What Is Display Advertising?

Display advertising refers to a type of digital marketing that delivers messages as text, images, videos, or other graphical formats. Display ads appear in predetermined positions on various online and mobile media, such as a website or social app. Sometimes referred to as display marketing or banner advertising, these ads are commonly used to target specific audiences based on relevant data, such as a person’s web browsing behavior, transaction history, and demographic information. An example of display advertising is an advertiser running a banner ad that appears only to men in a certain age range who also live in a particular city or region.

When these display ads are designed to appear as part of a site’s natural look-and-feel, this is sometimes called native advertising. A common example of this kind of display ad is a sponsored article or video on a news or entertainment site that looks, at first glance, like other content on the site.

Display advertising offers a wide array of targeting and programming options to marketers. These options have only become more powerful with the rise of the Internet age. Traditional media such as TV, radio, or outdoor advertising could only target audiences based on much broader criteria. Display advertising, when combined with personalization, helps marketers to easily target highly specific audience traits, and then measure the effectiveness of their campaigns with granular data on impressions, clicks, delivery costs, subsequent user behavior, and more.