Connected TV Measurement and Attribution in Canada

Who measures CTV in Canada?

Numeris. It is the Canadian measurement body, and since October 2025 it has run a national cross-platform product that covers linear and streaming in one dataset.

Numeris runs three relevant products. TAM measures linear television minute by minute. Enhanced TAM is a hybrid of panel and big data, and Numeris says it becomes Canada's official TV dataset in 2027. National VAM — Video Audience Measurement — is the unified linear-plus-streaming database.

National VAM is the significant one for CTV. It launched nationally in October 2025, having run in Ontario and Quebec since 2022, and covers over 95% of Canadian video platforms including Prime Video, Crave, CBC Gem, Disney+, Netflix, Pluto, TikTok and YouTube. It reports duplicated and unduplicated reach with demographic data across screens.

thinkTV publishes and interprets that data — its Total TV & Streaming Viewership reports are where most of the figures on this site come from — but thinkTV does not do the measuring.

What can you actually measure on a Canadian CTV campaign?

Four things reliably, and a fifth that depends entirely on which route you bought through.

• Impressions and completion rate. Universal, and high on CTV because most inventory is non-skippable.
• Reach and frequency. Available from the platform, and independently from Numeris VAM where the platform is covered.
• Incremental reach against linear. This is what VAM's unified dataset makes possible, and it is the strongest measurement argument for adding CTV to a Canadian TV plan.
• Brand lift. Offered by most major platforms, usually through third-party study partners.
• Outcome and conversion data. Route-dependent. Amazon's retail data integration is the strongest in this market. Bell Media provides outcomes measurement at no cost above $100,000 of investment.

Why don't platform numbers match Numeris numbers?

Because they measure different populations over different periods using different definitions, and neither is wrong. This is the single most common source of confusion in Canadian CTV reporting.

Netflix reports Monthly Active Viewers, defined as subscribers who watched at least one minute of ads in a month, multiplied by estimated household viewership. That produced 6.6 million for Canada. Numeris measures weekly reach across a panel-based national sample and puts Netflix's ad-supported reach at 10.8% of Canadian adults.

One is a monthly platform-side count of exposed households. The other is a weekly independent estimate of population reach. They are not comparable, and stacking them in the same deck to make a total is how plans end up promising reach that does not exist.

Our rule when building Canadian plans: platform metrics for optimisation, Numeris for reach claims. If a number is going in front of a board, it should be the independently measured one.

What can Canadian CTV not measure?

More than the sales decks suggest. Stating this is not a weakness in the channel — it is the difference between a plan that survives its own post-campaign report and one that does not.

• Cross-platform unduplicated reach at campaign level is hard. VAM does it at market level. Getting it across a specific multi-platform buy, where each platform reports its own impressions, remains genuinely difficult.
• Last-click attribution does not apply. CTV has no click. Anyone reporting a CTV click-through rate is reporting an artefact of a companion unit, not the TV ad.
• View-through windows are set by the platform, not by you, and they differ. Two platforms reporting “conversions” may be counting over different windows.
• Smaller-market granularity is limited. Panel-based measurement thins out below the major Canadian markets.

Where a method cannot distinguish two possible explanations, we say so in the report rather than picking the one that flatters the campaign.

What is changing in Canadian measurement?

Two things worth planning around, both from Numeris.

Enhanced TAM becomes Canada's official TV dataset in 2027. It is a hybrid of panel and big data rather than panel alone, so year-on-year comparisons that straddle the change will need care.

National VAM is now the reference dataset for cross-platform planning, having gone national in October 2025. Anything measured before that date, outside Ontario and Quebec, is not on the same basis.

Separately, AdClarity brought CTV ad intelligence to the Canadian market in June 2026, which makes competitive CTV activity visible in a way it previously was not.