Report Shows 81% of Advertisers Fail to Reach New Audiences Despite Rising Budgets

The "Data Advantage" report published by Taboola revealed that 81% of advertisers fail to reach new audiences and continue to target the same segments, at a time when companies have increased their marketing budgets by around 10% in pursuit of expansion.

The report surveyed more than 300 marketing and advertising leaders at companies with over 1,000 employees that spend at least $300,000 per month on marketing, making it specifically representative of large enterprise practices.

The report noted that 75% of advertisers find it difficult to identify the same customer who abandoned a purchase when tracking them across different touchpoints, which weakens their ability to retarget them at the right time.

Taboola attributed this gap to identity fragmentation across the open web, where user data is scattered across a large number of websites and applications without a unified identifier linking them. This indicates that the problem is not the level of spend, but rather the advertiser's ability to know the audience they are addressing and track their path. This underscores the importance of relying on multiple data sources and connecting them within a single system, particularly for companies engaging an audience that moves between devices and apps throughout the day.

What do these terms mean?

Open Web: Independent websites and applications outside of platforms like Google and Meta. Identity Fragmentation: The dispersion of user data across multiple entities without a single identifier to connect them. Touchpoint: Any point where a user interacts with a brand, such as an ad, a message, or a website.