Audience Unlimited: Expanding access to high-relevance third-party data

Driving growth today depends on reaching the right audience.

Third-party data helps advertisers identify high-intent audiences and improve performance. But activating that data at scale has often meant navigating complex pricing models and thousands of individual segments.

Audience Unlimited simplifies access to third-party data, offering more predictable pricing and AI-powered automation to help advertisers discover high-propensity audiences, test more strategies, and scale what works. 

• What is Audience Unlimited? 

• How Audience Unlimited works 

• Benefits for advertisers  

• A more scalable path to relevance

• Audience Unlimited for data providers

What is Audience Unlimited?

Audience Unlimited is an evolution of The Trade Desk’s data marketplace, giving advertisers access to hundreds of thousands of third-party data segments. 

Instead of evaluating each segment against incremental CPM costs, advertisers benefit from more predictable pricing by allocating data budgets at a single rate — freeing teams to focus on relevance, testing, and performance. 

How Audience Unlimited works 

Audience Unlimited combines broad marketplace access with AI-powered audience expansion. Two core features of the solution aimed at helping advertisers scale campaigns and reach new audiences are Audience Assistant and Audience Predictor.

• Audience Assistant helps scale what you’ve already built by automatically adding relevant segments while maintaining your original targeting intent. 

• Audience Predictor goes a step further — identifying entirely new, high-potential audiences based on your seed data.

You start with a campaign seed: First- or third-party data that represents your most valuable customers. From there, you can build audiences based on who you want to reach for a given campaign.

Once the campaign’s data foundation is in place, AI can further enhance audience targeting. Audience Unlimited’s Audience Assistant feature analyzes your targeting intent and adds high-relevance segments aligned to your strategy, and based on Relevance Score, which measures behavioral similarity to the campaign seed.

When using Audience Unlimited, at least one ad group within your campaign must have Audience Assistant or Audience Predictor enabled. If you don’t have Audience Assistant enabled for an ad group, the platform will surface those segments as recommendations for you to review and add manually.

By increasing decision-making across a broader set of relevant segments, Kokai gains more high-quality opportunities to bid on valuable impressions.

To maximize performance:

• Ensure a strong campaign seed based on your most valuable customers 

• Select several segments that represent your target audience 

• Allow Audience Assistant to identify and add additional segments aligned with your targeting strategy 

• Leverage the platform’s AI to continuously optimize bids and budget allocation for performance 

Benefits for advertisers

Audience Unlimited helps advertisers unlock greater value from third-party data in four key ways:

1. More qualified reach. With access to hundreds of thousands of segments and more predictable pricing, advertisers can activate more high-relevance data without worrying about incremental segment costs. This makes it easier to uncover high-propensity audiences and reach people more likely to drive outcomes. 

2. Smarter experimentation. Audience Unlimited removes some of the financial friction that limits testing. Teams can explore multiple audience strategies, compare performance, refine their approach, and gain deeper insight based on real results. 

3. Simpler discovery. By eliminating the need to manually source every relevant segment or reconcile pricing, Audience Unlimited reduces operational complexity. Traders can spend less time managing segments and costs, and more time optimizing strategy.

4. Stronger performance. Reaching more relevant audiences leads to more efficient conversions and stronger full-funnel performance. A platform analysis found that ad groups using third-party data achieved a 46% more efficient cost per acquisition (CPA) than those without third-party data.¹ 

When advertisers can use third-party data and experiment freely, high-quality segments surface and scale more consistently, helping to strengthen audience strategies. 

A more scalable path to relevance

Audience Unlimited represents a shift from complex, manual data activation to predictable scale, powered by AI-driven capabilities that help to further enhance performance.

With broader access to third-party data at predictable costs, advertisers can drive more efficient media investment while making high-quality data easier to deploy, evaluate, and scale.

Ready to get started with Audience Unlimited? Contact us or reach out to your representative at The Trade Desk. 

<sub>Source: 
1. The Trade Desk Platform Data, Jan. 2025 – Sept. 2025, campaigns with CPA as their primary KPI.</sub>