Display Ad

Ads attached to search results only meet people who are already looking. That's why they cost more and work better. The problem is that the supply of those people is fixed.

Someone searching for a collaboration tool has already decided they might switch, and if that search happens 200 times a month, capturing all 200 is where it stops. The person who feels the friction but doesn't know tools like this exist, or who realizes the need in the middle of doing something else, has no place where you can reach them.

Display advertising buys space on someone else's pages to appear in front of those people first. Because it starts from the assumption that nobody is looking for you, the arithmetic has to be set up differently from search.

You buy space left empty on other websites and apps and fill it with an image or a short video. There are two ways to buy: dealing directly with whoever owns the space, or setting conditions with an ad network. The second is more common, and the conditions describe who to show it to and what kind of space to appear in.

Pricing is usually per thousand impressions. Clicks aren't the basis because the click rate itself is low — often under 0.1 percent, depending on the placement and the creative. A thousand people see it and one presses it, which means putting this format's click rate next to a search ad's makes it look like a failure every time.

So results get read somewhere else. Rather than counting people who clicked, you look at whether searches for your name went up during the run, and whether more people typed the address in directly.

Where this format works hardest is retargeting, showing it again to someone who already visited. The assumption changes because they've seen you once, and the click rate rises with it.

Creative gets built per space size. It has to read in the half-second someone spends scanning, which cuts it down to one sentence and one button.

"The click rate is 0.08 percent. Is that normal?"

The baseline for this format is being set against search advertising.

"Don't read display as conversions. Read it as change in search volume."

It's an ad for getting known, not for getting pressed.

"I kept retargeting and turned the rest of the placements off."

Performance varies widely inside the same format.

At Pagedeck, Ravi ran placements for a month. The click rate was 0.07 percent and those clicks produced four signups.

Looking at other numbers with Mia, searches for the company name over the same period had doubled. So the placements were cut back to retargeting only, and the rest of the budget got counted separately as spend on getting known.