Ad budgets are rising, but incremental reach is not. Taboola’s new report, The Data Advantage, gives a sobering number to a familiar marketing problem: 81% of advertisers say they are still failing to reach new audiences.
The survey, fielded among more than 300 senior marketing and advertising leaders at companies with over 1,000 employees and at least $300,000 in monthly marketing spend, finds advertiser budgets rising by nearly 10%. At the same time, 30% of advertisers say new audiences are a top priority for that additional investment. That is a widening gap between intent and outcome.
The blind spot is before the conversion
Taboola attributes much of the gap to identity fragmentation across pre-conversion touchpoints. Around 75% of advertisers say they cannot recognise the same non-converting customer across multiple touchpoints. A shopper who reads a review on a news site, opens an email, checks a price aggregator and asks an AI assistant can look like four separate users instead of one journey.
For media planners, that is a crucial loss. Pre-purchase behaviour is where intent sharpens, but if the path is not connected, brands cannot act on it. The default response is to retarget the same known, already converted audiences, which raises frequency without lifting incremental reach.
Open-web spend is waiting on measurement
The money is not necessarily stuck. Taboola finds 81% of advertisers are open to increasing ad spend on publishers and news sites if identity-related challenges are addressed. The open web is not being rejected on quality or audience availability; it is being held back by measurement and identity resolution.
- Ad budgets are rising nearly 10%, but 81% of advertisers still cannot reach new audiences.
- 75% struggle to recognise the same non-converting customer before purchase.
- 81% would spend more on publishers and news sites if identity gaps were closed.
- US adults spend close to 13 hours a day with media on the path to purchase.
What marketing leaders should do next
The study treats this less as a spending problem and more as an audience strategy problem. If budgets grow and reach stays flat, brands are essentially converting media investment into frequency. The fix starts with an audit of the pre-purchase path: email, news, search, price aggregators and increasingly LLM platforms.
Adam Singolda, CEO at Taboola, put the challenge plainly. “Outside closed ecosystems, advertisers face a significant identity blind spot,” he said. “By relying on recycled audiences on walled gardens, they miss vast opportunities. Unlocking identity and measurement on the open web allows brands to break free from targeting ruts and connect with valuable, untapped audiences.”
For our readers, the takeaway is tactical. Before adding another retargeting dollar, check whether identity gaps are making your brand buy the same audience twice. Then run focused tests with open-web partners, measuring incremental reach rather than last-click conversion alone.
Source: MediaNews4U
