Display advertising
What is display advertising?
Display advertising is banner and image advertising shown on websites, inside apps and next to videos across Google’s network, rather than in search results. It is bought per click or per thousand impressions. Nobody was looking for you at that moment, so clickthrough rates stay low: its job is to introduce and to remind, not to catch an intent that already exists.
Example
A children’s clothing shop runs a display campaign on €300 a month at €2 per thousand impressions: 150,000 impressions. At a 0.10% clickthrough rate that is 150 clicks, or €2 a visitor — dearer than search. Alongside it, a remarketing campaign reaches 4,000 people who viewed a product without buying: 20,000 impressions, 0.60% clicked, 120 visits, 9 orders. The difference is the audience, not the banner.
Why it matters for a business
Display is cheap to show and expensive in results when it runs without limits. Google puts its network at more than two million sites, videos and apps, and some of them exist only to carry advertising; clicks from those lead nowhere. So a campaign runs with excluded placements, excluded topics and a defined audience, and the report is read placement by placement rather than as one total.
The second number is viewability. An impression is not the same as a look: the accepted standard counts a display ad as viewable when at least half of it is on screen for at least one continuous second, and Google Ads reports what share of your impressions met that.
Display earns its place in remarketing, in launching a product, and for brands nobody searches for by name yet. For an order today, search advertising is the shorter route. For a softer presence inside somebody else’s content, compare it with native advertising.
What to ask
- Which twenty placements take the most spend, and what do they return?
- Are apps and games excluded when they are not your audience?
- What share of the impressions was viewable?
- Are remarketing and cold audiences separated in the report?
We keep display campaigns apart from search campaigns so the figures do not blend, as part of our work on Google Ads.