16 Display Ads Best Practices to Accelerate Your Brand
Let’s talk display advertising. Need a refresh?
These are paid ads that traditionally appear as boxes or banners positioned within the margins, headers, footers, or between webpage content. Display ads primarily include a mix of text, graphics, and images and almost always link to a corresponding landing page or touchpoint for further engagement.
These ads are popular, as teams can leverage ad-buying technologies available, such as The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, or DV360, to build, execute, and optimize premium display campaigns across websites, apps, and media outlets, both local and national.
Moreover, display caters to multiple parts of the sales funnel, permitting teams to generate demand at the top to mid-funnel, while pushing bottom-funnel engagement and lead generation efforts.
Although display has many benefits, don’t be fooled, as finding success in this channel requires lots of time, effort, trial, and error. Luckily, we at Pathlabs have been in the display game for a while, and in this blog, we share 16 of our best practices teams should consider to level up their display ad strategies.
Essential Best Practices for Display Ads
1. Don’t Use Display Alone
Although display is effective, it doesn’t have to be the only advertising channel a team uses. Teams can leverage OTT, paid social, and paid search, in addition to display advertising. This integrated strategy creates multiple touchpoints across mediums to reach and engage users. Remember, the more channels used, the more difficult it is to track users and performance across all these touchpoints.
2. Understand The Display Ad Buying Landscape
Procuring ad space and placing display ads can look different ways. Some teams leverage demand-side platforms, like the Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, or DV360, to access open and private ad exchanges and bid on display ad impressions across multiple publishers’ web locations. Alternatively, teams may directly contact publishers to negotiate premium ad placements at a specific rate.
The point here? It is best practice to understand these different ad buying and placement routes; whichever teams ultimately choose will impact their access to inventory, impression price points, technological investments, and execution complexity levels.
3. Define Campaign Goals and KPIs
This is a no-brainer: before teams build anything out in-platform or spend a single dollar in display advertising, they need a media plan. They need to outline their business and marketing objectives, draw out the customer journey, validate that display is an optimal channel, and understand the overall scope and timeline of the campaigns to run. Along these same lines, the team needs to detail the KPIs to track and what kind of performance deems the objective met.
It is futile to run any campaign before laying this groundwork.
4. Know Your Target Audience
The media plan for a display ad campaign must clearly outline the target audience. A helpful method in doing so is audience profiling, which involves creating detailed profiles or personas that reflect the brand’s ideal customers. These personas are normally based on research and data from past successful conversions.
This practice is especially beneficial when using ad-buying platforms that offer various targeting options based on demographics, location, and interests. In effect, teams can create these audience personas, input these details into the platform, and target display ads to these users.
Remember that audience building and targeting is not an exact science and needs to be flexible. Often, the audience data available on these platforms may not perfectly match the intended persona, furthermore, the outlined persona could be inherently wrong.
Teams must be ready to face this reality, regularly updating and testing their audience targeting strategies.
5. Use Display Ads Throughout The Sales Funnel
Teams should not see display as solely a top-funnel tactic. In fact, they can run display ads throughout the funnel.
One avenue worth considering is running general display ads at the top of the funnel to cast a wide net and generate demand. In addition, using display ads as a mid-to-bottom funnel tactic to serve more personalized, direct-response ads for users to click on, go to a landing page, further engage, and hopefully spur lead capture. If users don’t immediately convert, teams can then attempt to retarget them in the future with display ads until they do.
6. Use a Variety of Ad Formats
Traditionally, display ads mainly refer to box or banner-style ads, primarily using text, images, and graphics with little to no animation or motion. These can come in multiple sizing dimensions; below are common examples.
There are, however, newer display ad formats that use HTML5 files, more animated features, and rich media content. Many display ad formats are even beginning to incorporate online video and native elements as well.
Overall, we encourage teams to experiment with these different creative dimensions and newer formats. Just remember, the richer the media and the more space it takes up, the higher the price and the longer it takes to develop, approve, and turn the creative live.
7. Build Landing Pages Consistent with Your Brand
Every display ad campaign should have a designated landing page or touchpoint that users navigate to upon clicking the ad. This primarily helps with attribution and tracking.
To illustrate, imagine Pathlabs ran a display campaign to promote our 2024 MEP eBook. We would create a specific landing page for it, called pathlabs.com/playbook, and direct all our display ads to this page where users can download the eBook. Having this single landing page ensures that every user who downloaded the eBook directly came from our display campaign.
Compare this to just linking the display ad campaign to our website’s home page. In this case, we would receive traffic from all our touchpoints: social profiles, organic search, and paid search efforts, in addition to display ads. This makes it impossible to discern which users came from where.
8. Utilize High-Quality Images and Graphical Elements
If the display ad creative quality is poor, it will receive little user engagement. So, whoever develops it must ensure the utmost quality. This means sourcing and using high-quality images and graphical elements, exporting at high quality, and performing due diligence to attain and adhere to any ad format specifications detailed by the ad-buying software or publisher.
Quality assurance should also come once the ad campaign turns live. Below is an ad that probably received quality assurance when the team developed the creative, but not when it served, as it appears cut off and blurry, and we can’t even see the brand’s logo.
Now, we admit serving display advertising creatives is complex, and even the most top-notch ad content files can come out blurry or pixelated. Regardless, display advertising is commonly on a CPM basis, and if the ad loads, it counts as an impression, irrespective of how it looks. So, it is worth putting in extra effort to make it look good. If not, the team pays for it, literally.
9. Clearly Present Your Value Proposition
The display ad copy and visuals must effectively present what the users should immediately know or understand about the brand, service, or product being promoted.
The ad below is an example of what not to do. There is a lot of text and no visual aids besides the cloud icon. It mentions the connectivity cloud, but is the value proposition trying to sell a software product that uses the cloud to the user? Is the brand offering cloud storage services? Even an expert in this field may question this.
The two ads below do a better job. The CNBC ad, though long, clearly prompts users with a 'yes' or 'no' choice, asking if they aspire to be smarter and more successful, and directs them to sign up. Similarly, Target's ad effectively showcases its key messages with toy visuals, making it easy for users to determine its relevance to them.
10. Use Creative Ad Copy
Elaborating more on the concept of display ad copy – the language and text in an ad – users have a short attention span, and with display ads, they will blow right past them. Sticking to brevity in the text is very valuable as it will be conducive to the users moving fast.
When deciding what to say precisely, try to cover the following three bases:
Reduce language as much as possible to get a concise value proposition across.
Include key terms and points in the copy that speak to what could be on a user’s mind, such as pain points, desires, or buzzwords.
Don’t be afraid to step out of the box. Be unique. Be exciting. Say something funny. This only helps grab attention.
11. Choose an Engaging Call to Action (CTA).
Most display ads come with a call to action (CTA), which traditionally is a small box or rounded icon with a small text tagline saying ‘learn more,’ ‘enroll now,’ ‘click here,’ ‘save 60%’, etc.
Display ads need a CTA, which signals to the user that they can click on the ad and further engage. Equally important, the CTA text should pertain to what the user can expect to do upon clicking the ad. If the ad is for an eBook download, the CTA should say ‘Download eBook.’ If the ad promotes a product, the CTA might say, ‘Browse Products.’
The only cases where teams can get away without using a CTA are if the ad creative visuals are compelling and engaging enough on their own or if the display ad campaign is prioritizing awareness and just trying to get as many impressions as possible, not clicks. Still, having a CTA in the end is a safe bet.
12. Consider Responsive Display Ads
Google Ads offers responsive display ads. This format allows advertisers to provide their display ad creative and copy assets, which Google then takes and serves in multiple formats across websites, apps, YouTube, Gmail, etc.
Teams can consider this advertising option, as it can place the ads in unique locations at high reach and leverages the power of artificial intelligence, something currently on the mind of many media buyers and advertisers.
13. Conduct A/B Testing
Display ads can be quite a conducive space for A/B testing, and teams should prioritize this, especially with creative development and audience targeting.
For creative testing, teams can make a few iterations of a display ad, with minor tweaks in text size, CTA button text, graphic color, etc. Then, keeping the other aspects of the campaign controlled, they can launch and see which creative versions performed better.
For audience targeting, teams can run identical campaign versions but slightly change audience targeting elements, keeping everything else controlled. Then, they can review which target parameters spurred better performance.
14. Leverage Allow and Block List
Certain DSPs and ad-buying platforms permit teams to indicate which online locations to prioritize serving ads via an ‘allow list’ while indicating which locations never to buy ad space from via a ‘block list.’
Utilizing these ensures teams safelist ad locations to put the utmost priority on; while blacklisting ad locations that are not of priority.
Remember, block lists can include locations with a high risk of containing inappropriate or questionable content that may cause negative ad adjacency, or it may simply be a location that does not fit into the context of the ad campaign.
15. Leverage contextual targeting opportunities
Speaking of context, teams should become more familiar with contextual targeting display ad tactics, especially as we see a depreciation in third-party cookies and challenges with tracking.
Contextual targeting is a fancy term for placing ads in locations that align with the ad content and the user's customer journey. For example, if the ad campaign aims to sell bikes, it’s worth placing ads in locations or ‘contexts’ online that either discuss bikes, sell bike equipment, or are geared more towards outdoor sports.
Since users naturally engaging in these locations already have a pre-existing interest in the ad's subject matter, this increases the likelihood that they will lean in. Additionally, teams don’t have to worry about tracking user data.
Newer opportunities in contextual targeting are surfacing, too, like GumGum, which uses natural language processing, computer vision, and sentiment analysis to analyze an advertiser’s ad content. It then crawls and identifies different online spaces, placing the ads in the locations most contextually aligned with the ad content.
16. Have Fun with Optimization
Optimization is crucial, as display ad campaigns never reach optimal performance on the first try. In addition, teams should have fun with these optimization efforts, as there are many levers they can pull to increase performance and reduce spending.
For example, teams can make minor modifications to ad creative to bump up performance minutely. Alternatively, they can make more considerable changes to the campaign regarding how much they bid on ad impressions or the device and geo they target, significantly impacting performance.
Getting into these weeds of looking at performance, making tweaks, reviewing the new performance, and repeating improves campaign performance and helps teams understand which tactical elements make a display campaign successful.
In Conclusion…
Display remains a valuable and ever-evolving advertising method. As this landscape continues to adapt, remember these best practices and keep pushing forward in your display ad endeavors. We are rooting for you!