Display Advertising

Display Advertising FAQs

• What is display advertising?

  Display advertising is one of the most commonly used channels and it uses images, text or video to promote the products/services of the host website, entertain or educate the target customers. A well-known example is banners, desktop or mobile leaderboard ads. The shape of display ads is usually rectangular and the look and feel are aligned with the promoted brand. Businesses run their display ads on networks such as Google or Facebook for maximizing reach and more precise targeting.

• Is display advertising effective?

  Simply put, yes it is very effective. It still delivers a great return on investment (ROI) for most businesses even though a very small percentage of people click on display ads. That’s why to make it effective, you need to use high traffic sites/networks and methods such as retargeting (displaying ads on other sites customizing their content based on what the consumer looked at on your site) which is 70% more effective than normal display advertising.

• Why is display advertising important?

  Display ads are very flexible as they allow you to use many different formats to present your offer to a global audience to increase brand awareness while at the same time giving you the power to target precise segments depending on location, demographics etc. It lets you reach and acquire customers who wouldn’t have found out about your product but were attracted when you offered them the right solution to their needs at the right time on the right website.

• What is the difference between PPC and display advertising?

  Pay-per-click as the name suggests implies that the business pays only when a customer clicks on the ad. It’s used mainly in search engines and it appears as a text-only ad in relation to a particular keyword search so it’s relevant to the user’s experience. Display advertising also reflects the user’s search behavior and it uses text, images or video/audio to convey the messages and it takes much bigger real estate on the host site for a lower PPC cost.

• What are the different types of display advertising?

  The traditional type is landscape, square or skyscraper images, static or animated and is mainly seen on websites. Responsive display ads get their name from the fact that the platform decides how to place the best-performing combination of text headlines and descriptions and formats for the target audience. Other main types are native ads (displayed in the same style as the host site), social ads (in social media), retargeting (aka remarketing) and discovery ads.

• What is native advertising?

  Native ads are a type of display ads that complement the look and feel and also the functionality of the online media format in which they are shown. You can see them on web pages as recommended content, on social media feeds on networks such as YouTube and in email newsletters etc. They blend in with the rest of the content, similar to the editorial in printed media, and don’t look like ads which is the main objective of using this display ad format.