Introduction

Universal Ads launched in 2025 with one simple idea: make premium TV as performant as social, and just as easy to buy and measure. From day one, we’ve believed TV can drive performance, alongside its long-standing role in building brands.

Proving it is easier said than done. TV ads don’t get clicked. A viewer sees an ad during their favorite show, and days later they might search the brand, tap a social ad or click a search ad. Standard attribution gives that visit or purchase to the last channel they touched, and TV gets no credit for starting the journey or building the trust behind it.

So, we set out to measure what attribution misses. We analyzed a cohort of brands advertising on Universal Ads and asked a simple question: how much of the traffic and sales they were already paying for in other channels did TV actually create?

The results were clear: TV was associated with a lift in paid site traffic for nearly 90% of brands studied, all from new or lapsed visitors. And that increased site traffic? It carried through to purchase: every brand with sufficient purchase data saw a lift in purchases made through paid search, social and other paid channels: sales their dashboards credited to those channels.

In this report, we share what we found, why your dashboards don’t show it, and what it means for how you evaluate TV.

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