Key takeaways
- CTV retargeting shows streaming TV ads to people who have already interacted with your brand, such as website visitors, email subscribers, or past customers.
- Cookies do not work on TVs. Retargeting on CTV requires identity resolution to connect a website visit or an email address to a streaming household.
- There are two ways to retarget on CTV with Untitled. The Untitled ID Tag retargets website visitors. Our Audience Builder retargets customer lists synced from Klaviyo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, or uploaded by CSV.
- Audiences built in Untitled can go to the Untitled DSP, Meta Ads, and Google Ads at the same time, so the same people see your brand on every channel.
- Audiences sent to the Untitled DSP match to streaming TV at a 90% rate.
What is CTV retargeting?
CTV retargeting is the practice of serving ads on connected TV devices to people who already know your brand.
The channel is growing on both sides. Streaming now accounts for nearly half of all TV viewing in the U.S., according to Nielsen’s The Gauge, and the IAB projects U.S. CTV ad spend will grow 11% in 2026.
Connected TV includes smart TVs, streaming sticks, and gaming consoles that play content from streaming apps. The audience can be people who visited your website, subscribers on your email list, or customers who have bought from you before.
Retargeting on CTV works differently than retargeting on the web in three ways:
- No cookies: Display retargeting relies on a browser cookie set when someone visits your site. Televisions do not share cookies with browsers. To reach a website visitor on their TV, a platform has to resolve that visitor to a person and then match that person to a streaming household. That process is identity resolution.
- The ad is on the biggest screen in the house: CTV ads play full screen, usually cannot be skipped, and are watched with the sound on. A retargeting ad on CTV is closer to a TV commercial than a banner.
- Viewers do not click: Nobody clicks a TV ad. Measurement depends on what people do after they see it, such as visiting your site or buying. Users can, however, add a QR code to their video ads with a unique UTM code for tracking. We cover how to measure this in the measurement section below.
For a broader look at the channel, see our guide to CTV ads for DTC brands.
Two ways to retarget on CTV
Untitled supports two retargeting paths for CTV advertising. The first reaches people who recently visited your website. The second reaches people already in your customer data.
Website visitor retargeting vs. customer list retargeting on CTV:
| Attribute | Website visitor retargeting | Customer list retargeting |
|---|---|---|
| Tool | Untitled ID Tag | Untitled Audience Builder |
| Data source | Visitors to your website | Klaviyo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, or a CSV upload |
| Who you reach | People who browsed but have not converted | Subscribers, leads, and past customers |
| Typical use | Recover abandoned browsing and cart sessions | Win back lapsed buyers, convert subscribers, cross-sell |
| Setup | Install the ID Tag, build a visitor audience, send it to the DSP | Connect a data source, filter it into an audience, send it to the DSP |
Website visitor retargeting
Customer list retargeting
Most brands use both. Website retargeting catches people while their interest is recent. List retargeting reaches people you already have a relationship with who may not be visiting your site right now.
Let’s take a deeper look at each path and the use cases.
Path 1: Retarget website visitors with the ID Tag
Most website visitors never fill out a form, so a standard retargeting program only knows them as anonymous browser sessions.
The Untitled ID Tag identifies those visitors at the person level by matching them against an identity graph of more than 300 million people. Once a visitor is identified, they can be added to an audience and reached on channels where cookies do not work, including CTV.
The setup has three steps:
- Install the Untitled ID Tag: Add the tag to your site through Google Tag Manager, WordPress, Shopify, or a direct install. Find the guides here.
- Build a visitor audience: Define who you want to retarget based on their browsing, such as people who viewed a product category, started checkout, or visited your pricing page.
- Send the audience to the Untitled DSP: The audience becomes a segment in the Untitled DSP, where you select the CTV inventory you want to buy and launch the campaign.
Path 2: Retarget existing customer lists with Audience Builder
Your email platform and CRM already hold your most valuable audience: people who have subscribed, engaged, or bought. Audience Builder turns that data into CTV audiences.
Untitled’s integrations are native. You authenticate the platform inside Untitled and the data syncs directly into your account. By default, the sync includes all of your data, and you can limit it if you prefer. Once connected, the platform is a data source you can query in Audience Builder.
The workflow is the same for every source:
- Connect the source: Authenticate Klaviyo, HubSpot, Salesforce, or Mailchimp from the integrations page, or upload a CSV.
- Build the audience: Filter the synced data in Audience Builder to define the people you want to reach, then save the audience to your account.
- Send it to the Untitled DSP: Push the saved audience to the DSP, where it becomes a segment ready for CTV targeting.
- Launch the campaign: Choose your CTV channels, set budget and flight dates, and start the campaign.
What changes from source to source is the data available to filter on. The sections below cover common uses for each.
Retarget Klaviyo email lists on CTV
Klaviyo holds subscriber and purchase behavior for many Shopify and DTC brands, which makes it a natural source for CTV retargeting. Useful audiences include subscribers who have never purchased, customers who have not ordered in 90 days or more, and your highest-value repeat buyers for new product launches.
Retargeting a Klaviyo list on streaming TV through Untitled puts your brand in front of subscribers who have stopped opening emails, since the TV ad does not depend on inbox engagement.
For more on combining email and paid channels, see our guide to Shopify email retargeting.
Retarget HubSpot contacts on connected TV
HubSpot contacts carry lifecycle stages and engagement history. That lets you build CTV audiences in Untitled around where people sit in the funnel, such as leads who never became customers, customers eligible for a renewal or repeat purchase, or contacts who went quiet after a sales conversation.
Agencies managing clients in HubSpot can use the same approach for each client account.
Retarget Salesforce contacts on CTV
Salesforce often holds the most complete customer record at larger brands. Use it to retarget customers by account attributes, purchase history, or opportunity status.
A common use in Untitled is reaching contacts tied to closed-lost opportunities with a brand message on streaming TV while the sales team re-engages.
Retarget Mailchimp subscribers on streaming TV
Mailchimp audiences, tags, and engagement data can be filtered into CTV audiences within Untitled. Useful segments include subscribers who opened a campaign but did not buy, subscribers tagged by product interest, and past customers who have not engaged recently.
Retarget offline customer lists on CTV with a CSV upload
Customer data that lives outside your marketing platforms can still be used inside Untitled. Upload a CSV of customer records from in-store purchases, event attendees, catalog requests, or point-of-sale systems, and it becomes a source in Audience Builder like any integration.
This is useful for brands with retail locations that want to reach in-store buyers on streaming TV.
Run the same audience across CTV, Meta, and Google Ads
An audience built in Untitled does not have to stay on one channel. From your Audience Library, you can push a saved audience to any combination of destinations, including:
- Meta Ads, where it appears as a Custom Audience
- Google Ads, where it appears in Audience Manager
- The Untitled DSP, where it appears as a segment ready for CTV targeting
Untitled has integrations for the majority of paid ad channels, including TikTok, Pinterest and more.
Meta and Google Ads are destinations only. Meta does not let advertisers export the members of a Custom Audience, so an audience that starts inside Meta cannot be moved to CTV. Building the audience in Untitled first is what makes the same audience available everywhere.
Running one audience across channels gives you a consistent message to the same people. A common setup uses CTV to reintroduce the brand on the largest screen, then uses Meta and Google Ads to reach the same people when they are scrolling or searching.
Audiences sent from Untitled match at 75% on Meta, 75% on Google Ads, and 90% on streaming TV through the Untitled DSP.
How to measure CTV retargeting
Because CTV viewers do not click, click-through rate does not apply. Measure CTV retargeting on what happens after exposure.
- Site visits and conversions after exposure: Track how many people in the retargeted audience visited your site or purchased after seeing the ad. This is the primary signal for a retargeting campaign.
- Video completion rate: The share of ads watched to the end. CTV completion rates are typically high because many placements cannot be skipped, so a low rate points to a placement or creative problem.
- Holdout comparison: Hold back a portion of the audience from the campaign and compare their conversion rate to the group that saw the ads. The difference shows the lift the campaign produced, rather than conversions that would have happened anyway.
- Cross-channel performance: When the same audience runs on CTV, Meta, and Google Ads, compare results on Meta and Google between people who were also reached on CTV and people who were not.
Matchback analysis: measure CTV against real orders with Untitled
Every Untitled audience is built from known identities, so you know exactly who is being targeted on CTV. That holds whether the audience comes from your first-party data, website visitors identified by the ID Tag, or Untitled intent audiences.
Knowing the targeted identities makes matchback analysis possible. During your campaign, the Untitled team matches the people you targeted against your actual conversions. When your customer data source is also synced to Untitled, such as Shopify customer and order data, the analysis connects targeted customers to the orders they placed and the revenue they generated.
Just like our client Hestan Culinary saw, the result is campaign ROAS based on real purchases.
Many CTV platforms report impressions and completion rates, then estimate conversions with modeled attribution. A matchback analysis shows which of the people you targeted went on to buy and how much they spent.
Pair it with a holdout group to see how many of those orders the campaign added beyond what would have happened anyway.
How Hestan Culinary Achieved 5.5X ROAS on Connected TV (CTV) for DTC Cookware
Hestan Culinary unlocked profitable growth on CTV with audience intelligence and premium inventory supplied by Untitled.
Frequently asked questions
CTV retargeting serves ads on connected TV devices to people who have already interacted with your brand, such as website visitors, email subscribers, or past customers. It requires identity resolution because cookies do not work on televisions.
Yes. The Untitled ID Tag identifies anonymous website visitors at the person level. Those visitors can be built into an audience and sent to the Untitled DSP for CTV targeting.
Yes. Connect Klaviyo to Untitled through the native integration, filter the synced data into an audience in Audience Builder, and send the audience to the Untitled DSP.
Not directly. Meta does not allow Custom Audiences to be exported. Build the audience in Untitled instead, then push it to Meta Ads and the Untitled DSP from your Audience Library so the same people are targeted on both.
Display retargeting uses browser cookies and serves banner ads that people can click. CTV retargeting uses identity resolution to reach streaming households and serves full-screen video ads, so success is measured by site visits and conversions after exposure rather than clicks.
Website visitors identified by the ID Tag, data synced from Klaviyo, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Mailchimp, and offline customer lists uploaded by CSV.
Start retargeting on CTV
CTV retargeting puts your brand on the largest screen in the house in front of people who already know you. Cookies do not work on televisions, so every CTV retargeting program depends on identity resolution to connect a website visit or an email address to a streaming household.
About Untitled
Untitled gives you two ways to build retargeting audiences for CTV. The Untitled ID Tag identifies website visitors at the person level so you can retarget people who browsed but did not buy. The Audience Builder turns the data you already have in Klaviyo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, or an offline CSV into CTV audiences.
Either audience can be sent to the Untitled DSP, Meta Ads, and Google Ads at the same time, so the same people see a consistent message across channels.
Because our audience platform is built from known identities, measurement goes beyond impressions and completion rates. With your Shopify customer and order data synced, the Untitled team can run a matchback analysis that ties the people you targeted to the orders they placed and reports ROAS based on real purchases.
To see how CTV retargeting would work with your data, book a demo with us today!
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- The Future of Website Visitor Identification: 7 Trends Reshaping How Brands Identify Anonymous Traffic in 2026
- Customer Data Platform Alternatives: Why Marketing Teams Are Moving to a Composable Stack
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