As much as 81% of advertisers fail to reach new audiences, despite budget increases, according to Taboola study.
Advertisers have increased spend to try and reach new audiences, yet the majority (81%) are failing.
According to Taboola’s The data advantage report, marketing budgets haven risen by nearly 10% year-on-year (YoY) for the period January to August 2026, with 30% of marketers saying that reaching new audiences is a top priority and a reason for the increase in spend.
Taboola surveyed over 300 senior marketing decisionmakers and found that despite higher spending, advertisers are repeatedly targeting the same audience segments again and again.
Other priorities for advertisers included increasing frequency against existing audiences (24%), testing new creative or messaging (24%), and bidding more aggressively on existing audience pools (22%).
This suggests there is not one stand-out strategy, but rather marketers are spreading their budget across multiple approaches at one time.
There’s an urgency for marketers to justify budget increases to leadership, with 46% of respondents feeling very or somewhat pressured to prove additional spending is bringing in new audiences rather than just continuing to invest in existing ones.
This isn’t necessarily felt across the whole industry, though. A further 21% of respondents reported feeling neither pressured or unpressured, and 32% feeling comparatively free of the expectation.
A fragmented ecosystem
The report also showed advertisers are struggling to identify the same customer across multiple touch points, before they convert, with more than three-quarters (76%)saying they find it a challenge. Around 44% reported it as not easy; a quarter (26%) said it was somewhat difficult; and 6% said it was very difficult.
The likely root cause of the fragmentation on identifying multiple touch points is down to the level of integration across performance marketing channels.
Only a fifth (21%) of organisation rated their performance marketing channels as fully integrated meaning the majority (79%) lack a complete, unified view of their audience across the media ecosystem.
The study highlighted that even the 21% that claimed their marketing channels were fully integrated could be “describing simpler stacks with fewer channels” rather than a “genuine end-to-end solution”.
“The underlying story is of a market still largely operating with a fragmented, incomplete picture of its own audiences, for reasons that are as much technical and structural as they are strategic,” the report stated.
Reliance on walled gardens
There’s also a barrier to understanding consumer intent outside of the walled gardens, with a quarter (25%) of respondents higlighting there is a limited standardisation of audience data across the open web.
This means marketers aren’t accurately able to recognise the same consumer from deice-to-device, or if they use a different browser.
The loss of third-party tracking signals and cookies (21%), a lack of reliable, privacy-safe identity solutions (17%), and fragmented data across publisher sites (16%) is also contributing to a fragmented open web ecosystem.
If identity challenges are solved, 92% of decisionmakers would be willing to increase adspend across news sites and publishers to diversify their spending beyond walled gardens.
In the last year, budgets an average, increased by 9%, with over three-quarters (77%) reporting a rise. Only 15% increased their budget by 20% or more, while 62% increased their budget by 1-20%.
Adam Singolda, chief executive at Taboola said: “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.
“Outside closed ecosystems, advertisers face a significant identity blind spot. 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.”
