Table of Contents
Privacy rules, signal loss, and changes in platform tracking have made broad behavioral targeting less dependable for programmatic campaigns, leaving performance marketers with a familiar challenge: how to keep reaching qualified users while still improving efficiency and measurable return.
The answer may be sitting inside two audience assets you already have access to. Your customer relationship management system (CRM) knows who bought, subscribed, or moved deeper into the funnel. Your demand-side platform (DSP) can reach people who share similar signals at a much larger scale. The strongest open web performance campaigns don’t treat these as separate tactics; they stack them.
By layering first-party and marketplace audiences, you combine the accuracy of your owned data with the scale and intent of external data. That combination helps create more qualified segments without cutting off the appropriate scale for your campaign to learn, supporting stronger conversion rates and more efficient acquisition.
Realize, Taboola’s performance advertising platform, is built specifically for open web campaigns that rely on this kind of audience layering. It gives advertisers direct access to first-party data from their own CRM and pixel activity, marketplace audiences from third-party data providers, and Taboola’s proprietary first-party signals, all within a single interface. The platform supports combined audience logic (AND, OR, and EXCLUDE), making it straightforward to stack audiences, test overlaps, and refine targeting without switching between multiple tools.
The Core Data Pillars: First-Party vs. Marketplace Audiences
First-party audiences come from data you collect directly with proper consent, such as CRM records, email lists, pixel-based site visitors, app users, lead form submissions, subscribers, and past purchasers. This data is valuable because it reflects real engagement with your brand, not just inferred interest. But, there is a limitation: scale. A first-party data activation strategy turns an accurate — but often too small or too static — list into a usable targeting asset instead.
Marketplace audiences are external segments available through your DSP, ad platform, or data provider. They’re usually built from aggregated demographic, contextual, interest, behavioral, or in-market signals across a much wider user pool. DSP audience targeting through these segments adds scale by helping you reach net-new users who may never have visited your site — but who still fit your target profile.
Neither pillar replaces the other. First-party data tells you who matters. Marketplace data helps you find who else fits the market and who might be ready to buy.
On Realize, these pillars map directly to the platform’s audience architecture:
- Advertiser First Party: Your own data, including CRM uploads, pixel-based site visitors, and customer lists.
- Taboola First Party: Proprietary signals including “In Market For” high-intent segments, contextual and topics targeting, search keyword and mail domain targeting, and interest-based audiences drawn from Taboola’s publisher network.
- Third Party/Marketplace Audiences: External segments from data providers, available through Realize’s integrated data marketplace.
A strong programmatic advertising strategy on Realize uses Advertiser First Party data as its foundation, layers in Taboola First Party signals for intent and context, and adds Third Party data where it improves reach.
Realize also offers Mail Contextual Segments, which are exclusive audience segments derived from Yahoo Mail inbox activity, available only through Taboola. These 109 segments cover inbox content and seasonal interests, providing high-intent signals not available on other platforms.
How to Combine Audiences for Open Web Performance Campaigns
Most DSPs support three types of logic for combined audience setups: OR, which expands reach by including users from either audience; EXCLUDE, which removes users you don’t want to target; and AND, which targets the intersection between two or more audiences. AND logic often does the most work for performance advertisers because it’s where audience-layering logic is most useful. Instead of targeting your first-party list or a marketplace segment on its own, you target the overlap.
Realize also offers a Combined Audiences feature that lets you build a “super audience” by blending first-party segments, Taboola first-party signals, and third-party marketplace data into a single targeting layer.
The risk when combining audiences is over-layering. Every additional filter narrows delivery, so audience quality has to be balanced against reach. When using AND logic, consider increasing your CPC to maintain delivery, since the audience is more specific. Use the reach estimator to confirm the combined audience is large enough to spend and learn effectively.
The strongest combined audiences are qualified enough to support return on ad spend (ROAS) optimization, while still being large enough to spend, learn, and scale.
Layer First-Party Data with Active In-Market Signals
Take a broad first-party audience, such as site visitors from the last 90 days, and layer it with AND logic against a marketplace segment showing in-market signals for your category. The resulting audience is smaller but more precise: people who already know your brand and are showing signs they’re actively shopping, researching, or comparing solutions.
The in-market filter is key to preventing wasted ad spend. Someone who visited three months ago may be done shopping. However, without that added signal, you’re still paying to reach them. For mid-funnel campaigns, retargeting, and high-consideration products, the audience becomes more useful because it reflects both prior engagement and current buying signals.
Realize in Practice
Realize offers a unique way to execute this tactic through its “In Market For” audience segments.* These are ready-to-use, high-intent bundles built from Taboola’s proprietary first-party data, including pixel signals, search behavior, and mail engagement. These segments identify users who are actively researching and shopping in specific categories. Available segments include:
- Finance: Personal Investing.
- D2C: Home & Garden, Health & Beauty, Apparel & Accessories, Pets, Furniture.
* “In Market For” segments are currently available in open beta for US-based campaigns in select verticals (Finance and D2C). Availability may expand as the beta progresses.
Build Scalable Lookalikes from High-LTV Seed Audiences
Lookalike modeling is only as effective as the seed list it’s based on. Instead of uploading your entire customer base, start with the customers you actually want more of, like high-LTV (customer lifetime value) buyers, repeat purchasers, or leads that converted into real revenue. A cleaner seed gives the model a sharper definition of what “good” looks like.
From there, marketplace and platform-level modeling can identify net-new users who share similar behaviors and intent signals across the open web. Your owned data becomes the input for expansion, while marketplace signals find more people who resemble your best customers — rather than expanding reach for its own sake.
Realize in Practice
Realize’s Predictive Audiences use AI-driven lookalike modeling to identify new users who mirror the behavior of a high-value seed audience, such as past purchasers, repeat buyers, or leads that converted into revenue. Instead of expanding reach for its own sake, Predictive Audiences find users who statistically resemble your best customers.
It’s important to note that Predictive Audiences require at least 100 Realize-attributed conversions over a 30-day period to generate, and availability depends on the strength of your conversion signals. They are not available for campaigns optimizing toward page views or search click-outs.
Apply Marketplace Demographic Filters to Retargeting Segments
A general retargeting pool is usually filled with more noise than marketers expect: customers, competitors, job seekers, students, low-fit researchers, early-stage browsers, and high-intent prospects in one mix.
Layering in marketplace demographic filters can tighten the pool. A B2B software advertiser, for instance, can take a retargeting audience of product page visitors and filter it through a marketplace segment tied to specific job titles, industries, or company types. Then, you can focus your spend on visitors who actually resemble the buying committee.
More refined audiences can also support better creatives. Instead of using a general retargeting ad that repeats the same brand message, your creative can be designed for a specific role, a specific use case, a pain point, or a funnel stage.
Use Exclusion Lists to Eliminate Wasted Ad Spend
Combining audiences also means knowing who to remove.
Sync your active customer list as a strict exclusion layer on top of any broad marketplace acquisition campaign, and you stop paying to “acquire” people who already converted. You can also exclude recent purchasers, existing subscribers, employees, low-value customers, or segments that belong in a different campaign.
For many advertisers, this is one of the cleanest ways to improve ROAS optimization without touching bids, budgets, or creative.
How to Validate Your Combined Audience Setup
Combined audiences should be tested before they become the default. Start by checking estimated reach: If AND logic shrinks the audience too far, the campaign may struggle to spend or gather enough conversion data. Plus, a smaller audience isn’t automatically a better one.
When available, run the segment in observation mode first; the platform will report on performance without restricting delivery to it, and compare conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), ROAS, and audience size before making the segment a hard targeting requirement. A combined audience that converts well but can’t scale may still be worth keeping in a retargeting or nurture campaign (rather than your primary prospecting effort).
Validating Audiences on Realize
On Realize, validation is built into the campaign workflow. When setting up combined audiences, the platform displays estimated reach before the campaign goes live, so you can catch over-layering early. Once a campaign is running, the “by audience” reporting tab splits performance by segment tier, making it easy to compare conversion rate, CPA, and ROAS between your first-party base, marketplace overlays, and combined segments side by side.
Key Takeaways
The advertisers getting stronger results on the open web are using first-party data as the foundation of truth and marketplace audiences as the layer that adds scale, intent, and context.
A smart programmatic advertising strategy treats audience overlap as the goal — not as a side effect. The overlap is where owned engagement, external signals, and active intent converge. Used carefully, AND logic, lookalike modeling, demographic filters, and exclusion lists can make open web campaigns more focused on high-intent users — without cutting off the scale needed to learn and grow.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the difference between first-party and marketplace audiences?
First-party audiences are based on people who’ve already interacted with your brand in some way, from CRM contacts and email subscribers to site visitors, app users, leads, and customers. Marketplace audiences come from outside your owned data, using external demographic, interest, behavioral, or intent signals to help you reach relevant users who are not already in your first-party pool.
How does audience layering improve open web performance?
Audience layering often uses AND logic to narrow reach to users who meet more than one qualification. Instead of targeting every past site visitor, using audience layering logic, you target those who also match a marketplace segment tied to active buying intent, giving the campaign a stronger intent signal and supporting better ROAS.
Should I use audience exclusions in my performance campaigns?
Yes. Audience exclusions help protect budgets and improve measurement. Using first-party audiences to exclude recent purchasers, current customers, employees, or low-value segments from acquisition campaigns reduces target audience overlap and keeps spend focused on high-value, net-new prospects.
Can I combine first-party and marketplace audiences on Realize?
Yes. Realize supports combined audience targeting using AND, OR, and EXCLUDE logic. You can layer your own first-party audiences (CRM lists, pixel-based visitors) with Taboola First Party segments (such as “In Market For” bundles) and Third Party marketplace audiences to create precise, high-intent targeting combinations. The platform also provides reach estimates and “by audience” reporting so that you can validate performance before scaling.
