• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 13, 2023

Microsoft, which announced a partnership with Roku in December 2022, shared its analysis on the benefits of integrating connected television (CTV) with search advertising, and how it will work to increase performance for campaigns.

The research, released Thursday, aims to help marketers understand how TV streaming, native, and search advertisements work together to drive full-funnel performance. Full-funnel measurement creates a greater challenge and is difficult to accomplish with a fragmented media-buying experience.

TV streaming ads are typically thought to drive awareness, but can also can drive the purchase. Search ads typically drive engagement and lower-funnel activities, but they also can be used to increase awareness.

Microsoft and Roku in partnership reach a massive audience. Microsoft can reach more than 1 billion people across its platforms, whereas Roku has more than 200 million active streamers.

The findings from Microsoft’s research prove the hypothesis that these advertising products work better together to discover, research and purchase products.

Combining Microsoft and Roku campaigns is more successful in driving lower-funnel search behavior when they are run simultaneously.

TV streaming drives an increase in search behavior. Roku TV streaming ads lead to a 9% increase in brand searches per user and 11% increase in clicks per user.

Cross-channel exposure increases engagement. Exposure to Roku ads lead to a nearly 18% increase overall in click-through rate on the Microsoft Audience Network.

Exposure to the Microsoft Audience Network and TV streaming exposure drives an 11% increase in searches and a 10% increase in clicks.

Advertisers, for the first time, can now understand and measure how TV streaming ads influence online and search behavior, including native, paid search, and organic search.

Here’s how it works. Advertisers run TV streaming ads on Roku and native ads and search ads on Microsoft. Anonymized and encrypted Roku advertising exposure data is passed from LiveRamp to Microsoft.

Microsoft looks at the advertising activity that is matched to Roku exposures before and after Roku ads are served. Advertisers then receive a report with cross-channel performance and audience insights. It will enable advertisers to optimize across channels.

The company says it can customize campaigns. Microsoft has developed day-parting techniques for the partnership. For example, time of day and day of the week are entered to determine when the combination of CTV and search ads reach the highest performance. Reporting also analyzes the lift by different campaign metrics such as creative and ad lengths.

When focusing on analysis for audience behavior, Microsoft built out a model in Python, allowing the company to cluster some of the user personas based on different characterizations. It allows Microsoft to analyze the time of data content streamed, what they query in search and how it affects both paid and organic search.