• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 23, 2024

National University began using cross-device measurement and attribution through a partnership between MNTN, a self-service technology company that supports connected television (CTV) ads, and Rockerbox, an analytics platform.

Michael Rossini, associate director of paid media and performance marketing at National University, feels confident that with the integration, site visits will solely be attributed to CTV ads when those ads prompted consumers to take action.

The company rolled out the integration on Tuesday, but National University began using the combined technologies in April 2023, with a goal to analyze where consumers are initially discovering or engaging with National University ads and content.

“We needed to understand when someone sees one of our ads, and if they have been exposed to us in the past,” Rossini said.

National University initially runs its ads through streaming platforms like Peacock to reach potential customers, and Rockerbox than tracks at what point that person receives the ad.

Rossini said the university runs a “good deal” of its over-the-top (OTT) campaigns through MNTN, which relies on an identity graph rather than browser cookies to understand the households studied.

The company is completely ID-agnostic, so it analyzes many signals including IP address and device IDs in order to gain a better understanding of who is in what household.

To support the transition, Verified Visits validate the source of advertising that drove visits. It initially launched to give marketers a way to accurately measure real site traffic and conversions they generated from CTV campaigns.

Aggregated data from multiple advertisers initially testing the integration found 70% of Rockerbox CTV advertisers saw costs per action (CPAs) between 18% and 33% lower than their top spending acquisition channels like paid search, and paid social.

Advertisers also saw an 18% lower CPAs using the integration to run CTV campaigns compared to traditional linear TV.

The companies say its too easy to inflate attribution, which is one reason why MNTN created Verified Visits.

During initial tests, data shows that advertisers experienced up to a five-times increase in attributed conversions and an 82% improvement in CPAs, compared with the performance with default impression-to-IP matching.