North American Media Experts
U.S. CTV ad spend hits $38B in 2026 and CPMs run 2-4x linear TV. Here are the connected TV benchmarks - CPMs, VCR, and ROAS - for eight industries.
10 min read
Connected TV is no longer the "emerging" channel media planners hedge with $20,000 test budgets. U.S. CTV ad spend is on pace to clear $38 billion in 2026, according to EMARKETER's December 2025 forecast, and the IAB projects 13.8% growth this year — second only to social. For the first time, CTV upfront commitments (~$17.7B) will exceed primetime linear TV upfronts (~$17.0B). The channel has graduated, and the question on every media director's desk is no longer "should we test CTV?" but "are our CTV numbers any good?"
This post answers that question. We pulled the most credible 2026 benchmarks from EMARKETER, IAB, Magna, Tatari, Adwave, FreeWheel, Skai, and Tinuiti, then layered in what we see across client accounts at North American Media Experts. The result is a working set of CTV advertising benchmarks for 2026 you can actually plan against — CPMs, video completion rates, ROAS, frequency, and incrementality — broken out by industry where the data supports it.
Two years ago, CTV was sold on reach and brand lift, and most advertisers measured it on reach and brand lift. That window is closed. Three things changed simultaneously:
If you have not refreshed your benchmark deck since last year, almost every number in it is now stale. Here is the current picture.
CTV pricing in 2026 sits in two clear tiers, with a long tail underneath. Aggregated across Adwave's 2026 update, R-Advertising's TV instream report, and what we see in DSP buys for clients:
The headline takeaway: CTV CPMs run roughly 2x to 4x linear TV CPMs for comparable reach. That premium is only defensible if you are using CTV's actual advantages — household-level targeting, frequency capping, and digital-style attribution. If you are buying CTV as "linear plus internet," you are paying the premium and getting none of the upside. For a deeper breakdown of how programmatic pricing stacks across CPM, CPC, and CPV formats, see our analysis of programmatic advertising costs in 2026.
Video completion rate is the cleanest signal of CTV ad quality. Unskippable inventory on a big-screen TV produces completion rates digital video advertisers can only dream about.
If your CTV vendor is reporting completion rates below 85% on premium AVOD inventory, ask hard questions. Either the placements are not what they were sold as, or the campaign is running on long-tail FAST inventory mislabeled as premium. We have seen both — and the easy fix is a private marketplace deal with completion-rate floors baked into the agreement.
Industry CPM variance on CTV is narrower than it is on paid search, but it is real. Inventory price is mostly set by audience demand, so verticals competing for the same affluent households pay more.
Two notes on reading these numbers. First, these are media CPMs — they exclude DSP fees, data costs, and verification, which together typically add another 18–30% to your loaded CPM. Second, these are open-market and programmatic guaranteed rates. Upfront-committed inventory and private marketplaces can come in 10–20% lower in exchange for volume commitments.
For most of CTV's history, the honest answer to "what is good ROAS?" was "we don't really measure it." That excuse is over. Shoppable CTV, attention-based attribution, and clean-room measurement now let advertisers tie streaming exposure to downstream commerce. From Skai's 2026 State of Retail Media DSP report, Tinuiti's retail-media trends analysis, and account-level data we collect on our clients, here is the realistic 2026 ROAS picture:
The honest framing: if you are running CTV as a standalone last-touch channel, you will underestimate its ROAS by 30–60%. CTV is an upstream channel that lifts the conversion rate of everything downstream. The brands beating these benchmarks are not running CTV harder — they are measuring it correctly, with a blend of MMM, incrementality tests, and platform-level attribution. Our perspective on why measurement frameworks have to shift toward owned signal is in our piece on why first-party data is the future of digital advertising.
The three CTV operational levers that move performance most in 2026 are frequency capping, reach extension, and incrementality testing. Here is what the data says about each.
Frequency. The best-performing CTV campaigns in our portfolio cap at 3–5 impressions per household per week. SpotlightIQ's 2026 analysis aligns with this, finding that frequency capping reduces ad fatigue by roughly 22%. Above 5 impressions per week, ad recall plateaus and brand-sentiment scores start dropping. Below 3, you are not building enough memory to move purchase intent.
Incremental reach. FreeWheel and Adtaxi both report that layering CTV on top of a linear TV plan produces up to 32% higher unique reach, mostly from cord-cutters and light-TV households. That is the highest-yield incremental reach math in television, and it is the strongest argument for the CTV premium over linear.
Incrementality. Brands running formal hold-out tests report that CTV drives 2x–3x higher awareness lift than comparable linear-TV spend (per AI Digital and FreeWheel measurement studies). For lower-funnel KPIs, incrementality typically shows a 10–25% true lift on conversions that last-touch attribution would credit to paid search or organic.
If you have never run an incrementality test on CTV, that is the single highest-ROI piece of measurement work you can do in the back half of 2026. The right test design is the difference between defending and growing your CTV budget in next year's planning cycle.
Adworldnews reports that even with 70% of advertisers raising CTV budgets, the creative gap is widening — most brands are still recycling 30-second TV spots designed for linear. CTV is a different medium. The benchmarks that separate top-quartile from median performance:
For more on what is changing in creative this year, see our take on creative strategy trends reshaping digital advertising in 2026, or talk to our creative strategy team about building CTV-native cutdowns from your existing brand assets.
Three concrete moves for the next 30 days.
1. Re-baseline your current CTV plan against these numbers. Pull your last 90 days of CTV reporting. Compare loaded CPM (not media CPM), VCR by publisher, frequency distribution, and whatever ROAS or CPA proxy you have. Anything more than 20% off these benchmarks deserves a root-cause conversation with your DSP or vendor.
2. Restructure your buy across the two CTV tiers. Most under-performing CTV plans buy a single blended package. The plans that beat benchmarks split the buy: a reach layer on FAST and broad AVOD at $18–$25 CPM, plus an addressable layer with first-party or retailer data on premium AVOD at $40–$60 CPM. The blended performance is materially better than either tier alone. Our framework for thinking about channel layering across CTV, paid social, and programmatic display is laid out in our guide to choosing the right paid social vs. programmatic channel mix.
3. Build a CTV incrementality test into Q3. Most advertisers can run a geo-based hold-out for 4–6 weeks with no media-spend reduction overall, just a reallocation. The test will give you a true-lift number you can defend to the CFO, and it will almost always justify raising the CTV budget for 2027 planning. If you need help structuring the test cleanly, our audience targeting team does this work every week.
Benchmarks tell you where the bar sits today. They do not tell you what will move your numbers above the bar. The brands beating the 2026 CTV averages share four habits: they buy in two tiers instead of one, they cap frequency at 3–5 per week, they measure with incrementality not last-touch, and they refresh creative for the medium rather than recycling linear spots. That is not a benchmark — that is a playbook.
If you want a second set of eyes on your current CTV plan, your audience strategy, or your measurement setup, our team at North American Media Experts builds, buys, and measures CTV programs across all the major DSPs and retail-media networks. We are happy to walk through your numbers, show you where you are relative to the benchmarks above, and recommend the changes most likely to move the next quarter. Request a quote and a free CTV plan review and we will be in touch within one business day.