Display advertising
Display advertising is buying visual ads on websites and apps, such as banners and videos. You choose audiences or sites, not search keywords. You pay to appear next to content someone was already reading. Paid search is the other model: ads on the results page after someone typed a query.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
What display advertising is
You buy inventory across a network of publishers, targeted by audience, topic, placement, or context. Pricing is usually CPM based, since you are buying impressions rather than clicks on intent. CPM is cost per thousand impressions.
Targeting leans on segments like in-market audiences (Google's lists of people whose recent behaviour looks like shopping for a category), remarketing lists, and contextual signals, because there is no query to bid on.
Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. On the Google Display Network a visitor who left the brown oxford page (product code OXFORD-TAN) can see that shoe again on a news site. A second campaign shows lifestyle banners to people Google places in an in-market footwear segment (people whose recent behaviour looks like shoe shopping), even if they have never been to the shop.
Why display advertising matters
Display is the cheapest way to buy reach at scale, which is why it dominates upper funnel plans (ads to people who have never heard of you) and most retargeting delivery (ads to people who already visited).
Display also carries the industry's worst reputation for waste. Fraud, low viewability, and placements next to nothing anyone reads are real, which is why placement lists and viewability standards exist.
How to read display performance
Be careful with credit. Much of display's reported value comes from view-through conversions, which count people who saw an ad and converted later without clicking. Some of that is real, and plenty of it would have happened anyway.
Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. The shoe workshop spends $4,000 on Display. $2,500 of that $4,000 is retargeting (ads to people who viewed shoes). $1,500 of the $4,000 is cold in-market (people Google thinks are shopping for footwear, who have never visited). Retargeting is credited with 40 sales. Cold display is credited with 3 last-click sales and 50 view-through conversions (people who saw an ad and bought later without clicking). The 50 view-through conversions look like a win until the shoe workshop notices many of those buyers also came through branded Search. The placement report shows $400 of the $1,500 cold budget landed in mobile game apps. The shoe workshop excludes those apps. Click-through rate on display stays a fraction of Search. That is the format, not weak creative. Compare display to display, not to someone typing leather oxfords into Google.
Common display advertising mistakes
- Judging display on last-click conversions alone, or on view-through alone.
- Leaving placement and app category exclusions empty.
- Comparing display click-through rates to search and calling the creative weak.
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