CTV advertising refers to video ads that run on internet connected televisions. This includes smart TVs with built in streaming apps and regular TVs connected through devices like Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, or Apple TV. When someone streams content through services like Hulu, YouTube TV, or Pluto TV, your ads can appear before, during, or after their shows. Unlike traditional cable commercials that reach everyone watching a specific channel, CTV ads target specific households based on their shopping behavior, location, and interests.
This guide breaks down everything you need to know about CTV advertising for your flooring business. You’ll learn how CTV works, why it’s effective for reaching active flooring shoppers, where your ads will appear, and what formats work best. We’ll cover the key differences between CTV and other digital advertising options, show you real campaign examples, and answer the most common questions flooring retailers ask. By the end, you’ll understand whether CTV makes sense for your store and how to get started without wasting money on the wrong approach.
Why CTV advertising matters for flooring retailers
Your potential flooring customers spend more than 2.5 hours per day watching content on connected TVs, according to industry data. When you understand what is ctv advertising and how it works, you realize this represents a massive opportunity to reach people in their homes during relaxed viewing moments. Traditional cable advertising forces you to pay for everyone watching a show, whether they need flooring or not. CTV advertising lets you target only households showing active flooring buyer signals, cutting waste and improving your return on every dollar spent.
You reach buyers during their planning phase
Most flooring purchases begin 3 to 6 months before someone walks into a store. During this planning window, homeowners research styles, watch renovation content, and explore their options while streaming shows. Your CTV ads appear on their TV screens during this critical decision-making period, building awareness before they start visiting competitors. This early positioning gives you a significant advantage because you become the familiar name they remember when they’re ready to shop.
The flooring customer journey starts long before they contact you, and CTV puts your message in front of them at the exact moment they’re making decisions.
Your ads appear in premium environments
CTV ads run during professional streaming content on services people choose to watch, not random websites they stumbled across. Your 15 or 30 second commercial appears on a big screen TV in someone’s living room, commanding full attention in a lean-back viewing experience. This premium placement creates stronger brand recall than banner ads competing with a dozen browser tabs. You gain the credibility and impact of television advertising combined with the targeting precision of digital marketing, reaching only the households most likely to need flooring in your market area soon.
How to get started with CTV advertising
You don’t need a massive budget or months of planning to launch your first CTV campaign. The process starts with defining who you want to reach and understanding what results you need to justify the investment. Most flooring retailers begin with a 90-day test campaign targeting households in their service area showing active flooring buyer signals. This approach lets you measure actual performance like call volume, website visits, and foot traffic before committing to longer contracts or bigger budgets.
Define your target audience first
Start by identifying the specific household characteristics that match your ideal flooring customers. You can target based on home ownership, household income levels, property age, recent home purchases, or renovation activity in your market area. The more specific you get, the less money you waste showing ads to people who aren’t in the market for flooring. Your targeting should include geographic boundaries around your store locations, focusing on zip codes where you already do business successfully or want to expand your presence.
Building your audience profile means understanding what is ctv advertising capable of tracking. Modern CTV platforms identify households researching flooring online, visiting competitor websites, watching home improvement content, or showing other high-intent buying signals. You can layer multiple targeting criteria together to create a precise audience segment. For example, target homeowners within 15 miles of your store who earn above $75,000 annually and recently searched for flooring terms online.
Set realistic budget and timeline expectations
Most effective CTV campaigns for flooring retailers start with $2,000 to $5,000 per month as a testing budget. This amount generates enough impressions and engagement to measure real performance while staying affordable for independent stores. You need at least 60 to 90 days to properly test CTV because flooring purchase cycles are longer than impulse buys. Someone seeing your ad today might not call for several weeks as they continue researching and planning their project.
Your budget determines your reach and frequency within your target audience. A smaller budget focuses on fewer households but shows them your ads multiple times, building familiarity. A larger budget expands your reach to more potential customers but might reduce how often each household sees your message. The right balance depends on your market size and competitive pressure in your area.
Starting with a test campaign lets you prove CTV performance before scaling up, reducing your risk and building confidence in the channel.
Choose your advertising partner carefully
You can buy CTV advertising through major platforms like streaming services directly, work with a programmatic advertising platform, or partner with an agency specializing in your industry. Direct buys through services like Hulu give you known placement but limited targeting options and higher minimums. Programmatic platforms offer better targeting and lower entry costs but require technical expertise to manage effectively. Industry-specific agencies understand flooring buyer behavior and can target the right audiences without wasting impressions on people who will never need your services.
Look for partners who provide transparent reporting on metrics that matter to your business. You need to see how many households viewed your ads, how many completed watching them, website traffic generated, phone calls received, and ultimately the return on your ad spend. Avoid any partner requiring long-term contracts before proving results or who can’t explain exactly where your ads will appear and who will see them.
Key benefits of CTV advertising
Understanding what is ctv advertising reveals several advantages that traditional cable advertising simply can’t match for flooring retailers. You gain digital targeting precision combined with television’s visual impact, creating a powerful way to reach active flooring shoppers. Your ads appear on big screens in comfortable viewing environments where people pay attention, not on mobile devices while they’re distracted or multitasking. This combination delivers better results with less wasted budget compared to broad cable buys or scattered digital campaigns.
You target only active flooring buyers
CTV advertising lets you focus your budget on households showing real buying signals instead of everyone watching a particular show. You can target people who recently searched for flooring terms, visited competitor websites, watched home improvement content, or fit specific demographic profiles matching your best customers. This precision means your $3,000 monthly budget reaches 5,000 qualified households instead of 50,000 random viewers who will never need flooring. Your cost per qualified impression drops dramatically when you eliminate waste.
Geographic targeting ensures every dollar stays in your market area. You can draw a custom boundary around your service territory, excluding areas too far from your store to be profitable. This level of control is impossible with traditional television advertising, where you pay for entire metro areas or regional coverage whether those viewers can realistically shop with you or not.
You measure real business impact
CTV platforms track completed views, website visits, and phone calls generated by your ads, giving you concrete data on performance. You see exactly how many people watched your full commercial, how many visited your website afterward, and how many called your store. This measurement capability answers the question flooring retailers ask constantly: "Is my advertising actually working?" Traditional cable advertising provides vague ratings estimates, while CTV gives you actionable performance data you can use to optimize your campaigns.
When you can measure website visits and phone calls directly connected to your CTV ads, you finally know which advertising dollars are working and which are wasted.
Most CTV ads achieve 70% to 95% completion rates because they run during content people chose to watch and can’t easily skip. Your message gets seen completely, building stronger brand awareness than banner ads someone scrolls past in two seconds. This high completion rate means you pay for impressions that actually deliver your full message, not partial views that waste your money.
Where CTV ads run and who you can target
Your CTV ads appear on major streaming services and connected TV devices that millions of households use every day. When you understand what is ctv advertising and where it runs, you realize your commercials reach people watching content on platforms like Hulu, Peacock, Pluto TV, Tubi, and YouTube TV. These ads display on smart TVs from brands like Samsung, LG, and Vizio, plus streaming devices including Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, and gaming consoles like Xbox and PlayStation. Your message appears during actual television viewing on big screens, not small mobile devices where people scroll and multitask.
Major streaming platforms and devices
Most CTV campaigns run across multiple streaming services simultaneously rather than just one platform. This approach maximizes your reach because different households prefer different services, and many people subscribe to several options. Your ads might appear during free ad-supported content on Pluto TV for one household, then show up during a Hulu series for another family in the same neighborhood. This cross-platform delivery ensures you reach more of your target audience without buying separate campaigns on each service individually.
Running your ads across multiple streaming platforms and devices ensures you reach flooring shoppers wherever they’re watching, not just on a single service.
Streaming devices process household-level data that enables precise targeting, making them ideal for local flooring advertising. The platform knows the physical location of each device, what content people watch, and can match that device to other online activity from the same household. Your ads reach the right living rooms in your market area during premium content viewing, not random households across the country who can’t visit your store.
Targeting households by buying behavior
You can target households based on specific online behaviors that signal flooring purchase intent. This includes people searching for flooring terms, visiting home improvement websites, watching renovation content, or researching specific flooring types like luxury vinyl or hardwood. Behavioral targeting identifies households actively moving through the buying process, not just anyone who might need flooring someday. Your budget focuses on high-intent shoppers who are weeks or months away from making a purchase decision.
Purchase history and life events provide additional targeting layers. You can reach households that recently bought a home, completed other renovation projects, or match the demographic profile of your best existing customers. Combining multiple targeting criteria creates audience segments more likely to respond to your message and visit your store than broad demographic groups like all homeowners aged 35 to 65.
Geographic and demographic precision
Geographic targeting lets you draw custom boundaries around your service area down to specific zip codes or radius distances from your store locations. You exclude areas outside your delivery range or markets where you don’t want to compete, keeping every impression inside your profitable territory. This precision prevents waste on households too far away to realistically shop with you, focusing your budget on people who can actually drive to your showroom and become customers.
CTV ad formats and creative best practices
Your CTV ads run as video commercials in three standard lengths: 6 seconds, 15 seconds, and 30 seconds. Most flooring retailers find 15-second spots provide enough time to showcase products and deliver a clear message without losing viewer attention. The 30-second format works well when you need to tell a more complete story about a renovation or demonstrate multiple flooring options. These ads appear as pre-roll (before content starts), mid-roll (during natural breaks), or post-roll (after content ends), with mid-roll placements typically generating the strongest engagement because viewers are already committed to watching their show.
Standard video lengths and timing
You can choose non-skippable formats that force complete viewing or skippable options that cost less but risk lower completion rates. Non-skippable ads guarantee your full message gets seen, making them ideal for building brand awareness and delivering complete information about your flooring store. Skippable formats work better when you target highly qualified audiences who are more likely to watch by choice because they’re actively interested in flooring. Understanding what is ctv advertising and how viewers interact with different ad lengths helps you pick the format matching your campaign goals and budget constraints.
Design elements that work on big screens
Your creative needs large, readable text because viewers sit farther from their TV screens than computer monitors. Font sizes that work on mobile ads become invisible on a television across the room, so use bold headlines and limit text to essential information only. Show high-quality product shots that display flooring textures and patterns clearly, avoiding busy backgrounds that distract from your message. Close-up footage of flooring installations or finished rooms performs better than wide showroom shots where details get lost.
Design your CTV ads specifically for television viewing, not by repurposing mobile or desktop creative that won’t translate to big screens.
Colors and contrast matter more on television than digital banner ads. Use strong color combinations that remain visible in different lighting conditions since people watch in various room environments. Your brand logo should appear clearly in the first three seconds and remain visible throughout the commercial, building recognition even if someone only catches part of your ad.
Call to action strategies
Your CTA needs to be immediately actionable and easy to remember. A simple phone number appearing on screen for the full duration works better than complicated URLs viewers can’t write down before your ad ends. QR codes displayed prominently let viewers scan with their phone while watching, creating a direct path from television viewing to your website without requiring them to remember anything. Keep your CTA singular rather than asking for multiple actions, focusing on either calling, visiting your website, or coming to your showroom, not all three simultaneously.
CTV vs OTT and other TV options
Understanding what is ctv advertising means knowing how it differs from other television advertising options available to flooring retailers. These distinctions matter because each approach offers different targeting capabilities, pricing structures, and performance measurement options that directly impact your return on investment. Many flooring retailers confuse these terms or assume they’re interchangeable when they actually represent distinct advertising channels with unique advantages and limitations. Knowing which option fits your goals helps you avoid wasting money on the wrong approach.
CTV versus OTT advertising
OTT (over-the-top) refers to any video content delivered over the internet to any device, including smartphones, tablets, computers, and televisions. CTV specifically targets television screens only, whether smart TVs or regular TVs with streaming devices connected. This means CTV is a subset of OTT focused exclusively on the largest screens where viewers pay closer attention and complete viewing at higher rates. Your OTT campaign might reach someone watching a video on their phone during a commute, while your CTV campaign reaches the same person on their living room television during evening relaxation.
The viewing environment creates the key difference. People watch CTV in lean-back mode on big screens, while OTT includes mobile viewing where distractions and multitasking reduce engagement. You pay similar rates for both, but CTV typically delivers better completion rates and stronger brand recall because viewers focus on the screen rather than scrolling while your ad plays.
Traditional cable and broadcast TV
Traditional television advertising forces you to buy entire dayparts or specific programs, reaching everyone watching regardless of whether they need flooring. You might spend $2,000 to reach 10,000 households, but only 200 of them are actually in the market for flooring. Cable and broadcast offer massive reach but terrible efficiency for niche products like flooring that only appeal to a small percentage of any audience at any given time.
Traditional TV delivers broad reach at high cost, while CTV focuses your budget exclusively on households showing actual flooring buyer signals.
Addressable TV options
Addressable television lets cable providers target specific households through their set-top boxes, but this technology remains limited to cable subscribers. You can target more precisely than traditional cable but reach fewer total households as cable subscription rates drop every year. Addressable TV costs more per impression than CTV because the technology requires cable infrastructure, and you miss the growing streaming audience that has already cut the cord completely.
Examples of effective CTV campaigns
Real flooring retailers have used CTV advertising to solve specific business challenges and generate measurable results. These examples show you different approaches and outcomes you can expect when targeting the right households with the right message. Each campaign demonstrates how understanding what is ctv advertising and applying it correctly drives more qualified traffic, phone calls, and sales for stores ranging from single locations to regional chains. Your specific results will vary based on your market, competition, and creative execution, but these cases provide realistic benchmarks for planning your own CTV strategy.
Independent store builds local brand awareness
A single-location flooring retailer in a competitive suburban market spent $3,500 monthly on CTV ads targeting homeowners within 12 miles of their showroom. They focused on households earning above $65,000 annually who recently searched for flooring terms or visited home improvement websites. Their 15-second commercial featured finished room installations and a simple phone number CTA that remained visible throughout the ad. The campaign ran for 90 days across streaming platforms like Hulu, Pluto TV, and Roku Channel.
Results showed 127,000 completed ad views reaching approximately 8,500 unique households multiple times during the three-month period. Website traffic from the campaign area increased 43% compared to the previous quarter, and tracked phone calls attributed to CTV ads totaled 67 inquiries. The store closed 22 sales directly connected to those calls, generating $178,000 in revenue against $10,500 in ad spend. This 17-to-1 return demonstrated that targeted CTV advertising works for smaller independent retailers competing against larger chains.
Regional chain drives traffic to multiple locations
A flooring chain with six locations across two adjacent counties used $8,000 monthly on CTV advertising to promote a spring sale event. They targeted households within 15 miles of any store location who fit their ideal customer profile based on income, home ownership, and property age. Their 30-second commercial showed multiple product categories and directed viewers to visit their nearest showroom for sale pricing, using dynamic location insertion to customize the store address based on viewer location.
Customizing your CTV ads by viewer location ensures each household sees the most relevant store information, reducing friction between seeing your ad and taking action.
The campaign generated 38% higher foot traffic during the sale period compared to the previous year’s event promoted through traditional cable advertising. Store managers reported customers specifically mentioning seeing the commercial while streaming shows, indicating strong message retention. The company tracked 312 sale-related inquiries through phone and web forms during the campaign period, with the CTV investment paying for itself within the first two weeks of the promotion.
Product-focused campaign for luxury vinyl launch
A flooring retailer introducing a new luxury vinyl plank line ran a 60-day CTV campaign targeting households researching waterproof flooring and showing interest in kitchen or bathroom renovations. Their commercial demonstrated the product’s durability and water resistance through a compelling visual story featuring a family lifestyle scenario. The creative included a QR code that viewers could scan for instant access to product samples and pricing.
Campaign metrics showed 89% completion rates on their 15-second spots and 71% on 30-second versions, indicating strong viewer engagement. The QR code generated 412 scans leading directly to their product landing page, with 38% of those visitors requesting samples. The focused product campaign established the new line successfully in their market and created a template for future product launches using CTV as the primary awareness driver.
Common CTV questions from flooring retailers
Flooring retailers ask similar questions when considering CTV advertising for the first time. These concerns range from budget requirements to performance expectations and technical capabilities. Understanding what is ctv advertising includes knowing the practical realities of campaign management, costs, and results you can reasonably expect. Your specific situation will vary based on market size, competition level, and existing brand awareness, but these answers provide realistic expectations for planning your CTV strategy.
How much should I budget for CTV advertising?
Most flooring retailers start with $2,500 to $5,000 monthly as a testing budget that generates enough impressions to measure real performance. Your minimum effective spend depends on your market size and how many households you need to reach to drive meaningful traffic. Smaller markets with 25,000 to 50,000 households in your service area can test effectively at the lower end, while larger metro markets need $7,000 to $10,000 monthly to achieve adequate reach and frequency. These budgets include the ad serving costs but not creative production, which typically runs $1,500 to $3,500 for professional video production.
Budget allocation should focus on sustained campaigns rather than short bursts because flooring purchase cycles extend over weeks or months. Spending $3,000 monthly for three months outperforms spending $9,000 in one month because repeated exposure builds familiarity and catches different households at different stages of their buying journey.
How long before I see results?
You’ll see immediate metrics like impressions and completion rates within days of launching, but meaningful business results take 30 to 90 days to develop. Flooring purchases involve significant planning, research, and decision-making time, so someone seeing your ad today might not contact you for several weeks. Phone calls and website traffic typically increase within the first two to three weeks as your ads reach households already deep in their buying process who needed that final push to contact you.
Expect early wins from households ready to buy now, but the full campaign impact develops over 60 to 90 days as you reach people earlier in their planning phase.
Sales conversions lag even further behind because your leads need time to visit, get quotes, make decisions, and schedule installations. Track your inquiry volume and website engagement as leading indicators rather than waiting for closed sales before evaluating campaign performance.
Can I target people who visited my competitors?
You can target households that visited competitor websites or searched for competitor brand names, though privacy regulations limit how precisely you can do this. Modern CTV platforms identify households showing interest in flooring retailers generally rather than tracking visits to specific competitor stores. This approach targets people researching multiple options, which includes your competitors, without violating privacy standards. Your ads reach active shoppers comparing different flooring retailers in your market area, giving you the opportunity to present your value proposition before they make their final decision.
What if my creative isn’t working?
Switching creative mid-campaign costs nothing on most CTV platforms since you already produced the video assets. You can test multiple versions simultaneously by splitting your audience and measuring which creative generates better completion rates, website traffic, and phone calls. Simple changes like different opening scenes, revised calls to action, or product focus variations can significantly impact performance. Your advertising partner should provide creative performance data within the first 14 to 21 days, giving you time to adjust before completing your full campaign period.
Final thoughts on CTV advertising
Understanding what is ctv advertising gives you a powerful tool for reaching active flooring buyers in your market without the waste of traditional television campaigns. Your ads appear on big screens during premium content viewing when households are relaxed and receptive to your message. You target only the people showing real buying signals, track actual business results, and adjust your approach based on performance data rather than guessing whether your advertising works. This precision transforms television advertising from an expensive brand-building expense into a measurable performance channel that drives qualified traffic to your store.
Your next step depends on whether you want broad reach or laser-focused targeting of households at specific buying stages. IFDA’s AI-driven targeting technology identifies flooring consumers during planning, research, and shopping phases, ensuring your CTV ads reach the right households at the right time. This approach eliminates waste and maximizes your return on every advertising dollar spent.
