Digital marketing term
Display Advertising
Banners, native units, and other visual formats on sites and apps. Unlike search text ads, they show up before someone has typed a query into the box.
Detailed explanation
Use them for awareness, retargeting, and reach on publisher inventory. Pricing is often CPM or viewable impression; click-through is usually lower than search. If the message ignores the surrounding context, you paid for a blind impression.
Same cramped creative in every size, fake close buttons, and uncapped frequency are common failures. Impressions that never meet viewability still spend. Skip brand-safety and ROS/RON controls and the ad lands on junk pages.
Read viewable impressions, frequency, branded search, and on-site conversion together. CTR alone is a weak score. Decide to tighten audience and placement, rotate creative, or cut the channel—not to ship a larger banner.
Frequently asked questions
- Does a low CTR kill the campaign?
- Display CTRs run lower than search. The real questions are viewability, frequency, and later conversion. Cutting on CTR alone misleads.
- Can awareness and retargeting share one ad?
- They should not. Cold audiences need the story; warm audiences need a reminder. One creative for everyone burns out faster.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- CPMCPM (Cost Per Mille) is the cost of 1,000 ad impressions; it is one of the most common media buying units.
- ImpressionAn impression is a single instance of an online ad being displayed to a user.
- Ad SpaceThe placement where an ad sits, plus the inventory that slot can sell. A fixed unit, run of site, and run of network are not the same product.
- TargetingLimiting who sees an ad by demographics, interests, behavior, or a custom audience list. Tight targeting cuts waste; over-narrowing kills learning and scale.
- Floating AdA creative that overlays or sticks to the page instead of sitting in the grid. It can raise viewability; if it cannot be closed, it taxes UX and the brand.
- PublisherThe party that owns the content and the ad inventory: a site, app, or show. Advertisers buy the impressions; this side sells the space and the audience.