Study: Digital tech makes purchasing path 'entirely random' for many consumers
With the digital world playing an integral part in consumers’ day-to-day lives, the path to purchase has changed fundamentally.
That’s according to new research from MiQ, a leading programmatic media company, which found that nearly nine-in-10 (87%) consumers switch between digital activities at least once an hour. A whopping 91% of consumers use a second device while watching TV, and 69% say they discover brands they like even when they’re not actively shopping.
MiQ says the survey findings offer proof that so-called “passive” moments are “commercially significant.” Overall, 42% of those surveyed said their path to purchase feels entirely “random.”
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“Couches have become the new storefronts as consumers move from screen to screen, almost in the same breath,” said Jordan Bitterman, global chief marketing officer at MiQ. “Today, a full customer journey can conceivably take place in hours or minutes, instead of weeks or days. To keep up, marketers must shift from rigid funnels to flexible frameworks. This isn’t just a planning shift for marketers, but a mandate for the adtech industry to move beyond channel silos toward systems that unify data, intelligence, and activation, so every investment is accountable to both brand and business outcomes.”
AI tools and social platforms now act as accelerants for commerce, according to MiQ. Nearly half (45%) of consumers already use AI chatbots when shopping. Seventy-two percent of consumers under 34 have made a purchase inside a social app
Seventy-one percent of consumers say they get distracted during the process of researching a product, and only return to a purchase when prompted. At the same time, just 43% of marketers feel confident in their efforts to reach consumers, with fragmented screens and supply paths emerging as roadblocks.
“The funnel was built for a world where the customer journey is linear. Today a consumer can see an ad on CTV, price-check the product on their phone, and buy it on social media – all before the next commercial break,” said Moe Chughtai, global VP of strategy & partnerships at MiQ.
For its report, MiQ fielded two surveys among 4,000 adult consumers split evenly across Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., and 600 marketing professionals across the same regions. MiQ also tapped 700 trillion signals from its property Sigma platform to analyse 53 million distinct households over seven days in January 2026.
