CMO Strategies: A guide to marketers’ success metrics for ad-supported streamers, including Netflix, Prime Video and Roku

As streaming services continue to rival linear TV for audience share, brands and agencies are eager to measure the success of the campaigns they’re running on ad-supported streaming platforms. They consider metrics ranging from engagement/watch time to impressions to click-through rates. Streaming platforms aim to provide advertisers with that data, but measurement tools vary by platform, and the services must sell their individual platform offerings as well.

“A lot of my job in running marketing and measurement is to articulate our proposition to the ecosystem,” said Sarah Harms, vp of ad marketing and measurement at Roku. “Roku is a publisher. It’s an operating system. … Unfortunately, some buyers don’t quite understand our proposition, because we were a walled garden and because we had a demand-side platform.”

Among the brands and agencies surveyed by Digiday+ Research in the first quarter of this year, impressions and engagement/watch time were the top two success metrics advertisers consider for the third year in a row on the three streaming services where they place the majority of ads — YouTube, Amazon Prime Video (with ads) and Hulu. Not only was impressions a top success metric on platforms where brands and agencies place the majority of their ads, it was also the top success metric across all platforms considered for this report, with the exception of YouTube.

Tracking impressions can help an advertiser understand the scale of an ad’s exposure and can be key for raising brand awareness. Platforms are eager to offer impressions data as proof of scale as they seek to grow their streaming businesses and to draw advertisers away from traditional TV.

However, for as much as ad-supported streaming viewership is growing, recent data from Samba TV indicates that advertisers are too often missing the mark. An overwhelming majority of TV and streaming ad impressions — 91% — are being served to the top 50% of U.S. households that spend the most time watching traditional TV, according to Samba TV. That’s based on households’ traditional TV watch time, but it includes streaming ad impressions. By contrast, only 9% of TV and streaming ads reached the bottom 50% of households. This means that the ads are predominately being served only to one group of consumers, narrowing their reach despite a high number of impressions.

To capture a fuller picture of an ad campaign’s performance, some ad agencies, like performance marketing agency Tinuiti, have been weighing a variety of other metrics in combination with impressions to gauge campaign success for their clients.

“We have our own proprietary measurement technology called Bliss Point that’s based on one-to-one attribution between the impressions that we serve and the KPIs that we track for our clients,” said Harry Browne, vp of TV, audio and display innovation at Tinuiti. “We are generally looking at KPIs like visits, cart ads, orders, subscriptions. We will look at lift and awareness, but we try to focus on real business metrics to build the case for CTV in partnership with all of the other channels that clients are running. It’s important that we’re able to tell the story of what CTV is providing in similar terms to what those other channels are telling them.”

Engagement/watch time was the second-most important success metric for advertisers on almost all platforms in Digiday’s 2025 survey, or, in some cases, equally important as impressions, as seen on Samsung TV Plus and YouTube. Ad engagement, which can refer to reactions and activities from increasing viewers’ interest in a product to evoking emotional responses based on ad content, matters to marketers because advertisers hope to prompt engaged viewers into taking actions like making purchases via a TV remote control or clicking to learn more about a product. The metric also shows ad buyers which impressions are making an impact with viewers or causing action.

Five of the 13 streaming platforms also surveyed by Digiday for this report said they introduced gamified ads within the last year. Gamified ads, which integrate gamelike elements to encourage viewer participation, are specifically geared toward engaging consumers and developing deeper viewer-brand connections.

Peacock, for example, is currently testing its Mini Games and Prediction Games before a broader rollout later this year. Mini Games quiz users about their knowledge of entertainment, pop culture and sports, while Prediction Games give viewers the opportunity to cast votes, guess outcomes and check statistics for programs they’re currently watching.

Gina Reduto, evp of strategy, advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, said the games are intended to deepen fan engagement around Peacock’s most popular programming. “It’s engaging consumers in a different way,” Reduto said. “Can you create trivia around certain content or get consumers to make predictions about what’s going to happen, and give consumers an opportunity to engage in a different way.”

The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus have also added ad formats intended to engage audiences over the past year. Forty-three percent of marketers said this year that engagement is their main metric of success on Samsung TV Plus, and 38% of marketers said the same of The Roku Channel.

The Roku Channel updated its home-screen ads to include videos and it added video to the Roku City screensaver. “We’ve always had what we call our marquee unit, which, if you’re a Roku user, is the big rectangular unit in the home screen,” Harms said. “This year, we introduced video within that unit … very helpful for the consumer, because you can click in to drive tune-in or drive engagement. And so, it’s just a really beautiful, big, splashy opportunity for brands.”

In June 2024, Samsung launched its interactive trivia game “The Six,” which anyone with a Samsung TV remote can play, according to Michael Scott, vp and head of ad sales and operations at Samsung Ads.

“We invested more in game breaks, with fun new experiences, our first being ‘The Six,’ an interactive trivia game built directly into Samsung’s connected devices, with more games to come throughout the year,” Scott said. “These new gaming solutions give advertisers a chance to co-brand exciting experiences, creating a more engaging and memorable connection with users while making brand interactions feel natural and fun.”

Beyond impressions and engagement/watch time, commerce or sales grew in importance this year as a success metric marketers track on all ad-supported streaming platforms, except for Netflix Standard (with ads), where it wasn’t selected by respondents to Digiday’s survey as a success metric for the second year in a row.

Drilling down deeper on the commerce metric, when Digiday asked survey respondents about streaming platforms’ performance throughout the marketing funnel, marketers said insufficient lower-funnel performance (at the point of sale) was their biggest concern on nine out of the 13 ad-supported streaming platforms examined in this report. Notable exceptions were Amazon Prime Video (with ads), The Roku Channel and Tubi, where insufficient mid-funnel performance won out.

Prime Video’s major advantage when it comes to lower-funnel marketing performance is likely due to Amazon’s primary business as an e-commerce platform, which makes the path to purchase shorter for consumers who don’t have to click away from Amazon’s site to visit an external brand site in order to complete a purchase. Amazon also automatically opted in Prime subscribers to the streaming platform’s ad-supported tier, which was launched in January 2024 — a tactic that enabled the e-commerce giant to report an average monthly ad-supported reach (i.e. potential streaming shoppers) of more than 115 million customers in the U.S. and 200 million globally as of February 2025.

To note, commerce or sales was the second-most important success metric marketers said they consider on Amazon Prime Video (with ads), after impressions — 29% of marketers selected commerce or sales versus 35% who selected impressions. Prior to launching Prime Video (with ads), Amazon already had an ad-supported tier, Amazon Freevee, with an established ads business that it has since folded into Prime Video.

Netflix Standard (with ads) was the only ad-supported streaming platform for which marketers didn’t select commerce or sales as a key success metric — 0% of survey respondents said commerce or sales was a main metric of success they consider on the platform. Although Netflix Standard (with ads) and Prime Video (with ads) launched within 14 months of each other — November 2022 and January 2024, respectively — Netflix didn’t have an existing shopper base to opt into its ad-supported tier and it didn’t have an established ads business. Instead, the streaming platform has been building its subscriber base and ad offerings over time. Netflix Standard (with ads) told Digiday that it had 70 million global monthly active users as of November 2024.

Instead of tracking commerce or sales on Netflix Standard (with ads), marketers told Digiday they are focused on impressions and engagement/watch time — 64% of respondents and 27% of respondents selected these metrics, respectively. However, that doesn’t mean marketers aren’t concerned about Netflix’s ability to generate sales. Sixty-seven percent of marketers said they are concerned about insufficient lower-funnel performance on Netflix Standard (with ads).

However, Netflix appears to be taking steps to address shoppability on its ad-supported platform. Netflix and Google partnered on a shoppable integration for the latest season of the streaming platform’s popular series “Emily in Paris” via Shop with Google, according to details shared with Marketing Dive.

Shoppable experiences like Netflix’s Google integration offer a key opportunity for brands to make sales through streaming ads, and shoppable ads were a top ad innovation several platforms told Digiday they were instituting in our 2024 report on ad-supported streaming services. For our 2025 report, five platforms told Digiday they have continued to tweak and expand their shoppable ad offerings over the past year — presumably in an effort to improve lower-funnel sales performance for advertisers.

Roku’s video ads, for example, allow viewers to explore product details and make purchases. Viewers can click through a virtual product catalog, and showrooms can include checkout options. “We call them action ads, where our remote is just so simple and intuitive, and the fact that we now see people purchasing things through televisions is an exciting proposition,” said Roku’s Harms. “This is my wallet. … And Roku is interestingly positioned to do well there, because of our reach, because of those performative formats, and the fact that we often have direct relationships with consumers with their credit cards on their Roku account, and so it’s kind of seamless checking out because of our relationships with them.”

Tinuiti’s Browne said he’s seen a trend across streaming platforms toward offering shoppable experiences. He said shoppable ads can improve engagement metrics in addition to sales. “A lot of the new formats that have come out have been with an eye towards shopability,” Browne said. “We see that less as a way to shorten the purchase path — obviously it does that, and that’s exciting — but I don’t think that most viewers engage with it that way. We see it as a way to increase overall engagement and attention with the ad, where it feels different, it appears differently when you are watching it, and it creates a more memorable experience than your traditional ad.”

“So, it’s not so much that we are driving in a huge amount of additional commerce when we’re running shoppable ads,” Browne added. “But what we are doing is generating an increased amount of attention which, when you look at it over a long enough time scale, will serve the same purpose.”

This year, advertisers are finding lack of scale to be the top challenge they face on ad-supported streaming platforms, followed by lack of measurement and attribution options, and lack of budget. On average, 25% of respondents to Digiday’s survey said lack of scale is the biggest roadblock they face across the 13 platforms analyzed for this report, 19% of respondents said lack of measurement is their biggest challenge and 15% said lack of budget is their top concern.

As more streaming services have introduced ad-supported tiers alongside their ad-free options — Amazon, Disney+ and Netflix, to name a few — the ad-supported streaming market has become increasingly fragmented. (The Trade Desk is poised to be the next competitor in the streaming wars with its CTV operating system Ventura, which it plans to launch later this year.) And the large number of competing streamers can make it challenging for advertisers to buy audiences at scale and to track where their ads are running.

“Our biggest concern is the fragmentation of the ecosystem,” Tinuiti’s Browne said. “There are almost a dozen major ad-supported streaming platforms now between Prime, Netflix, Max, Peacock and Paramount+. There’s a trickiness in identifying where your best audience is going to be across all of these environments. We have put a lot of effort in over the last year into building up an audience planning system on our side, leveraging both internal data, client data and third-party data to try to identify exactly where the right person is going to be and how we can best reach them across all of these mediums. So, it’s a little bit of a dance, but it’s certainly the exciting part of what we do.”

Lack of measurement and attribution options was marketers’ second-most important concern on most streaming platforms. Nineteen percent of respondents selected lack of measurement as their biggest challenge. Connected to that, a fragmented marketplace plays a role in marketers’ measurement concerns as well. While linear TV advertisers have long relied on Nielsen’s data to measure TV ad viewership, streaming services use a variety of measurement methods across their devices and platforms. That makes it difficult for marketers to assess the reach and performance of their ad campaigns. (Nielsen is among several companies, including iSpot.tv and Roku, that measure streaming services’ content.)

Additionally, CTV publishers and streaming services often act as walled gardens, using encryption tools and limiting audience data sharing, which can make measurement more complex.

Some media agencies, like PMG, are hopeful that new AI applications may alleviate measurement and standardization challenges in CTV. PMG’s programmatic media director Doug Paladino described how the media agency is using AI in CTV campaign targeting and optimization. “Walled gardens and IP churn limit the ability to track a growing share of our media plan, but AI can help us understand the full-funnel impact of CTV media through probabilistic modeling and incrementality measurement,” Paladino said.

Similarly, Yahoo’s recent DSP integration of three measurement providers may also serve to reshape TV and streaming ad measurement. In June 2024, Yahoo announced that its DSP would add support for CTV ad measurement from Comscore, iSpot.tv and VideoAmp, so that advertisers could use the measurement providers to gauge their CTV campaigns purchased programmatically. (Yahoo had previously added support for Samba TV’s measurements).

“Interoperability and flexibility are absolutely critical when we’re going to be operating in not just a multi-currency world, but a world in which there’s triangulation of multiple measurement inputs,” said Kevin Cahn, head of the media center of excellence at Kepler Group. “So the flexibility that comes with being able to choose which partner matches the preference of your individual client — on up to agency[-level preference] — is really helpful.”

Lack of budget is the third-greatest challenge marketers said they face on ad-supported streaming platforms. Fifteen percent of respondents said lack of budget is their top concern. Similar to advertisers’ concerns about lack of scale within a fragmented marketplace, marketers also struggle to disperse their ad budgets across so many streaming platforms.

For example, advertisers spent the largest portions of their 2024 streaming ad budgets on only three platforms — YouTube, Prime Video (with ads) and Hulu — according to the first installment of Digiday+ Research’s ad-supported streaming report. Half of marketer respondents (50%) said YouTube consumed the largest portion of their streaming ad budget in 2024, while 16% of respondents and 8% of respondents said the same of Prime Video (with ads) and Hulu, respectively.

Only 4% of marketers said Tubi consumed the largest portion of their company’s streaming ad budget in 2024, while 2% of marketers said the same of Peacock, Samsung TV Plus and Netflix Standard (with ads). None of the respondents to Digiday’s survey said Max, Paramount+, Pluto TV or The Roku Channel consumed the greatest portion of their company’s streaming ad budget in 2024.

Interestingly, in last year’s report on ad-supported streaming platforms, cost of media was marketers’ top concern on all ad-supported streaming platforms. This year, it was only a top concern for advertisers on two platforms: The Roku Channel and Peacock.

However, Amazon’s influence on the streaming market has been pulling ad costs down across the board, making cost less of a concern for advertisers. To lure marketers in when Prime Video launched its ad-supported tier last year, Amazon set two pricing options for Prime Video — one in the mid-$30 range for ads guaranteed to run and another in the low-$30 range for preemptible ads.

Amazon essentially turned its rivals’ margins into its own advantage by undercutting the market. Rather than pay $39 to $45 per 1,000 viewers on Netflix, advertisers suddenly found themselves paying in the low-to-mid $30 range, per the Wall Street Journal’s reporting at the time. Just like that, Amazon reset the market.

Among ad-supported streaming platforms, Netflix has taken the biggest hit to its ad prices, according to data from eMarketer. Since the first quarter of 2024 when Prime Video introduced ads, Netflix CPMs have fallen more than those of Prime Video, Disney+, Max, Peacock and Hulu. They dropped from $42.14 to $31.05 by the end of the year. In comparison, Prime Video CPMs slid from $35.25 to $28.01.

For competitors, keeping up with Amazon Prime Video (with ads) has meant lowering their prices, according to industry executives. “We are seeing the same trends as depicted in this chart. I wouldn’t call it ‘sinking’ but I would agree the CPMs are coming down and making the marketplace more efficient for brands,” said Jennifer Kohl, chief media officer at VML. “It’s clear Amazon is leveraging its humungous scale and ginormous e-commerce infrastructure to disrupt the streaming video landscape.”

However, some advertisers think that ad-supported streaming prices haven’t dropped enough. “Right now, particularly with streaming television and CTV, we’ve seen the costs continue to be very high, and so we have not necessarily seen the effectiveness at the level,” said Laura Knebusch, svp of CPG marketing and consumer experience at paper goods company Georgia-Pacific. “We absolutely believe that with the amount of consumers that are leveraging this content it’s an important channel to be in. We just need to balance how that fits within our total media plan.”

“Our biggest challenge is, one, the costs and, two, the relationships and the ability and ease of how we buy, whether it’s the upfront or more programmatic options making it more agile and easy to buy,” she added.

We can’t talk about streaming and TV advertising without mentioning this year’s TV upfront week, which is set to begin on May 12 in New York City. And this year, programmatic buying is expected to be firmly part of the process.

While the upfront marketplace has largely been based on relationships between TV sellers and agency buyers for the past several decades, media agency executives have recently acknowledged that a larger percentage of their upfront spend on behalf of their clients is being handled programmatically now.

“There was a huge swing last year,” said one agency executive Digiday spoke with, referring to TV network and streaming services being more willing to allow advertisers’ programmatic spend to count toward their upfront commitments.

What remains in limbo, though, is which programmatic deal framework will win out. Upfront ad buyers largely prefer programmatic private marketplace deals, which allow advertisers and agencies to control how money is spent. By contrast, upfront ad sellers would rather have programmatic guaranteed deals that offer TV network and streaming service owners more assurance that the money will be spent.

Peacock’s Reduto said Peacock approaches the upfront marketplace with an eye on creating new advertiser-platform partnerships. “First and foremost, we want to make sure that Peacock is performant for our advertisers,” Reduto said. “We see that the norms for brand impact [on Peacock] are 22% higher than the CTV norms, but where we really lean in and partner and with brands, is where we see that impact grow.”

“We’re working with a number of DSPs, so we’re agnostic in terms of how advertisers activate, whether it’s programmatically or via standard IO,” Reduto added. “We’re constantly working with advertisers to understand what partnerships we need to forge and how we can evolve our offerings to continue to drive that impact for them. It’s about democratizing access, driving performance and having the best consumer experience.”

When it comes to buying programmatically on streaming platforms, Georgia-Pacific’s Knebusch said the company is proceeding cautiously. “Our approach has been to test and learn, so we don’t make big pivots one way or the other,” Knebusch said. “But if we see that there could be an additional option to buy it programmatically and believe it’s the right channel for, or the right network for our brands, then we’ll do a test and assess whether or not we want to make a bigger pivot into that space.”

Whether ads are bought programmatically or not, a downside of both linear and streaming TV buys can be the lack of flexibility to react to current events and switch up ad content close to air time, according to Emmanuel Orssaud, CMO at language learning app Duolingo.

Duolingo, for example, aired a five-second ad during the 2024 Super Bowl that went viral in short order. The language learning app had plans to follow that up with an ad during Super Bowl 2025 that included content about the impending TikTok ban in the U.S. However, when the TikTok ban date got pushed farther out in time, Duolingo had to scrap its plans.

“We were in discussion about the media buy, and then when the TikTok ban didn’t happen, our idea was no longer viable,” Orssaud said. “That’s the hardest part with paid media and booking placements on TV months in advance. If you do marketing like ours, which is reactive and so much in the moment … it’s very hard to predict in advance what will hit during the Super Bowl. … We had to plan different scenarios, and one of them was that TikTok will be banned, and it didn’t happen.”

In addition to marketers’ concerns about flexibility within the upfront marketplace, this year’s TV and streaming upfront negotiations could be colored by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have begun to cast a pall over the event, as they have over the ad market more broadly.

While upfront ad buyers and sellers alike have still said they expect advertisers to commit more money with TV network and streaming services in this year’s upfront market than they did a year ago, conversations are fixating around flexibility for advertisers’ upfront cancelations.