CTV Contact Targeting Campaigns

What are Contact Targeting Campaigns for CTV

A CTV Contact Targeting Campaign is a precision advertising strategy that allows you to reach a specific Contact List by serving high-impact video ads directly on their Connected TV devices.

This approach is ideal for driving top-of-mind brand awareness and influence with a known, high-value audience (such as event registrants, late-stage prospects, or key customers) in a premium, non-skippable environment. AdRoll matches the email addresses from your list to digital profiles, allowing you to reach these same individuals (and their households) across streaming apps and platforms.

To launch a Contact Targeting Campaign, you will need to import a Contact List to AdRoll ABM, which will be comprised of a list of email addresses for the people that you are looking to reach. Contact Lists can be created natively in AdRoll ABM, imported through our CRM/MAP Integrations, or manually through a CSV file. Click here to see all the available sources and instructions to add a Contact List to AdRoll ABM.

Who can access

Access to Contact Targeting Campaigns depends on your AdRoll ABM package:

Step 1. Essentials before you start

• Install the Pixel to track visitors.
• Create at least one conversion audience. We recommend creating one conversion audience for each single form submission.
• Your Contact List must have at least 100 unique emails that match a cookie. However, we recommend at least 1,000 unique emails for better performance, as smaller lists may lead to suboptimal reach and ad effectiveness. Learn more about Contact Lists here.
• 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.
• If a contact from your targeted audience visits your site and converts (e.g., fills out a lead form), AdRoll ABM will continue to target them by default. It's advisable to manually exclude these conversion audiences from your Retargeting Campaigns by marking them as ‘Exclusions’. For guidance, check this help center article.

Step 2: Create a Contact Targeting Campaign for CTV 

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

• Select Contact Targeting as your Campaign 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.

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 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 EndDate:
  • 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.

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

Choose the Contact List you want to target. If you haven't created your Contact Audiences, follow the instructions in our Contact Lists introduction guide.

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

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.

FAQ

Why am I spending more on 'Unknown' than 'Known' contacts?

'Unknown Total' includes all the cookies that we haven't yet been able to match with a certain domain. In case we are not able to deanonymize those with our database and our partner networks, we may need to wait for the contact to actually visit the website, so we can finalize deanonymization with our pixel.

Those values are fluid, and usually at the beginning your campaign may show a higher number of 'Unknown Total', and with the flow of the campaign, the amount should go down in favor of 'Known Total'.

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.