucial in today's remote work environment.

Adjusting geo targeting limits the locations of users seeing your ads. If you want to select specific audience locations, read this article to learn more.

Please note that this is an AdGroup setting, and you can have multiple AdGroups within one campaign targeting different user locations with different ads.

 

Confirm your Audience Size Estimation

After selecting your audience segments and location filters, this widget will show you the estimated size of the number of households eligible to see your CTV ads. These numbers may change over time depending on how many users do we track in your selected audience and the audience duration.


 

Select your Ads

Ensure your ad creative follow the technical requirements and creative best practices outlined here.

 

 

 


 

Create more AdGroups if needed

Add additional AdGroups to your campaign as needed by clicking New AdGroup and repeating the prior steps to define: AdGroup Name, Custom Schedule, Location, and Ad sets.

 

Step 5. Choose your budget and Payment method

You cannot use Ad Credits for CTV Campaigns

If you have Ad Credits as part of your contract, they cannot be used towards your CTV campaigns. AdRoll will bill you for your CTV Campaign spend separately from your Ad Credits.

Enter your daily budget, billing information and click Done.

  • A $165/day minimum budget is enforced for each individual CTV campaign.
  • Your budget will be automatically allocated among your AdGroups by BidIQ.

Once you're done setting your campaign, scroll up to the top of the page and click Submit. You can also click Finish Later to save your campaign as a draft.


 

Step 6. Finish later or launch

Once you have completed all the steps in this guide, you can:

  • Click Finish Later to save a draft. This allows you to save your work in progress and return later to finalize and submit for launch.
  • Click Submit if you are ready to confirm the campaign should launch on the Start Date. Launch date is subject to our ~48 hour ad policy review period.

 


 

Measure the impact of your CTV campaigns

Read our CTV Overview Guide to learn what CTV reports are available to you and what metrics you should use to measure the success of CTV Campaigns.


 

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