Display Ads

Display ads are visual advertisements — banners, images, videos, or animated graphics — shown to users as they browse websites, use apps, or watch content across the internet. Unlike search ads, which appear in response to what someone is actively searching for, display ads are served based on audience targeting criteria: who the person is, what they’ve previously done online, or what type of content they’re currently viewing.

You’ve seen them everywhere. The banner at the top of a news article. The square ad in the sidebar of a blog. The pre-roll video before a YouTube video. The animated ad between levels of a mobile game. These are all display ads.

Display advertising runs primarily through ad networks, with Google Display Network (GDN) being the largest. GDN reaches over 90% of internet users globally through a network of millions of websites and apps. Other significant display networks include Meta’s Audience Network, Amazon DSP, and programmatic platforms like The Trade Desk.

How display ads work

When you visit a website that carries display ads, an auction happens in milliseconds. The publisher’s website sends a bid request to an ad network, which evaluates which advertisers are targeting users like you, runs an auction among them, and serves the winning ad. All of this happens before the page finishes loading.

Advertisers define who they want to reach through targeting parameters. The ad network matches those parameters to available users and serves ads accordingly. You pay when your ad is shown (CPM, cost per thousand impressions) or when someone clicks it (CPC, cost per click), depending on how your campaign is set up.

The result is that display ads can reach people who have never visited your website or searched for your product. That wide reach is the core advantage. The challenge is that most people are not actively looking to buy when they see a display ad, which is why conversion rates are typically much lower than search.

Display ad formats

1. Static banner ads: Fixed image ads in standard sizes (leaderboard at 728x90px, medium rectangle at 300x250px, wide skyscraper at 160x600px). These are the most common and the simplest to produce.
2. Responsive display ads: Google’s adaptive format. You provide headlines, descriptions, images, and logos, and Google assembles combinations automatically to fit any available ad space. These reach more placements than fixed-size banners and are easier to scale.
3. Animated GIF and HTML5 ads: Banner ads that move or cycle through multiple frames. More engaging than static banners but require more production time. HTML5 ads can include interactive elements.
4. Video display ads: Short video clips served outside of video content, usually on websites and in apps. Different from in-stream video ads (YouTube pre-rolls), which are technically also display advertising but are usually categorized separately.
5. Native display ads: Ads designed to match the look and feel of the surrounding content. They appear as recommended content, sponsored posts, or “you might also like” items. Less visually disruptive than banner ads and often perform better because they don’t trigger the same ad-blindness response.
6. Rich media ads: Interactive ads with features like embedded video, expandable panels, or real-time data feeds. More engaging but more expensive to produce.

Display ad targeting options

Targeting is what separates effective display advertising from spray-and-pray banner campaigns. The options available through platforms like Google Display Network give advertisers significant control over who sees their ads.

• Contextual targeting: Ads are shown on pages whose content matches keywords or topics you specify. A camping gear advertiser might target pages about hiking, outdoor activities, or camping equipment. No audience data required, just content relevance.
• Audience targeting: Ads are shown to specific groups of users based on their demographics, interests, or past behavior. This includes affinity audiences (people with demonstrated interest in a topic), in-market audiences (people actively researching a purchase category), and demographic filters like age, gender, and household income.
• Remarketing/retargeting: Ads shown to people who have previously visited your website or used your app. These are users who already know you exist and have shown some interest. Remarketing display campaigns almost always outperform prospecting campaigns because the audience is warmer. (This overlaps heavily with retargeting, covered in its own glossary entry.)
• Customer match: Upload a list of customer emails and the platform matches them to logged-in users, serving ads specifically to your existing customer base or people similar to them.
• Placement targeting: Manually selecting specific websites, apps, or YouTube channels where your ads should appear. Useful when you know exactly where your target audience spends time.
• Similar audiences / Lookalike audiences: The platform creates audiences that share characteristics with your existing customers or website visitors. Effective for prospecting at scale.

Display ads vs. search ads: the key differences

Search ads and display ads serve different roles in a marketing funnel and work best in combination rather than competition.

Search ads capture existing demand. Someone searches “best running shoes for flat feet” and sees your ad. They have intent. Conversion rates are high. The limitation is you can only reach people who are already searching, and competitive search terms can be expensive.

Display ads create and maintain demand. Someone reading an article about marathon training sees your running shoe ad. They weren’t searching, but they’re in a relevant context. You’re reaching a much larger audience at lower cost per impression, but most won’t convert immediately.

Display advertising works best for brand awareness at the top of the funnel, keeping your brand visible to warm audiences (remarketing), and reaching niche audiences at scale. Search advertising works best for capturing high-intent buyers ready to make a decision.

Most effective marketing programs use both.

Common display ad metrics

• CPM (Cost per Mille): Cost per 1,000 impressions. The standard pricing model for brand awareness campaigns. Lower CPMs mean more reach per euro spent.
• CPC (Cost per Click): What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Relevant when driving traffic to a landing page.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): Percentage of impressions that result in a click. Display ads typically have very low CTRs (0.05% to 0.3%) compared to search ads. This isn’t necessarily a problem — views without clicks still contribute to brand recall and can influence later purchase decisions.
• View-through conversions: Conversions that happen within a window (typically 7 to 30 days) after someone saw your ad, even without clicking. Controversial metric because correlation isn’t causation, but it captures some of the influence display advertising has on purchase decisions that happen through other channels.
• Frequency: How many times the same user has seen your ad. High frequency can drive ad fatigue and resentment. Most platforms let you set frequency caps to avoid showing the same ad to the same person too many times.

Display advertising and ad verification

For marketers running display campaigns at scale, ad fraud is a real concern. Bot traffic, low-quality placements (ad farms, made-for-advertising sites), and domain spoofing inflate impression counts and make campaigns look more successful than they are while wasting budget on placements that no real user ever sees.

Ad verification and brand safety tools help marketers monitor where their ads actually appear and exclude placements that don’t meet quality standards. Ad verification proxies paired with an antidetect browser allow marketers to check how their ads appear across different geographies and devices, simulating real user experiences from different locations to verify placements are serving correctly.

For agencies managing display campaigns across multiple client accounts, Multilogin’s isolated browser profiles keep each client’s campaigns, data, and ad account access properly separated. The same applies to performance marketers running separate campaigns for different brands or markets.

When display advertising makes sense

Display advertising is the right tool when:

You want to build awareness among audiences who don’t know your brand yet, particularly when the product needs visual context to be understood. You’re retargeting website visitors and want to stay visible to warm audiences while they’re in their consideration phase. 

You have a strong creative asset (a striking image, a compelling video) that communicates value quickly without needing a search intent context. Your target audience’s attention is scattered across multiple content channels and you want to be present across them.

Display advertising is less effective when: your product category has no visual storytelling dimension, your target audience has very narrow intent that search captures better, or your budget is so limited that the floor-level CPM spend doesn’t generate enough impressions to build recall. In those cases, search advertising and organic channels typically generate better returns first.

Key takeaways

Display ads are visual ads served across websites and apps based on audience targeting rather than search intent. They reach broader audiences at lower per-impression cost than search, but at lower conversion rates. 

The most effective use cases are brand awareness, retargeting warm audiences, and staying visible during customer consideration phases. Ad quality and placement verification matter significantly at scale to ensure budget is reaching real users.