Is your business just getting started with Connected TV (CTV) advertising? Good news—you’re in the right place because we understand what you’re going through, and we’re here to help.

If you’re used to obsessing over click-through rates (CTR) and last-click attribution, CTV measurement might feel like learning a new language. The metrics may look different, and the impact can take time. You may not see a flood of contact requests or sales leads ready to close the following morning after your first CTV ad goes live. Rest assured: that doesn’t mean it’s not working.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• What CTV advertising actually is, and why marketers are increasingly embracing it
• What to actually measure (and how to avoid common pitfalls)
• Best practices that set your campaigns up for success from the very beginning.

Let’s take a closer look at how to make your first CTV campaign count.

Overview of CTV Advertising

Let’s start with the basics: CTV stands for “Connected TV”—i.e., any television that can digitally stream content from the internet. Whether it’s a smart TV, a TV that uses a streaming media adapter (like Chromecast, Roku, or Amazon Fire Stick), or the latest PlayStation console, if it’s streaming content, it’s CTV.

CTV advertising, naturally, refers to video ads that appear during these kinds of streaming experiences.

And there are even more reasons that so many advertisers are taking notice:

• CTV ad spend officially outpaced search, social, and retail media in 2024, making it the fastest-growing ad channel.
• By 2026, average U.S. CTV usage is expected to hit 2 hours and 37 minutes a day—up from just 1 hour and 22 minutes in 2020.
• Around 61% of advertisers say they plan to increase their CTV budgets, and nearly 70% of the U.S. population will be CTV users by 2026.

So yes—it’s a crowded, fragmented, fast-evolving space. But with the right tools, small businesses can easily compete on the same screen as the biggest brands, and gain some significant viewership.

Before You Get Started: CTV Advertising Checklist

Before launching your first CTV ad, it pays to do a little prep work. Some important first steps include the following:

• Review past marketing campaigns
• Budget realistically for CTV advertising
• Commit to your measurement strategy

Now, let’s dig into how to approach each one.

Review Past Marketing Campaigns

Looking at your past efforts can help you spot trends, avoid redundancy, and carry over what’s performing well. It also gives you a clearer baseline for measuring what CTV spend might add to the mix.

Before diving into a new platform like CTV, take a minute to audit what you're already doing. Crucially, it’s not just about staying organized—it’s about identifying what’s actually working, campaign-wise, for your brand.

Start by asking:

• What platforms are we already advertising on?
• Are any legacy or always-on campaigns still running that we’ve lost track of?
• Which creative elements—headlines, visuals, CTAs—have worked well across other channels? Any linear TV advertising that might work here?
• Are we running ads in other formats, like radio, podcasts, billboards, or local print?

Budget Realistically for CTV Advertising

Let’s be honest: your budget will shape your results. And if you go too small, you're not setting yourself up to learn anything useful.

We understand that CTV is often treated as an experimental channel for small and mid-sized businesses—which makes sense. But “experimental” shouldn’t mean “spend $500 and hope for the best,” either.

According to Paramount’s Measurement Analytics Team, an advertiser’s CTV budget usually comprises 15%-30% of their overall marketing budget. That percentage should give you enough spend to actually measure performance and start identifying patterns.

Why does this matter? Well, if you’re only setting aside a small percentage for your very first streaming TV campaign, you can expect limited results. Not because the platform doesn’t work, but because short campaigns with limited spend won’t tell you much. Real insights come from consistent, strategic investment—ideally, over a few months.

The bottom line? Treat your CTV budget like a learning tool. You’re not just buying impressions—you’re buying clarity.

Commit to Your Measurement Strategy

Before you launch your CTV campaign, it’s time to make a big decision: How will you measure success?

Ask yourself—are you trying to:

• Build awareness?
• Drive traffic to your site?
• Increase foot traffic at your store?

The metrics you care about should shape how you structure your campaign.

Make a plan, and stick to it. Then you’ll actually be able to tell if CTV is moving the needle—or if you need to adjust course.

Measure Brand Awareness

If your goal is brand awareness, the most direct way to measure may be surprisingly simple: ask people how they found you.

By building that question into your customer interactions, you’ll start to notice patterns—especially if your CTV campaign is doing its job. If people start saying, “I saw your ad while streaming NCIS,” that’s your signal that awareness is rising.

But don’t stop at anecdotal feedback. Track business outcomes, too. Are you getting more calls, form fills, or walk-ins during (or soon after) your campaign period? Are people naming your business unprompted more often? These are likely signals that brand discovery is increasing, even if they aren’t directly tied to a click or conversion.

It’s also helpful to distinguish between what you’re doing consistently (like evergreen messaging) and what you’re launching on a case-by-case basis (like events or promos). Those context clues can reveal when people are discovering you and why.

Finally, know that for many SMBs (Small or Medium Businesses), impressions still matter. Don’t discount them—look at them in tandem with what’s happening on the ground. If your CTV ads are generating high engagement, but brand activity stays flat, it might be time to shift the strategy.

To help you understand your results better, we recommend the following:

• Conduct a spike analysis, reviewing your website traffic at least two months before your ad ran, as well as two months after the ad launched
• Create a one-question survey to ask where customers first heard of you
• Run two separate ad campaigns that target different geographies (cities or zip codes) and/or content placements

Understand Customer Journey Measurement

One of the most common mistakes small businesses make when running CTV ads is expecting a clean, linear attribution path: someone sees your ad, clicks a link, and makes a purchase.

In reality? That’s just not how brand-building works.

CTV is part of the awareness layer of your marketing. It’s designed to put your brand in people’s heads—not necessarily their carts—right away. And that means the impact may show up indirectly: e.g., more searches for your business, more foot traffic, and more social media engagement.

So yes, ask people how they heard about you. But don’t expect every response—or every sale—to tie neatly back to one platform. CTV ads are one tool in your marketing mix toolkit, and it works best when combined with your other marketing efforts.

Create Success Metrics and KPIs?

Once you know what success looks like for your campaign, it’s time to set the right KPIs, and track them closely.

Most CTV ad solutions will offer a wide range of metrics, including:

• Impressions and reach: How many people saw your ad, and how often

• Completion rate and cost per second viewed: Did people actually watch it? How much did that cost?

• Leads, site visits, and in-person visits: Are viewers taking action online or in-store?

• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): If available, this can give you a sense of financial return—though it’s often estimated and rarely the whole picture

These numbers can help you understand the scale and engagement of your campaign. But don’t treat them as a full diagnosis. Especially with a top-of-funnel channel like CTV, not every meaningful outcome will show up in your dashboard.

Use the data to look for patterns—then layer it with what you’re seeing elsewhere. Are you getting more branded searches? More walk-ins? More people saying, “Oh yeah, I saw your ad”? All worth knowing.

Establish a Strategic Timeline for Your Ads

CTV is an awareness-driven channel, and that means it takes time to build recognition and impact behavior. In other words, if you want meaningful data, you need enough time to collect it.

Our recommendation? Aim for at least 90 days. That gives you a full quarter of data to track patterns, compare results, and spot trends across different types of performance metrics.

And if you really want to know whether your ads are doing something? Run a control test. That might look like holding back ads in one geographic area while launching in another. Just make sure you’re not changing a million other variables at once—otherwise, you won’t be able to isolate what’s actually working.

Go the Distance With Your Ads

Once your campaign is live, the work isn’t over—it just entered a new phase. CTV success requires patience, ongoing evaluation, and a clear understanding of how all your marketing efforts work together.

Here’s our advice for SMBs:

Maintain Your Efforts

While you certainly don’t need to worry over every daily fluctuation, you do want to monitor trends and stay responsive.

A longer campaign window gives you time to track meaningful shifts, spot early signals, and evaluate performance with a clearer lens.

Note, too, that if the numbers aren’t matching your expectations, that doesn’t mean the campaign’s a failure—it just means there’s something to learn. Check in on your creative, your targeting, or your broader messaging strategy.

Finally: don’t hesitate to reach out to platform specialists for help with optimization tips.

Think of Your Channels Holistically

As we’ve said before, CTV works best when it’s part of a bigger picture—not your only play.

By adding CTV to your media mix, you're not replacing other efforts as much as multiplying your touchpoints. That leads to more chances to be seen, remembered, and ultimately chosen over other businesses.

Are you seeing better performance from one channel than another? Take a closer look. It could be the result of overlap—your CTV campaign driving brand awareness that boosts performance elsewhere, like search or social. Those connections are valuable, and often invisible if you're only looking at each channel in isolation.

So Why Paramount Ads Manager?

There’s no shortage of CTV ad platforms out there—but Paramount Ads Manager was built to give smaller brands a fighting chance in a space usually dominated by big media buys.

You can get started for as little as $50 per day (for a minimum of three days), launch campaigns quickly, and reach viewers where they’re already watching—on premium programming from channels like Paramount+, CBS, Pluto TV, BET, CBS, and MTV.

Plus, Paramount Ads Manager’s format prioritizes engagement: delivering full-length, unskippable ads to a relaxed, attentive audience. That translates to high completion rates, competitive CPMs, and—for many advertisers—much more efficient reach than what they typically see on social channels.

Best of all, you don’t need to be a media buyer to figure it out. Paramount Ads Manager offers straightforward targeting, campaign performance metrics, and a library of real-time support resources to help you make the most of your spend.

Customer Story: 30-Second Spots a Hit

One agency that’s seen real results with Paramount Ads Manager? Moving Forward Marketing. They needed more than a two-second scroll-by on social media. In fact, they wanted viewers to stick around and actually *watch the ad. *

As the agency’s president put it:

“The wonderful thing about Paramount Ads Manager is that you can get high-90 video completion rates. If I apply that same standard to any of the social media platforms, I'm going to have CPMs for a video completion view that are going to be 400–500% more expensive.”

By switching to Paramount, the client was able to stretch their budget further while making a stronger impact. You can read the full success story here.

The Bottom Line

Launching your first CTV campaign can feel like stepping into a new world, but the principles behind it are familiar: know your audience, set clear goals, and track what’s working.

Paramount Ads Manager makes it easy to put these best practices into motion. With just a few steps, you can reach 100M+ monthly viewers across Paramount’s portfolio of brands—including Paramount+, CBS, Pluto TV, and more—with professionally delivered, unskippable ads.

Designed for small businesses, the platform is simple to use, competitively priced, and backed by some of the most recognizable content on TV.

Have questions about getting started or how to make your ads successful? Schedule time with our team—we’re here to help.