Competition for digital attention has reached a new peak. Pressured by economic uncertainty, AI-powered marketing, and global events, media budgets have to work harder than ever to drive revenue growth.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) projects ad spend will grow 9.5% in 2026, while analysts predict the S&P 500 growth rate will lag behind it at 7.2%. That might not seem like a large gap, but any time you’re spending more to achieve less growth, you have to adapt quickly, optimizing your media strategy to make sure every dollar you spend ties to a measurable outcome.
Your 2026 focus: Budget efficiency
The competition for eyeballs will be fierce and more expensive. While overall ad spend in 2026 may be below 10%, IAB expects connected TV (CTV) ad spending to grow by nearly 14%. And if you’re in retail, the intensity ramps up even higher; eMarketer predicts omnichannel retail media ad spending will grow by 17.9% this year.
No matter your industry, your focus should remain the same: ensuring you’re reaching the right audiences across the right channels at the right spend. A bigger budget won’t close the widening gap between spend and return. But targeting, attribution, incrementality, and optimization strategies built on connected first-party data can help you get it right. Let's dive in.
Target the right audiences
Channels like retail media networks (RMNs) and CTV offer you countless ways to expand your reach. But each media platform has its own approach to segmentation and performance data. So, how do you know which buys will offer the best chance for conversions? It starts with a deeper understanding of your audience. And that comes from the first-party data you’ve collected from your customers.
This data is your most reliable, privacy-centric source for understanding the behavior and attributes that make up your target audience. By connecting your platforms and tools, you can unify your first-party data and use it to identify and segment audiences. Taking it a step further, you can model your data based on criteria that impact your bottom line, such as predicted lifetime value and churn.
With this information, you can not only target those who offer the best possible return on ad spend (ROAS), but also reach ex-customers with re-engagement campaigns, exclude existing customers from new-customer acquisition campaigns, and engage with repeat purchasers — all where they’re most likely to convert.
Plus, deeper audience insights allow you to be more sophisticated with your frequency management, reducing wasteful oversaturation and ensuring spend efficiency.
Connect the dots for multi-touch attribution
Smart segmentation and targeting ensure your ads are connecting with the right people in the right places. But a customer journey might span your CTV ad, a social media post, and an on-site or in-store visit. So how do you know if your ad contributed to revenue?
Connecting your first-party data with ad platform data (often in a privacy-safe data clean room) lets you move beyond last-click models that credit the final search to see exactly how your spend worked across channels to drive the conversion.
If you’re a retailer, you can see the path a customer takes from watching a CTV ad to conducting a zero-click search to researching your product on Amazon or your website to ultimately purchasing.
In financial services? You can match anonymized ad exposure data with your internal CRM to see which display campaigns led to a completed loan application or an open savings account, all without exposing personally identifiable information (PII).
Or, if you're in an industry like tech, you can see which campaigns (and touchpoints) influenced customers to move from downloading trial software to converting to a paid version.
No matter your industry, you can track how your spend works across channels to drive conversions. And you can use the customer journey information you gather to tailor your optimization strategy.
Understand incrementality
While multi-touch attribution connects the dots of the customer journey, incrementality shows which of those dots actually mattered. How do you know if your ad caused the conversion, or if your customer was already planning to convert?
You can use your first-party data in an incrementality framework that includes randomized control groups and testing to isolate the lift your media truly causes. This work is particularly helpful for hard-to-measure brand awareness campaigns that may indirectly influence a purchase. It can also help you see if the smaller, iterative bidding or creative optimizations you make help or hinder your success.
Implementing an incrementality framework can be complex, as you need the right platforms and tools in place, working together to ensure you’re distinguishing between correlation and causality. But it’s worth the setup, as the right framework can be the difference between thinking you know what's driving growth and actually knowing it.
Aim higher
Once you have a clear view of attribution and incrementality, how do you know which campaign optimizations will be the most impactful on your organization’s bottom line?
You’ll need to move beyond optimizing for proxy metrics like clicks and impressions and start optimizing based on revenue drivers like high-value conversions and lifetime customer value. When you align your spend with KPIs that generate greater return, you’ll reduce waste and zero in on the audiences and tactics that drive revenue.
Layering in tools like marketing mix modeling (MMM) can help. Taking into account your data, external market factors, and both online and offline variables, MMM shows you how your spend is performing across each of your media channels. Even more impressive, it can predict the impact of potential budget or tactical shifts, so you can confidently make optimization decisions.
And with your first-party data foundation and modern measurement framework in place, you can prove your efforts are directly impacting your bottom line.
Opportunity is here
Achieving a high ROAS can feel daunting in today’s intensely competitive media space. But if you focus on strategies that drive measurable, incremental outcomes, you’ll have a huge opportunity to turn market pressure into your competitive advantage.
Need help?
We can partner with you to connect your disparate data sources, uncover deeper audience insights, and activate and measure your campaigns more efficiently. Reach out to learn how we can help you get a better return on your marketing investment.
