CTV Contact Targeting Guide

What is Contact Targeting for CTV

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

Used with a retargeting objective, it focuses that reach on known contacts already in your funnel - re-engaging those who have gone quiet, nurturing leads mid-journey, and supporting sales on active opportunities. It works well for audiences such as event registrants, late-stage prospects, and key customers, reached in a premium, non-skippable environment.

AdRoll matches the email addresses from your list to digital profiles, allowing you to reach those 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, made up of the email addresses of the people you want to reach. Contact Lists can be created natively in AdRoll ABM, imported through our CRM/MAP Integrations, or added manually through a CSV file.

Which objective should I choose

Both objectives retarget contacts you already know. The difference is how far through the buying process they are.

• Drive Engagement - Re-engage dormant and mid-journey accounts, nurture leads and customers through the funnel, and support sales by identifying target accounts.
• Accelerate Existing Pipeline - Move mid- to late-stage buyers toward conversion, increase sales velocity and deal progression, and support active opportunities with sales-aligned engagement.

If you are not sure, start with Drive Engagement to build presence across your list, then run Accelerate Existing Pipeline alongside it for contacts attached to open opportunities.

Who can access

Access to Contact Targeting campaigns depends on your AdRoll ABM package.

Step 1. Essentials before you start

Below are the essentials you must have ready before launching a Contact Targeting campaign for the CTV channel:

• 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. We recommend at least 1,000 unique emails for better performance, as smaller lists may lead to suboptimal reach and ad effectiveness.
• 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 - for example, fills out a lead form - AdRoll ABM will continue to target them by default. Manually exclude these conversion audiences by marking them as exclusions. For guidance, see this article.

Step 2. Create a Contact Targeting campaign for CTV

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

• Select your Campaign Objective, then click Next:
  • Drive Engagement - to re-engage dormant and mid-journey contacts.

• Accelerate Existing Pipeline - to move mid- to late-stage buyers toward conversion.

Both objectives use the same settings on CTV, so this choice affects how your campaign is reported and optimized, not the steps below.

Step 3. Configure your CTV campaign settings

In this step, you will configure the settings that apply to your whole campaign, including when it runs and how we prioritize your bidding.

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 where you want your ads to run:

• 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 on both Web and CTV, you will need to launch two separate campaigns, one for each channel.

Select Connected TV to follow this guide.

Campaign Schedule

Scroll down to the section called Schedule. The schedule you select applies to all ad groups within your campaign, unless you set up custom schedules for specific ad groups.

• Specify your Start Date:
  • Choose whether to launch your campaign immediately or on a specific date.
  • All campaigns 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 a specific end date.

All dates and times you set are expressed in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). This default time zone cannot be changed.

We suggest skipping Advanced Options and launching with AdRoll's default settings. To limit specific days of the week or times of day, learn how to customize dayparting.

Default Start and End Dates	Specific Start and End Dates

CTV Bid Settings and Advanced Options

Under Bid Settings and Advanced Options > Bid Strategy, you can only choose Impressions. This is the case for both retargeting objectives:

• Due to the nature of CTV campaigns and how users interact with them, 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 with AdRoll's default settings. Learn how to customize frequency capping.

Step 4. Configure your ad group settings

An ad group is a fundamental organizational unit within a campaign. Creating multiple ad groups within one campaign lets you select specific ads for a specific audience, location, and custom schedule.

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

Ad Group Name

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

Ad Group Schedule

If you want this ad group to run on a different schedule than your main campaign schedule, turn on Use Custom Ad Group Schedule and select your start and end dates.

Ad Group Audience Target Options

Under Targeting, open the Audience section and select Contact Targeting to target known email addresses sourced from a CRM, a marketing automation tool, or a static list.

You can only select one audience type per ad group. If you need to run more than one, add a separate ad group for each.

Ad Group Audience Included

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

This is an ad group setting, so you can have multiple ad groups within one campaign targeting different audiences with different ads.

Ad Group 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 Ad Group > Targeting > 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.

Ad Group Audience Location

By default, our AI-powered BidIQ algorithm chooses the best locations for you, based on where the users in your target audience are. We recommend leaving locations set to Automatic so you cover 100% of users in your audience, wherever they happen to be - especially important with remote work.

Selecting Manual limits the locations of users who see your ads. Remember that CTV reach is restricted to the United States, Canada, and Australia. If you want to select specific audience locations, read this article.

This is an ad group setting, so you can have multiple ad groups 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 shows the estimated number of households eligible to see your CTV ads. These numbers may change over time, depending on how many users we track in your selected audience and on the audience duration.

Target by Categories

Categories let you target whole types of content rather than individual page text. Select the kinds of programming and content your ads should appear alongside, and we place your ads across content that matches.

Open Target by Categories and use any of the following:

1. Search - Type in the search field to find a category by name.
2. Browse - Scroll the alphabetical list of top-level categories.

Select the checkbox beside a category to add it. You can select as many as you like, at any level of the list.

Select your Ads

Add your video creative in the Ads section. On CTV you have two options:

1. Choose - Select existing creative from your Ad Library.
2. Upload - Upload finished video ads directly to the campaign.

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

Create more ad groups if needed

Add additional ad groups to your campaign as needed by clicking New Ad Group and repeating the prior steps to define: ad group name, custom schedule, audience, location, categories, and ad sets.

Step 5. Choose your budget and payment method

Enter your daily budget and billing information.

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

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 lets you 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

Because click data is not collected for CTV, measure this campaign on impressions and reach rather than clicks, CTR, or CPC. 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 we haven't yet been able to match with a certain domain. If we are not able to deanonymize those with our database and our partner networks, we may need to wait for the contact to visit your website so we can finalize deanonymization with our pixel.

Those values are fluid. At the beginning your campaign may show a higher number of 'Unknown Total', and as the campaign runs the amount should go down in favor of 'Known Total'.