Advertisers are increasing their budgets in a bid to reach new audiences, but a new report has found the majority are failing to actually find those consumers — raising questions about how effectively that additional spend is being used.
Digital advertising platform Taboola’s latest report, The Data Advantage, found advertiser budgets are rising by almost 10 per cent as brands look to expand their reach, with 30 per cent identifying new audiences as a top priority for additional budget allocation.
But despite putting more money behind the effort, more than 80 per cent of advertisers said they are failing to reach new audiences.
Instead, the report suggests advertisers are being pushed back towards the same audience pools they have already targeted, with identity fragmentation making it difficult to identify consumers across the increasingly complex path to purchase.
The findings come as consumers move between a growing number of devices, channels and platforms before making a purchase, with Taboola pointing to touchpoints including email, news, search, price aggregators and increasingly large language models.
For advertisers, the issue is that increasing the size of the budget does not necessarily translate into reaching more people if the technology underpinning audience identification cannot keep up.
Three-quarters of advertisers surveyed said they have difficulty recognising the same non-converting customer across multiple touchpoints, making it harder for brands to understand whether they are actually reaching new prospects or simply retargeting the same people.
The report also found advertisers are interested in moving more of their budgets beyond walled gardens, but identity and measurement remain barriers.
Eighty-one per cent of advertisers said they would be open to increasing spend across channels including publishers and news sites if identity challenges could be solved.
Taboola said the findings point to an “identity blind spot” outside closed advertising ecosystems, where brands can struggle to understand audiences and purchase intent across the open web.
“As AI search overviews and shifting habits fragment how consumers discover content, brands and agencies must understand true purchase intent at the crucial moment of decision,” Taboola CEO Adam Singolda said.
“Outside closed ecosystems, advertisers face a significant identity blind spot.”
Singolda argued that advertisers relying on existing audience pools risk missing consumers who sit outside those established segments.
The report, which surveyed more than 300 senior marketing and advertising leaders, focused on companies with more than 1,000 employees and monthly marketing spend of at least US$300,000.
