u/Far_Argument5470

People have been talking about making TV advertising easily accessible to everyone but nobody talks about is how most small businesses don't know how to measure TV incrementality.

They're used to Facebook's instant metrics whereas TV attribution is a whole other battlefield. You need proper measurement frameworks, holdout tests and brand lift studies. The platforms are getting easier to use but the measurement sophisitication required hasn't changed.

Thoughts?

Our ad agency runs our streaming and CTV budget and sends us a PDF every month. Impressions, completed views, reach and frequency, a blended Cost per mill, and that is basically it. Our CFO wants to see what our spend is driving and I for the life of me dont know what I’ll say other than "people saw it." I’m sh**ing bricks ngl.

I have asked for dashboards showing site visits or conversions but its always the same “CTV doesn’t work like that” or “thats another measurement vendor you need to pay more for” story.

For anyone doing it in-house, how did you get past this? Did you push the agency for log-level or pixel data, set up a geo holdout yourselves, or just pull the channel in-house so you owned the measurement? Trying to work out if this is an agency problem or a CTV problem before I break bank on it.

I'm working for a $20M ARR b2b SaaS and CTV is now 20-25% of our paid mix.

We're well past testing and are now trying to figure what role it should play in the ful paid mix as we scale. We’re seeing the expected signs: branded search lift, more direct/dark traffic, etc, but the signals are showing up downstream. Credit still collapses into last-touch search/direct, and as usual, each platform is overclaiming.

In a mix model, how do you judge CTV's contribution relative to lower-funnel channels and if any, what signals do you trust for when CTV is showing up indirectly?

I’ve been thinking about how many people in life only meet us during a specific chapter.

Some people knew the insecure version that was trying too hard or the version that was just existing without any particular direction or purpose.

And the weird part is, a lot of those people will always think that’s who you are. They won’t see the years of work you put or the habits you changed to reinvent yourself. At first that used to bother me. I wanted to be understood.

But lately I’ve started to think maybe that’s just life. Not everyone gets access to the updated version of you. Some people are tied to old chapters because that’s where their role in your story ended.

I’m part of growth team for a mid-market B2B team ($20-30M ARR), and we’ve hit that awkward ceiling where the Meta and Google Search are getting expensive and crowded.

Google Search is tapped out (CPCs are crazy in our category), LinkedIn works but CAC keeps going up, and Meta feels hit-or-miss depending on the week. We’ve tested a bit of Reddit and YouTube, but nothing has clearly broken through yet.

The tricky part is we’re not an enterprise brand with massive budgets, but we’re also past the startup phase where only organic + outbound can carry us. We are looking for something scalable and efficient.

For those in a similar mid-market stage, what’s been the most underrated paid channel for you lately? Not just “it works,” but something that actually surprised you in terms of CAC or pipeline quality. I'm curious on what you're doubling down on right now.