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Is anyone getting value out of display campaigns? ….. (not Google Display specific)
Posted by on March 6, 2026 at 6:59 pmI'm at a loss with display advertising.
We're an agency using a DSP that lets us build audiences and serve ads with audiences from The Trade Desk and other data sources.
But despite great looking audiences, some decent placements, and everything else looking good on the front end – we're getting damn near no actual engagement for visitors.
I feel like a fool trying to drive a CTR above benchmarks (.2%) while then seeing the visitors doing absolutely nothing on our site.
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1 Reply
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Display works really well for:
1. Impulse buys
2. Brand awareness
3. That’s it… -
To achieve effective display advertising particularly for site engagement. You need to implement conversion tracking properly and accurately on your site for those DSPs.
Only by passing the conversion data to DSPs, then you can the system algorithm to optimise for visitors that are most likely to take certain action within your site.
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Don’t expect engagement. Display advertising is largely noise on the internet. There is little relevance involved in the click.
Display is best used for retargeting (staying top of mind) or cost effective (low CPM) impressions for outreach. Measure effectiveness by your reach and costs.
Utilize lower funnel strategies like search ads if you’re trying to measure engagements.
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in 99% of cases I lead clients away from DSP. it doesn’t work that well – too much ad fraud, and nobody pays attention to banner ads anyway unless it’s as others have said for retargeting high quality leads who have shown purchase intent.
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Nope.
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Display is a crapshoot, but we get some value from it for clients who can secure high-quality placements. One of my clients gets the majority of their impressions from [yahoo.com](http://yahoo.com) and other reputable sites, as opposed to the typical junk you’ll see in your display reports. Took a lot, a lot, a LOT of placement exclusions over an extended period to get Google prioritizing more legitimate URLs like that. I found an online master list of 40,000 URLs generally considered to be junk, implemented it, and immediately saw CTRs spike across the clients I used it on. I realize now that this info got a little Google-specific, so sorry about that.
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What platform are you using? Interested to hear what you mean by it allows you to use TTD audiences.
Inventory is a big problem in display. Unless you’re using strict controls you’re gonna have a huge amount of budget going to pretty much garbage websites.
Have you full tagging in place? Modelling from converting audiences, etc.?
Have you tried video? Again, all the above applies here too.
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display is trash trafic, just stop doing it
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Display ads are mostly view through-conversions, conversions that would have happened regardless.
Rarely is it last click to purchase. When was the last time you clicked & purchased from a display ad?
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I’ve been in performance marketing for 20 years and have witnessed brands spending millions of dollars on display and I’m fully convinced it’s total garbage.
The remarketing argument works fine as does most remarketing, but I’m not convinced it’s truly incremental.
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There’s plenty of studies online stating the effectiveness of both Display as part of your overall marketing mix and doing so via programmatic buying options.
[https://smartyads.com/blog/examples-of-programmatic-advertising-campaigns](https://smartyads.com/blog/examples-of-programmatic-advertising-campaigns)
There’s a lot of bias in this sub as you’ll find a lot of freelancers that work with micro or small businesses that are not suitable candidates for display.
While the conversation of moving away from running campaigns that have a budget of less than $100 a day is for another day, these aren’t the right customers for Display.
Add in the fact that overall asset quality is usually incredibly low, landing pages, offers and product prices are terrible and you get “Display is rubbish, it’s all bots”.
Use it for awareness, use dynamic display retargeting for ecommerce and you’ll find overall it assists in scale.
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Your display visitors need a separate landing page with zero friction display traffic intent is completely different from search
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Very few brands / agencies truly understand how to run display. Programmatic is for sure the best way to do it but you need still the baseline of strong creative / curated inventory / the right signals alongside measurement that is not last click.
There is a reason the biggest brands in the world invest in it still, especially in a DSP ecosystem. -
CTR and click based is a very searchy way to measure display. Clicks do not equal influence – more than likely your display “credit” is living in another channel in GA
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If placements are selected yes if not it’s a money burner
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