True-TV Impact

The Black Box Is Broken:

A Simple Guide to TV Tracking That Drives Massive ROI

You've heard it a million times: TV is sexy, but its results are a "black box." Performance marketers are told to just accept that TV is "brand media" and not directly measurable.

We are here to tell you that is dead wrong.

At Monday Marketing, we don't just measure TV; we turn it into a high-powered, data-driven engine, giving you the control and transparency you need to scale profitably.

This guide breaks down exactly how we do it, moving from a simple spike in traffic to a full, multi-million-dollar picture of performance.

The Three Pillars of Offline Measurement

To truly master offline campaigns, you must measure on three levels. We specialize in making the first two quantifiable, turning soft metrics into hard dollars.

Pillar 1: Direct Impact

What We Measure: Immediate website visits and conversions.

The Core Concept: What happens in the few minutes after the spot airs.

Pillar 2: Indirect Impact

What We Measure: Total campaign uplift, brand building, and long-term trail.

The Core Concept: What happens over the weeks and months after the spot airs.

Pillar 3: Brand Impact

What We Measure: Awareness, likability, and brand usage studies.

The Core Concept: The traditional, soft metrics (we focus on translating this into dollars).

If you’re only measuring Pillar 3, you are missing 90% of your performance data. Let's dive into the two crucial worlds that drive your ROI.

‍

Direct Impact: Catching the "Magic Moment"

For performance veterans, the goal is always immediate, spot-level feedback. Direct Impact tracking brings the precision of digital right to the moment your commercial hits the air.

Solving the Classic TV Peak Problem

When a commercial airs, you see a spike in traffic—the "magic moment." But how do you prove the TV spot caused it and not another online campaign?

• The Problem: An avalanche of visitors hits your site, and you have to prove TV triggered it.
• The Solution: Extreme Filtering. We filter your traffic down to only what is relevant: brand traffic (direct type-ins and brand search). These are the users who saw your ad, picked up their phone, and searched for you. This instantly removes the noise from other marketing channels.

Setting the Standard and Handling Overlaps

A traffic peak must be significantly higher than normal to be attributed to TV. We don't guess—we use data science to set the rules:

1. The Baseline: We establish a reliable median baseline of your typical traffic flow. (Why a median? To prevent huge, one-off spikes from skewing the baseline and underestimating the next spot’s true performance.)
2. The Threshold: We only attribute a minute of traffic to TV if it exceeds the baseline by an Impact Threshold (e.g., a 60-70% lift). This ensures extreme accuracy and prevents over-allocation.
3. Handling Overlaps: What if three spots air across three channels at once? We use sophisticated balancing factors based on channel reach and response curves to accurately split the traffic proportionally to each spot.

The Direct Impact Payoff: You gain real-time, minute-by-minute Cost Per Visit (CPV) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) by spot, by channel, and by time of day. This is the data you need to start optimizing immediately.

‍

Indirect Impact: The True Multiplier

If you stop measuring after the Direct Impact, you are leaving the majority of your success (and millions of dollars) on the table. The Indirect Impact is TV's true superpower—the proof that it lifts your entire business.

The Campaign Effect: Proving the Uplift

This measures the holistic impact of your TV campaign over its entire flight period (e.g., four weeks). This is where the "job saved" moment happens.

• The Engine: Bayesian Time Series Prediction. This powerful statistical model analyzes every factor in your data—weekly, monthly, and yearly seasonality, long-term trends, and random residuals.
• The Calculation: The model predicts exactly what your traffic should have been without the campaign. By comparing this prediction to your actual traffic during the campaign, we isolate the total, pure, TV-driven uplift with confidence.

The Long-Term Impact: The Trailing Effect

When you shut off TV, the traffic doesn't crash back to zero immediately. This is the lag effect—the sustained, elevated level of conversions that continues after your budget is turned off.

We track this period to prove that TV is a long-term asset, not a short-term expense. This effect can last anywhere from two weeks to six months, depending on your business’s seasonality.

The Grand Total: The Multiplier

By adding the Brand Halo, the Campaign Effect, and the Long-Term Impact, we show you the totality of your TV investment.

For the average brand, this often reveals an overall multiplier of up to 2.5× the initial direct response. This is the whole picture, and it will fundamentally change how you view media strategy.

‍

Beyond TV: Applying the Mastery

The measurement models we use for TV are so robust that they can be applied to any offline medium, even those that have no direct response nature:

• Radio & Print: Since these channels have no direct response, we use the Indirect Measurement models (Bayesian Time Series) to isolate the uplift and compare performance across similar media groups (comparing apples to apples) to reveal what works best.
• Out-of-Home (OOH) & Retail: Even without an online shop, we measure your campaigns by analyzing offline KPIs like store visits (via light barriers, beacons, or Wi-Fi tracking) and applying the same time-series models to your revenue data.

‍

Why Monday Marketing?

We know the industry inside and out. We know the high-stakes pressure of delivering on promises made to investors. Our entire approach is designed to eliminate the learning curve, avoid costly experiments, and deliver results that speak for themselves—like helping StepStone halve their CPV and earn a German Effie Award nomination for efficiency.

Is your TV budget performing optimally? Are you getting $1.00 or $2.50 in value for every dollar spent?

If your current tracking system can’t answer that question, we need to talk.

We are not an agency; we are your full-stack, in-house team replacement. We come in, plug in our proven models and expertise, build the structures, and set up your team for self-sufficient success.

Ready to break the black box for good?

P.S. If you are still in the test and learn phase, we recommend a test budget of approximately €20,000 to €30,000 over a four-week period to get sufficient data for optimization. Don't waste money on a small, one-week test—get the data you need to scale right, right now.

‍