Is CTV Advertising Worth the Investment? Here's a Low-Risk Way to Decide

Is CTV Advertising Worth the Investment? Here’s a Low-Risk Way to Decide

Erica Peacock

May 29, 2025

I’ve been having some great conversations with current and prospective clients recently; and everyone is curious about the performance branding aspect of CTV.

It’s no secret that CTV can help expose new audiences to our clients’ products and services. Yet two factors have held our clients back in the past:

1) How to measure the efficacy of upper-funnel channels like CTV

2) CTV’s relatively high cost

Those are real causes to hesitate before testing a channel. But they can be mitigated.

My team and I are using a tried and true approach to de-risk CTV tests: match-market geo testing (aka geo-lift studies).

Need a Refresher on Match-Market Geo-Testing?

I’m guessing that even if you haven’t conducted these tests, you’ve heard the term.

“Match-Market” geo-testing is a testing methodology where we identify treatment markets and control markets (which should be demographically and behaviorally similar) and only run the ads we’re testing in the treatment market. We then measure the lift in overall and channel-specific performance in the treatment markets against the control market.

Basically, think of it like this: “Okay, we ran CTV in these four cities and compared them to these four cities where we didn’t run CTV. If we see definitive lift in overall site traffic, brand searches and conversion rate in paid social channels, there isn’t much to argue about!”

Another benefit to this approach is the reduced media budgets needed to get a read.

Rather than committing to nationwide campaigns, geo-testing allows marketers to reduce their initial investment to a fraction of a full-scale budget while still achieving a directional read, if not full statistical significance.

This approach transforms CTV from a high-stakes gamble into a calculated, data-driven experiment. Here’s how this comprehensive geo-testing process works:

Our Geo-Testing Framework

1: Strategic Market Selection

Identify optimal treatment markets based on demographics, behaviors and conversion volumes – these markets are where you’ll serve your ads
Select control markets (dark markets) that mirror the treatment areas, but will not get ad exposure
Determine if your budget allows for statistical significant learnings – this is nice to have, but not absolutely necessary if you’re ok with a directional “proof of concept”
Account for macro-economic factors and seasonal variations that could skew results

2: Campaign Execution

Create at least two CTV-optimized creative assets video ads, each :30 seconds in length
Schedule the flight for at least 8 weeks
Monitor campaign delivery (spend, impressions) and conversions daily
Optimize campaign delivery across placements for scale and performance weekly

3: Measurement & Analysis

Track full-funnel impact across all paid and organic marketing channels and touchpoints
Measure and compare the cross-channel performance improvements in treatment vs. control markets
Measure and compare lift across KPIs: site traffic, brand search volume and social and search conversion rates

That’s the beauty of this approach. You’re not asking stakeholders to trust you about upper-funnel marketing. You’re showing them exactly what happened when you turned CTV on, vs. when you didn’t. It’s hard to argue with that kind of proof.

TL;DR

Match-market geo-testing is an approach where you identify certain geo markets to test ad campaigns and then compare them to similar geo markets without the ad campaigns. The lift in the treatment markets isolates the incremental impact of the ad campaigns.
You can implement this strategy to prove out the efficacy of CTV by:
- Identifying 5-10 markets to run CTV in based on current conversion volumes
- Selecting 5-10 similar geographies to act as the control or “dark” markets, where you will not run CTV
- Measuring and comparing full funnel and channel-specific performance improvements in the test vs. control markets

If you found this blog insightful, read this post where I go more in-depth about other ways you can measure the impact of CTV: 5 Ways to Measure CTV Performance.

Or if you would like a more on-hands solution, I’d love to talk with you! Reach out to us here.

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About the Author

Erica Peacock

COO

Erica Peacock began her career in marketing in 2000 and has worked with hundreds of brands to both develop and execute high-performing growth strategies. After a 10+-year stint at leading performance marketing firm QuinStreet, Erica joined The DuMont Project as EVP. In 2018, she became Playbook Media’s first COO and has since spent her time developing her team and working hands-on with the agency’s clients to design, refine, and execute differentiated growth strategies.