Global social media ad spend projected to reach $239 billion in 2025, $273 billion by 2026: Report

Taboola today announced a new report based on a survey conducted with Qualtrics, a leading company in experience management working with nearly 20,000 organizations worldwide.

Performance advertising on social media is rapidly growing—industry forecasts predict that social media ad spend will reach $239 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $273 billion in 2026. However, new research found that despite social media’s dominance in performance advertising, nearly 75% of performance marketers have noticed diminishing returns from their social media ad investments.

Additional key insights from The Pulse of Performance Advertising: Diminishing Returns include:

● Most of these performance marketers indicated that diminishing returns impact over 30% of their spend.

● Marketers focused on performance face diminishing returns on social media due to audience saturation, rising costs, and ad fatigue.

● Over 80% of performance marketers use multiple tactics to combat diminishing returns, with more than half expanding into additional digital channels beyond social media ads.

“While social media accounts for a large portion of performance advertising budgets, many marketers have hit a barrier in the form of diminishing returns,” said Adam Singolda, CEO of Taboola. “More spend just isn’t translating into better results. The findings in this report point to difficulty in sustaining performance over time, with marketers seeking solutions that can help them overcome that barrier.”