Display advertising with honest expectations
Display is good at reminding people you exist and poor at making strangers buy. Campaigns fail when they are measured as if the opposite were true.
Connect the audience, the message and the page they land on.
- Right audience
- Relevant advert
- Focused landing page
Spend, response and enquiries, considered together.
What is display advertising actually good for?
Two jobs: keeping you visible to people who already know you, and building awareness in a defined audience. Expecting cold display traffic to convert like search traffic is the single most common reason these campaigns get labelled a failure.
Judged as an awareness and re-engagement channel, with the right measurement, it earns its place. Judged on last-click conversions against search, it never will.
Placement control matters
Left unmanaged, display budgets drain into low quality apps and auto-refreshing pages that generate impressions nobody saw. Exclusion lists and placement reviews are the difference between a display campaign and a donation.
Yes, well under one percent is normal. That is not necessarily a problem, because the value is largely in being seen. It becomes a problem when the campaign is being paid for on the basis of clicks.