How big is Canada's digital advertising market in 2026?

Short answer: IAB Canada’s latest estimate puts Canada’s digital advertising market at $21.1 billion for 2025, up 16% on the year, with search the largest category. The mobile and in-app numbers quoted alongside it are forecasts or models, not measured spend. The fastest growth, in video and retail media, is funded by national brands, not by businesses spending a few thousand dollars a month. Fund one channel, usually Google Search or Meta, matched to where your customers already show intent.

The most recent industry estimate is from IAB Canada. In an announcement titled “IAB Canada Releases New Industry Estimates Signaling an Expanding Canadian Digital Market”, posted on 23 June 2026 and updated on 25 June 2026, it said that in 2025 Canada’s digital advertising market grew 16% year-over-year to reach $21.1 billion. That is the number to start from if you searched for the size of the market.

It is not the number to budget from. This article explains what the $21.1 billion counts, why other figures for mobile, in-app and programmatic advertising are less solid, and what any of it has to do with your first C$1,500 a month.

What IAB Canada’s $21.1 billion actually counts

IAB Canada is the industry body for digital advertising in the country. Its Internet Ad Revenue Survey estimates the advertising revenue earned by digital media, which is advertisers’ digital spend seen from the sellers’ side. According to the announcement, search was the largest category and social media the second largest, while video grew 26% as advertisers invested in connected TV and premium streaming. The report also adds new measurement of retail media, ad technology and data products. The full report is available to IAB Canada members only, so we have worked from the public announcement and cannot show you the breakdown behind it.

One caution on the figure itself. The announcement prints a dollar sign without naming the currency, so we quote it exactly as printed, as $21.1 billion, and do not convert it or label it Canadian or American.

Now the contrast. Statistics Canada’s most recent release on the advertising and related services industry put total operating revenue at CA$15.4 billion for 2024, up 8.0% on 2023, with Ontario alone accounting for just under two-thirds of it. E-commerce made up only 10.1% of that industry’s own sales, and three quarters of its clients were other Canadian businesses.

These two numbers look like rivals, and they are not. Statistics Canada measures what agencies and advertising services firms billed across every medium, including print, outdoor and broadcast. IAB Canada estimates the advertising revenue of digital media. One counts the revenue of the businesses that make and place ads. The other counts what digital channels earn from carrying them. They cover different years, different scope and different questions, so one does not confirm or disprove the other, and subtracting one from the other tells you nothing.

Both are real, and both are bigger than anything the business reading this will ever personally touch. That is the first thing worth understanding before any of it shapes a decision.

Where the growth is concentrated, and who is funding it

The part of this market growing fastest is the part least available to a small business.

IAB Canada reports that search was the largest category in 2025 and social media the second largest, and that video grew 26%. The video growth is attributed to advertisers investing in connected TV and premium streaming. Connected TV means ads on streaming services watched on a television. In our reading, that is overwhelmingly national brand money buying broad reach, not local businesses buying leads.

Retail media follows the same pattern. Retail media, meaning ads sold inside a retailer’s own app, site or in-store screens rather than through Google or Meta, is forecast by eMarketer to grow 19.7% in 2025, more than double the 8.8% growth of digital ad spending overall. It is expected to take about one in every five Canadian digital ad dollars in 2025 and more than a quarter by 2028. Retailers such as Loblaw, Walmart Canada and Canadian Tire run their own networks, and eMarketer credits Amazon’s dominance for much of the reason Canada ranks second in the world, behind only China, for retail media’s share of digital ad spend.

That growth is funded, as far as we can tell, almost entirely by national consumer packaged goods brands buying shelf and app inventory at scale, managed through agencies, with minimums that put it out of reach for a single-location business today.

None of this is a reason to avoid digital advertising. It is a reason to notice that the number everybody quotes describes a different business than yours, funded by different money, chasing a different outcome.

How big is Canada’s mobile advertising market?

The one figure we could read at its source comes from eMarketer’s report “Canada Digital Ad Spending 2024”, by Paul Briggs, published on 25 April 2024. Its key statistic is that mobile ad spending will account for 54.6% of total advertising in Canada in 2024.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to misquote. It is a forecast, not a measurement. And it is a share of all advertising in Canada, with television, print and every other medium in the denominator, not a share of digital advertising. It does not say that 54.6% of digital spend is mobile. The same report names connected TV and retail media as where spending is heading.

We do not have a dollar figure for Canadian mobile advertising from a source we can open and check, so we will not print one. If you have seen a precise mobile number on a market research site, ask what it was derived from before you repeat it.

What does this mean in practice for a small business? In our experience, most of a small business’s Meta spend and much of its Google spend already runs on mobile devices. You do not buy “mobile advertising” as a separate line. It is the screen your Google Search, Instagram and Facebook campaigns are mostly seen on, which is why landing pages and enquiry forms need to work on a phone before anything else.

The in-app numbers, and why we would not plan on them

In-app advertising is the search that attracts the loosest figures, so it is worth being plain about where they come from.

Statista Market Insights publishes an “In-App Advertising - Canada” page. The free version masks every figure behind a paid account, so there is nothing we can verify, and we will not print a number from it. What the page does publish is its method. Market size comes from a combined top-down and bottom-up model. Figures are in US dollars, “modeled using current exchange rates”. They exclude agency commissions, rebates, production costs and taxes. They cover ads shown inside mobile apps, and the page is updated twice a year. That is a reasonable description of a model, and a model is what it is.

Bonafide Research, in “Canada In-App Advertising Market, 2031”, dated 18 July 2026, says the market is “anticipated to add USD 10.73 Billion by the 2026-31 period”. Read as 2026 to 2031, that is a forecast of growth over five years. It is a paid report. The supporting statistics on the free page carry no links to their sources, so we cannot trace where the inputs came from.

Here is our own arithmetic, for scale only. US$10.73 billion is about half of IAB Canada’s $21.1 billion for the whole 2025 market. The two figures are not in a stated common currency, so the comparison is rough. We are not calling the Bonafide figure false. It is a modelled forecast from a paid report, and we would not plan a budget on it.

What in-app means for you is much simpler than the market sizing. It is ad placement inside Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or a retailer’s app, bought inside a normal campaign. If you run Meta ads, a share of your budget is already going to in-app placements, priced and measured like every other placement Meta sells. App ad networks do sell in-app inventory on its own, but for a single-location business there is rarely a reason to buy it outside those campaigns.

Programmatic and “advertising software” in plain terms

Programmatic advertising is display and video advertising bought by software, mostly through automated auctions, where the software decides in a fraction of a second which ad appears in front of which person, rather than a person negotiating each placement. If you searched for the Canadian programmatic display market, we have to be direct: IAB Canada’s announcement does not give a programmatic figure, and we have no verified Canadian programmatic number to offer. We would rather say that than repeat a secondhand one.

What we can say is practical. A small business running Google display campaigns, Performance Max or Meta ads is already buying through automated auctions. You do not buy “programmatic” as a separate product to get access to them. The platforms handle the auction. Your job is the offer, the targeting, the creative and the follow-up, which is where small budgets are won or lost.

“Advertising software market” usually means something different again: the ad tech and campaign management tools running behind the scenes, such as bid management, creative automation and attribution, rather than what businesses spend on ads themselves. IAB Canada’s report is said to add new measurement of ad technology and data products, but we cannot see that detail without membership. If software is what you are after, our guide to the marketing automation market in Canada covers it. This article covers ad spend and channel choice, not software procurement.

The tax that briefly sat on top of your Google bill

One dated example shows how far removed this market’s rules are from anything a small Canadian advertiser controls.

From 1 October 2024, Google added a 2.5% surcharge to ads served in Canada, in direct response to Canada’s Digital Services Tax, as set out in Google’s Canada DST FAQ. Canada announced it would rescind the tax in mid-2025, Google stopped charging the fee from 1 July 2025, and once the repeal became law, Google began crediting back every DST fee charged in that window, either as an automatic invoice adjustment for direct advertisers or a credit memo for agencies and DV360 customers to apply manually. If your business ran Google Ads in Canada across that period, it is worth checking your account for a credit.

The wider point is not the 2.5%. A line item on your Canadian ad invoice was set by a trade dispute between Ottawa and Washington and then removed by the same dispute, without any Canadian small business having a say in either decision. The market you are told to benchmark against is shaped several levels above where your budget operates.

Where your first C$1,000 to C$3,000 a month should actually go

None of the numbers above are the input to this decision. The input is what your customers do before buying from you.

If people search for what you sell, Google Search reaches them at the moment of intent, and that is usually the better first channel for local services, trades and anything solving an urgent problem. If your product is visual, or the audience needs to be built rather than found, Meta does that job better and generally at a lower cost per click. For Meta prices specifically, see our guide to what Meta ads cost in Canada. Our full guide to digital advertising for Canadian small business covers the budget floor, provincial targeting and the Quebec decision in detail, and the cost breakdown by industry and our guide to Meta ads in Canada go deeper on each platform.

What should not shape the decision is that retail media or video are the fastest-growing lines nationally. Both grow on national CPG budgets and agency-managed connected TV buys with minimums well above what a single-location business spends in a year. A plumber in Hamilton or a clinic in Kelowna gets nothing from knowing Canadian video grew 26% last year, and chasing a category because it is the one everybody writes about is a reliable way to spend a small budget on a channel never built to sell it back to you in enquiries.

The same logic applies to the break-even discipline covered in our guide to Meta ads ROAS: a headline benchmark from a market you do not operate in tells you almost nothing about whether your own campaign works. Judge your channel by your own cost per enquiry, not by which category is growing fastest in a report written for national media buyers.

The honest read

Canada’s digital advertising market is a large number. IAB Canada puts it at $21.1 billion for 2025, and that estimate is the best public marker we have. Most of it is money you will never compete for: national video and connected TV buys, enterprise retail media contracts and agency-managed budgets. The mobile and in-app figures that circulate beside it are forecasts and models, some behind paywalls, none of which we would put a budget against.

That does not make digital advertising a bad idea for a small business. It makes the aggregate market size irrelevant to your decision. Fund one channel, matched to where customers already show intent, above the threshold where its bidding can learn, and stop reading the market’s growth rate as a signal about your own.

Frequently asked questions

How big is Canada’s digital advertising market in 2026?

IAB Canada’s latest estimate is $21.1 billion for 2025, up 16% on the year, with search the largest category. IAB has not yet published a 2026 figure. Statistics Canada’s CA$15.4 billion for 2024 is a different measure: operating revenue of the advertising and related services industry, meaning agency and services billings across all media, not platform ad spend. Neither number is the one that matters to a business spending C$1,500 a month.

Where is most of the growth in Canadian digital advertising happening?

Retail media, built by large retailers such as Loblaw and Walmart Canada into their own ad networks, is the fastest-growing line, forecast by eMarketer to grow 19.7% in 2025 and to pass a quarter of Canadian digital ad spend by 2028. IAB Canada reports that video grew 26% in 2025 as advertisers invested in connected TV and premium streaming. Both are funded overwhelmingly by national brand and CPG budgets running through agencies, not by local small businesses.

How big is the mobile advertising market in Canada?

eMarketer forecast in April 2024 that mobile ad spending would account for 54.6% of total advertising in Canada in 2024. That is a forecast, and it is a share of all advertising, television and print included, not only digital. We have no verified dollar figure for Canadian mobile advertising to give you. In practice, most of a small business’s Meta spend and much of its Google spend already runs on mobile.

What does in-app advertising mean for a small Canadian business?

In-app advertising means ads shown inside mobile apps, such as placements inside Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or a retailer’s app. A small business usually buys it inside a normal Meta or Google campaign rather than as a separate purchase. Published Canadian in-app market figures are models: Statista’s sit behind a paid account, and Bonafide Research’s forecast comes from a paid report. We would not plan a budget on either.

What is programmatic advertising, and does a small business need it?

Programmatic advertising is display and video bought by software, mostly through automated auctions, rather than negotiated placement by placement. IAB Canada’s announcement does not give a programmatic figure, and we have none to offer. A small business running Google display, Performance Max or Meta ads is already buying through automated auctions, so it does not need to buy programmatic as a separate product.

Is Google still charging a Digital Services Tax fee on Canadian ad accounts?

No. Google added a 2.5% surcharge to Canadian ad accounts from 1 October 2024 in response to Canada’s Digital Services Tax, stopped charging it from 1 July 2025 once Canada rescinded the tax, and is now crediting back every fee charged in that window, either automatically or as a credit memo for agencies. If you were charged it, check your account for the credit.

Where should a small business put its first CA$1,000 to CA$3,000 a month?

Into one platform that reaches existing demand or attention, funded properly, rather than spread across the categories driving the national growth figures. For most local services that is Google Search; for visual products or demographic targeting, Meta. Retail media and connected TV, the fastest-growing lines nationally, generally need minimum spends and national distribution out of reach for a single-location business in 2026.

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