Display advertising refers to visual ads, typically banners or images, shown across websites, apps, and ad networks. While display ads are often associated with lower click-through rates than search ads, they remain valuable for building brand awareness and staying visible to audiences throughout their browsing session.
Design Principles That Work
Effective display ads use a clear visual hierarchy, with the brand, key message, and call to action easy to spot within the first second of viewing. Simple layouts with minimal text tend to outperform cluttered designs, especially on smaller ad sizes where space is limited.
Standard Ad Sizes
Most display networks support a set of common ad sizes, including the medium rectangle, leaderboard, and skyscraper formats. Designing creative in the most widely supported sizes increases the number of available placements and generally lowers the cost of reaching an audience.
Targeting Strategies
- Contextual targeting – showing ads on pages related to specific topics or keywords.
- Audience targeting – reaching users based on interests or past behavior regardless of the page content.
- Retargeting – showing ads to people who have already visited your website.
- Placement targeting – choosing specific websites or apps where ads should appear.
Frequency and Fatigue
Showing the same ad too many times to the same person can lead to banner blindness, where the audience simply stops noticing the ad. Setting frequency caps and rotating multiple creative variations helps keep display campaigns fresh and prevents wasted impressions on an audience that has already tuned out.
Measuring Beyond Clicks
Because display ads often serve an awareness role, metrics like view-through conversions, which count purchases that happen after someone sees but doesn’t click an ad, and brand lift studies can give a more complete picture of a campaign’s impact than click-through rate alone.