CTV advertising is your direct shot at the cord-cutters who’ve left linear TV behind, and that’s a group expected to grow to more than 70 million U.S. households by 2026. It’s a huge opportunity, but it also means we’re all fighting for eyeballs in an incredibly splintered viewing world. So, how do you actually get your brand in front of these people and make it stick?
Key Takeaways
- To get your targeting right in CTV, you have to mix your own first-party data with third-party audience lists to nail down specific viewer profiles.
- Your creative needs to be adapted for the living room. That means short, high-impact video ads that work in a non-skippable format.
- Measuring if a CTV campaign actually worked requires a multi-touch attribution model that connects ad impressions to website traffic and real conversion numbers.
- Even dedicating a small part of your budget to CTV, say 15% of your total media spend to start, can deliver a cost-per-acquisition that’s competitive with your other channels.
- You have to be A/B testing your ad creative and landing pages constantly if you want to see any real improvement in your CTV campaign performance and ROAS.
Campaign Teardown: “Home Comforts” by Urban Furnishings
We kicked off the “Home Comforts” CTV campaign for Urban Furnishings in Q3 2025. They’re an online retailer selling modern home decor, and our goal was simple: sell their new line of modular sofas and accent chairs directly to consumers. We were specifically aiming for millennial and Gen Z households in the Atlanta metro area, people we figured were furnishing new apartments or just upgrading their current place. And we knew this audience was almost exclusively watching content on streaming services.
Strategy and Targeting
From the start, our strategy was all about precision. We knew we had to go after a core audience of 25- to 40-year-olds living in specific Atlanta zip codes like 30309 (Midtown) and 30312 (Grant Park), especially those who’d already shown an interest in home decor, interior design, and sustainable brands. We then layered that demographic info with behavioral signals from data management platforms (DMPs), looking for things like recent moves or people actively searching online for furniture. The initial budget we set for this three-month run was $150,000.
We decided on a multi-platform buy, running programmatically on major CTV publishers including Hulu, Peacock, and Tubi. Our targeting stack looked like this:
- Geographic Targeting: The Atlanta MSA, with a heavy focus on the dense urban neighborhoods.
- Demographic Targeting: Age 25-40, household income over $75,000, and college-educated.
- Behavioral Targeting: People in-market for home furnishings, recent movers, or those who showed an affinity for design-focused content.
- Contextual Targeting: We placed ads on shows about home renovation, lifestyle topics, and indie films.
Trying to reach these splintered audiences means you’re managing a ton of complex media buys, and honestly, that’s where an agency partner really pays off. We worked with Moburst on this, and their experience in OTT Advertising was exactly what we needed to sort through the different streaming platforms and make sure our placements were hitting the right people. Using their platform gave us a single view of performance across all the publishers, which made tweaking the campaign in real time a lot easier than if we had to manage each publisher relationship one-by-one.
Creative Approach
For the “Home Comforts” creative, we ran two main video ads: a 15-second spot and a 30-second one. Both were built to show off the comfort and style of the new sofa line. We shot them in real Atlanta apartments to give them a lived-in, relatable feel, deliberately avoiding that hyper-polished look that can feel fake to this audience. The call-to-action (CTA) was a simple “Shop Now” with a URL overlay to push people straight to the website.
- 15-second Ad: This one was all about a single product feature, like the easy assembly or different fabric choices.
- 30-second Ad: This spot told more of a story, showing how the sofa fits into different parts of life (a movie night, someone reading, a small party).
Our A/B test gave us a clear winner on one front: the 15-second spot hit a 92% completion rate compared to just 78% for the 30-second version which makes sense when you consider that a lot of these CTV ad slots are non-skippable. The shorter ad just held attention better. Interestingly, the 30-second ad, while fewer people finished it, seemed to drive deeper engagement among those who did, suggesting it worked better on viewers who were already thinking about buying.
Initial Performance Metrics (Q3 2025)
The campaign ran from July 1 through September 30, 2025. Here’s how the numbers broke down at the end of the quarter:
- Total Impressions: 12,500,000
- Video Completion Rate (VCR): 87% (weighted average)
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): 0.35% (from companion banners and interactive overlays)
- Website Visits from CTV: 43,750
- Conversions (Purchases): 750
- Total Revenue Generated: $225,000
- Cost Per Lead (CPL – website visit): $3.43
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA – purchase): $200.00
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): 1.5x
A 1.5x ROAS isn’t bad for a campaign meant to build brand awareness and drive sales, but we knew we could do better. The main area for improvement was the conversion rate, which would bring down our CPA. An initial CPA of $200 was acceptable given the product’s price, but it left a lot of room for us to get more efficient with the budget.
Q3 2025 Performance Overview
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Budget | $150,000 |
| Impressions | 12,500,000 |
| VCR | 87% |
| CTR | 0.35% |
| Website Visits | 43,750 |
| Conversions | 750 |
| Revenue | $225,000 |
| CPL | $3.43 |
| CPA | $200.00 |
| ROAS | 1.5x |
What Worked and What Didn’t
The best part of the campaign was definitely the granular targeting we could do with CTV. By zeroing in on those specific Atlanta zip codes and behavioral groups, we wasted far fewer impressions than we would have with a traditional TV buy. The authentic creative also clearly worked, as shown by the high video completion rates. With eMarketer projecting in late 2024 that U.S. CTV ad spend would pass $30 billion by 2025, it was obvious we were in the right channel.
The big problem we saw was the drop-off between getting a website visit and actually making a sale. That told us something was wrong with either the landing page or the user’s path once they got to the site. Our companion banners, which were supposed to drive some of that traffic, also had a lower CTR than we’d hoped for, which is a classic case of banner blindness. We also had to deal with the fact that some programmatic exchanges served up low-quality inventory, placing our ads on shows that weren’t really relevant, even with our targeting filters. That’s a constant headache in programmatic buying that requires you to constantly manage your exclusion lists.
Optimization Steps Taken (Q4 2025)
Going into Q4 2025, we took what we learned from the first three months and made some big changes for the next campaign phase, which ran from October 1 to December 31. We also bumped the budget up to $180,000.
- Landing Page Optimization: We A/B tested two completely new landing pages. One was designed around a big lifestyle gallery with simple product info, and the other was a direct-to-business product configurator. The lifestyle gallery page immediately gave us a 15% lift in conversion rate.
- Creative Refresh and Call-to-Action Enhancement: We rolled out a new batch of 15-second ads, this time with a more urgent CTA tied to a limited-time offer. We also tested some interactive end cards that let people browse products right from the ad which boosted our interactive ad engagement by 0.5%.
- Audience Refinement: We built a lookalike audience from everyone who converted in Q3 and targeted them in our programmatic buys. We also got aggressive with our exclusion lists, blocking specific apps and channels that gave us low engagement or high bounce rates.
- Attribution Model Adjustment: We switched to a more complex multi-touch attribution model. This let us give partial credit to a CTV ad view even if the person came back later through another channel to buy, giving us a much better picture of the campaign’s real impact.
- Bid Strategy Adjustment: Wherever we could, we moved away from a fixed CPM (Cost Per Mille) bidding strategy and started using a target CPA strategy, which tells the platform to automatically optimize for conversions.
Revised Performance Metrics (Q4 2025)
These optimizations produced immediate, concrete results:
- Total Impressions: 14,000,000
- Video Completion Rate (VCR): 91%
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): 0.48%
- Website Visits from CTV: 67,200
- Conversions (Purchases): 1,344
- Total Revenue Generated: $403,200
- Cost Per Lead (CPL – website visit): $2.68
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA – purchase): $133.93
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): 2.24x
The jumps in CPA and ROAS were huge. Our cost per acquisition fell by nearly 33%, while our ROAS shot up by almost 50%. This just goes to show how powerful iterative optimization is for CTV campaigns. The refined landing page and the higher engagement from the interactive ads were clearly the main drivers of this success. We also saw that the lookalike audiences converted at a much higher rate, which confirmed our theory that our first batch of customers had common traits we could target.
Q4 2025 Performance Overview (Post-Optimization)
| Metric | Q3 2025 | Q4 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Budget | $150,000 | $180,000 | +20% |
| Impressions | 12,500,000 | 14,000,000 | +12% |
| VCR | 87% | 91% | +4% |
| CTR | 0.35% | 0.48% | +37% |
| Website Visits | 43,750 | 67,200 | +53% |
| Conversions | 750 | 1,344 | +79% |
| Revenue | $225,000 | $403,200 | +79% |
| CPL | $3.43 | $2.68 | -22% |
| CPA | $200.00 | $133.93 | -33% |
| ROAS | 1.5x | 2.24x | +49% |
The “Home Comforts” campaign proved that while CTV gives you amazing access to cord-cutters, your success really depends on smart planning, creative that can change on the fly, and constantly watching your performance data. Being able to combine your own first-party data with good third-party audience lists is absolutely essential for targeting. And you can’t forget about the post-click experience. A great ad is only half the job. The journey from the ad to the checkout has to be completely painless.
A challenge we’re always up against is how fragmented measurement is across all the different CTV platforms. Programmatic platforms give you aggregated data, but getting true, deduplicated user data across different apps is still a problem for the whole industry. It means that even though we can track unique impressions on Hulu or Tubi, figuring out if it was the same person seeing our ad on both is tough. This is where investing in advanced attribution modeling is a necessity, even if it’s not perfect.
As we look forward, the new interactive CTV formats like shoppable ads and personalized overlays are going to create even more ways to get viewers involved. The brands that are willing to test these new formats and pay for good attribution tools are the ones that will get the best results from their CTV budgets. With so much content out there on platforms like Roku and Amazon Fire TV, you need more than just a good ad placement to stand out. You need creative that’s built for the audience and a real understanding of how they behave.
The growth of CTV is also forcing a change in how media planning teams work. You’re not just buying gross rating points (GRPs) anymore. You have to think in terms of specific audience segments and map out individual user journeys, which requires a much more data-heavy, analytical mindset than the old way of doing things. It’s about getting the right message to the right person at the right time, no matter what streaming app they happen to be watching.
If you’re just getting into this space, my biggest piece of advice is to start with clear, measurable goals. Are you trying to build awareness, drive traffic, or get direct sales? Your objective changes everything about your creative, your targeting, and how you measure success. And you have to be ready to iterate. Almost no campaign is perfect right out of the gate. The whole point of digital media, and that includes CTV, is that you can make changes in real time based on what the data is telling you.
This “Home Comforts” campaign showed that when you run a CTV campaign with precision and a commitment to optimization, it’s a powerful way to reach and convert that huge audience of cord-cutters. The upfront work to understand the audience and fix the user experience paid off directly in our results, showing that CTV can be a central part of any modern media plan.
To make it in CTV advertising, you have to stay on your toes and keep learning, because the platforms and viewer habits are changing fast. If you focus on the entire user experience, from the first ad they see all the way to the final conversion, you’ll get the most out of your return on ad spend.
What is connected TV (CTV) advertising?
It’s basically just advertising that runs on any device you use to stream TV over the internet. Think smart TVs, Roku or Amazon Fire TV boxes, and even gaming consoles like a PlayStation or Xbox. The ads are delivered programmatically, which gives you the kind of advanced targeting you can’t get with old-school broadcast TV.
How does CTV advertising differ from linear TV advertising?
The biggest differences are in targeting, measurement, and audience. Linear TV blasts your ad out to a huge, general audience based on what show is on. With CTV, you can target specific households based on their data, viewing habits, location, and interests, just like you would with any other digital ad. You also get much better analytics on how your ad actually performed, like completion rates and website visits, which is nearly impossible with linear TV.
What are the main benefits of using CTV for advertising?
The main upsides are reaching the growing audience of people who don’t have cable, being able to target very specific groups, and getting way better measurement than traditional TV. You get to deliver a big-screen, engaging video ad in a high-quality environment. It’s the best of both worlds: TV-style brand building combined with digital-style performance tracking.
What kind of creative works best for CTV ads?
Short, high-impact, and visually strong creative works best. Since a lot of CTV ads can’t be skipped, keeping them to 15 or 30 seconds usually gets you a better completion rate. The ad should look good and feel like it belongs in a premium TV show. You also need a very clear call-to-action, usually as a banner or overlay, to tell people what to do next.
How do you measure the success of a CTV advertising campaign?
You measure a CTV campaign’s success by tracking several metrics at once. The main ones are video completion rate (VCR), click-through rate (CTR) on any interactive parts, website visits that you can trace back to the ads, and of course, direct conversions like a purchase or a sign-up. For a more complete picture, most of us use multi-touch attribution models to see how a CTV ad might have influenced a sale, even if the customer converted later through a different channel.
