TL;DR: What is display advertising in digital marketing?
- Display advertising uses ads across websites and apps to reach users as they browse online, increasing awareness and conversions.
- Most display ads are now bought programmatically, allowing agencies and brands to target, optimize, and scale campaigns in real time.
- Performance ultimately depends on how well creative, targeting, and the ad formats you use work together.
- As AI, retail media, and privacy changes reshape the channel, display is becoming more measurable and easier to optimize across the full funnel.
Display advertising has come a long way from its early days as the world’s first form of digital advertising.
Back then, targeting didn’t exist, A/B testing wasn’t possible, traffic came with few guarantees, and advertisers didn’t even care to ask about campaign performance, because the entire medium was completely untested.
Now, despite its everyday ubiquity, display advertising has become a central part of how brands reach, influence, and convert customers online.
According to EMARKETER, 57.2% of total digital ad spending went to display in 2025—giving it the largest share overall—with most industries allocating between 54% and 66% of their total budgets to the channel.
If you’re new to display advertising or want to use it more effectively in your campaigns, you’ve come to the right place.
In this blog post, we’ll walk through how to plan, execute, and optimize display campaigns—from targeting and buying methods to strategies and creative best practices—so you can build banner ads that actually get clicked.
What is display advertising?
Display advertising is a form of online advertising that uses visual ads—such as images, text, animations, or video—across websites and apps. When clicked, these ads often direct users to a landing page or website where they can learn more, sign up, or make a purchase.
Although it’s often easy to overlook due to how commonplace it’s become, display advertising is so widely used across digital channels that between 2026 and 2029, display ad spending in the US is expected to grow 31.9%, reaching $294.3 billion USD.
According to internal StackAdapt platform data, display is the most widely used channel by both enterprise and SMB marketers as part of their multi-channel strategies.
What is programmatic display advertising?
Programmatic display advertising is the automated process of buying and selling display ad inventory across websites and apps. Using real-time bidding (RTB) and machine learning, it helps advertisers reach relevant audiences more efficiently than traditional, manual buying methods.
As a result, programmatic buying has become the default way to purchase display inventory. In fact, nearly 90% of display advertising worldwide went through programmatic channels in 2025 and is expected to drive nearly all future growth.
What is the difference between search and display ads?
The difference between search and display advertising is that search ads appear in response to user queries, capturing high intent at the moment someone is actively looking for information through search engines like Google or Bing. Display advertising, in contrast, uses visual ads to reach audiences as they browse websites and apps, building awareness and consideration based on their interests and behaviors beyond search results.
That difference is reflected in how advertisers are allocating their budgets. In fact, display’s share of total digital ad spending is expected to reach 62% by 2029, putting it far ahead of search as the gap continues to widen.
Where are display ads shown?
Display ads can appear across a wide range of digital channels, allowing brands to reach audiences wherever they spend time online.
Common placements include:
- Publisher websites, such as news sites, blogs, and trade publications.
- Mobile apps, including games, news apps, and streaming services, like Spotify.
- E-commerce marketplaces, where ads appear alongside product listings or search results.
- Other digital platforms with feed-based placements, where display-style ads appear alongside content.
Within these channels, ads can show up in familiar formats—like banner placements at the top, side, or bottom of a page—as well as within content, such as in-article placements or app screens.
How does display advertising work?
Display advertising works by placing ads across websites and apps to reach people as they browse online.
In most cases, this happens programmatically, with ad space automatically bought and sold in real time.
Behind the scenes, each impression is decided in milliseconds.
When a user loads a page or opens an app, an auction takes place in which advertisers bid to show their ads based on their campaign goals.
Which ad gets shown depends on a variety of factors, including targeting, context, and the bid amount.
In doing so, this process helps ensure ads are shown to the right audience at the right time.
The display advertising ecosystem
Display advertising operates within a connected ecosystem of advertisers, publishers, and advertising technology platforms that work together to deliver ads.
Here’s a simplified explanation at a high level:
- Advertisers create campaigns and define who they want to reach.
- Publishers make ad space available on their sites and apps.
- Programmatic platforms sit between the two, helping match the right ad with the right opportunity in real time.
The ecosystem also includes ad networks and exchanges, which aggregate inventory and facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers, as well as demand-side platforms (DSPs), which allow advertisers to buy, manage, and optimize campaigns across multiple sources.
When a user loads a page, these systems work together to run an automated auction in real time.
Rather than relying strictly on manual negotiations, advertisers can use programmatic advertising platforms like StackAdapt to reach their ideal audience across thousands of sites and apps through a single platform.
Display advertising targeting
Targeting with display works much like other digital channels, but often offers more ways to reach the right audiences. Here are some of the most common ways you can refine delivery and align your campaigns with specific goals:
- Geographic targeting reaches audiences based on location—down to the city, postal code, designated market area, or radius level—to ensure ads appear where they’re most relevant and support local, regional, or national campaigns.
- First-party targeting activates your own customer data—such as site visits, purchase history, app activity, or CRM lists—to reach and re-engage audiences. It can also be used for suppression or lookalike modeling to extend reach.
- Third-party targeting uses external data providers to reach audiences based on demographic attributes, interests, past behaviors, and modeled segments beyond your owned data.
- B2B and ABM targeting reaches users based on company, industry, job seniority, or technology stack to support account-based and B2B campaigns.
- Dynamic retargeting automatically re-engages users who previously visited your site with personalized ads featuring the exact products or pages they viewed, helping drive return visits and conversions.
- Contextual targeting places ads alongside relevant content so your message appears next to the topics people are already engaging with, while also allowing you to exclude content that doesn’t align with your campaign.
- Device and supply targeting refines delivery based on device type, inventory source, and environment to better align placements with campaign goals.
- Domain targeting allows you to include or exclude specific websites to control where ads appear and maintain brand suitability.
- Language targeting serves ads based on site language or browser settings to ensure messaging matches the viewer’s preferred language.
- What are the benefits of display advertising?
As targeting capabilities have advanced and measurement has become more precise, display advertising has evolved into a flexible channel that can support both brand awareness and performance goals.
Here are some of the main benefits of display advertising:
- Precise targeting: Programmatic advertising platforms help you reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and online behaviors. By activating first-party data or layering in contextual and third-party data, campaigns can narrow in on users most likely to convert.
- Cost-effective reach: Display advertising allows you to place ads across thousands of websites and apps at a fraction of the cost of traditional channels. With affordable pricing models and the ability to optimize campaigns mid-flight, you can expand reach while maintaining budget control.
- Cross-channel integration: Display ads work alongside social, search, native, video, and connected TV (CTV) to keep your brand visible as customers move between platforms. Used within a broader multi-channel strategy, display can follow up on earlier engagement, support search intent, and help move buyers from interest to action.
- Creative flexibility: Display advertising makes it easy to test and adapt creative in real time. With dynamic creative optimization (DCO), you can tailor headlines, images, CTAs, and offers to different audiences, reducing production costs and wasted impressions.
- Full-funnel performance: With the right formats and bidding strategies, campaigns can drive clicks and unique reach at the top of the funnel, improve click-through rate (CTR) during the consideration phase, and drive sales and sign-ups at the bottom of the funnel.
- Higher conversions: By re-engaging people who have already visited your site or viewed a product, display campaigns can keep your brand top of mind and encourage return visits, increasing sales.
- Measurable impact: Display advertising makes it easy to see what’s working. You can track impressions, clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend (ROAS), tying results back to specific decisions to inform future campaigns.
- Stronger brand recall: Formats like rich media combine imagery, motion, and interactive elements to improve visual storytelling, allowing you to capture attention and leave a more lasting impression than text alone.
- Greater inventory variety: Programmatic platforms like StackAdapt provide access to hundreds of thousands of sites, including premium publishers. That means campaigns aren’t confined to just a few placements, which can help limit overexposure.
- Easy to create: Display ads don’t need tons of resources to design. Teams can quickly create ads—even using common design tools like Canva or in-platform tools from programmatic partners—lowering the barrier to entry for brands of all sizes.
How to get started with display advertising
Launching a display campaign doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are a few practical steps to guide your planning—from targeting and creative development to bidding strategy and performance measurement—for any industry you’re working in:
Step 1: Choose the right platform and buying approach
Not all programmatic platforms are created equal. When working with a DSP, ask about verification partners, inventory access, and platform features to ensure your campaigns can scale effectively.
Evaluate supply quality, brand safety, and measurement capabilities to ensure your ads appear in the right places and deliver results, instead of on low-quality inventory—like made-for-advertising sites—where ads are crowded, and performance is often limited.
Step 2: Define your audience
Start by identifying who you want to reach and where they are in the buying journey. Go beyond basic demographics by layering:
- Firmographic data
- Intent signals
- Past engagement
Doing so will help ensure your messaging matches your audience’s mindset.
While adding layers can reduce scale, it often improves relevance. Forecasting tools within DSPs can also help you understand the trade-offs of different audience targeting combinations before launching.
Step 3: Set clear campaign goals
Prior to launching your ads, determine what success looks like.
Whether your objective is reach, increasing site or in-store traffic, or conversions, your KPIs, budget, and bidding strategy should align with your overall goal.
Step 4: Develop and size your creative properly
Strong performance starts with strong creatives.
Develop clear, focused messaging aligned to your objective, and size assets correctly across desktop, mobile, and in-app placements to maintain consistency.
Step 5: Launch across the right channels
Activate your campaign across websites and apps where your audience already spends time, and apply frequency caps to avoid overexposure.
Consider how display can complement social, search, or other programmatic channels—like CTV or digital audio—to maintain consistency across touch points.
Step 6: Monitor and optimize performance
Track performance beyond surface-level metrics. Evaluate impressions, clicks, conversions, and post-click behavior to understand what’s driving results. Adjust creative, audiences, or bids based on what you learn.
Taken together, these steps help ensure your display ads—whether used as a standalone channel or as part of a multi-channel strategy—are set up effectively from the start.
What are some display advertising best practices and examples?
Design and messaging are ultimately what separate display ads that get ignored from those that drive results.
Below are some display advertising best practices from StackAdapt’s award-winning in-house Creative Studio team.
Follow them to ensure your visuals, copy, and messaging are clear, consistent, and built to perform.
Keep it simple
Display ads appear in small spaces and compete for limited attention. If your message can’t be understood in two or three seconds, it’s likely too complex.
Focus on one clear idea, relevant visuals, and concise copy. Think of it as a preview of your campaign, not a landing page.
This cloud security ad, designed by the Creative Studio, is effective because it centers on a single, clear message with minimal supporting copy and a high-contrast call to action (CTA), making the value proposition immediately understandable.