The variety of advertising formats offered by Google Ads is impressive. Each pursues slightly different goals, so combining them skillfully often contributes to the success of marketing efforts.
Thanks to this, we can reach users at various stages of the purchasing path and gradually build their trust and, subsequently, brand loyalty.
In the first stage of this process, display advertising, focused on increasing brand awareness, provides significant support to marketers. What are the characteristics of display campaigns, how can you create this type of advertising, and how can you use it to promote your company?
Display advertising – what is it?
Display ads are promotional content that takes a graphical form and appears not in the search engine itself, but on specific websites. Every internet user encounters them almost constantly, every time they visit the web. Where are they visible?
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Practically everywhere. Display ads include banners that appear next to the main text on a page, at the top of a website, or between paragraphs of articles you read.
Display advertising also includes pop-ups, interstitials, and ads that appear in the background, behind the actual website content. This also includes YouTube ads – below (on smartphones) or next to the player (on computers).
We most often use the term "display advertising" to refer to Google campaigns , meaning those displayed on the Google Display Network. This extensive network comprises approximately 2 million websites and encompasses the vast majority of active internet users worldwide.
GDN includes news portals (e.g., Onet and Wirtualna Polska), thematic blogs, video platforms, and lifestyle websites. This makes display campaigns suitable for almost any industry, regardless of the preferred audience.
In short: what is a display ad? It's a graphical advertisement on a website, most often published via the Google Display Network.
What do display ads consist of?
Now let's talk a bit about how to create a display ad. Most often, these sales messages contain an image and a small amount of text, although there are display ads that are purely text-based – these are small white squares with a slogan and a CTA button.
As a rule, however, advertisers try to fully exploit the potential of display campaigns and create image-based messages that attract the attention of recipients much more effectively.
How do you create an ad that will catch the eye of your audience and serve as an effective promotional tool? Contrary to popular belief, creating such a campaign doesn't necessarily require professional graphics created by a specialist.
The Google Ads system offers a library of free images that advertisers can use to build their display campaigns.
However, if we have the opportunity, it is worth using a unique design – then we can place on the banner, for example, products from our online store, photos of specialists working in the company, photos of the premises, etc. Such materials inspire much greater trust among recipients and build a stronger relationship with the brand.
Examples of display ads:
Display advertising – on what websites is it visible?
As we've already mentioned, display ads appear on websites belonging to the nearly 2 million-page Google Partner Network. However, this doesn't mean that your display campaign will appear in random corners of the internet – using the GDN correctly allows you to avoid wasting your budget and ensure your display ad lands exactly where it's supposed to. This is a huge advantage over many other advertising formats.
Advertisers can influence banner placement by selecting targeting types. For example, we can target ads exclusively to websites with a specific topic, selected from a broad list of topics.
It includes categories such as home and garden, games, travel, sports, cars and vehicles, and many, many more. By choosing this type of targeting, we can ensure that our ads on the website won't appear related to completely random topics.
However, we can also prioritize audiences and set the campaign to display to users who have interests that match our needs or have recently searched for products in a specific category. Display ads can then be displayed on unrelated websites, but only to those likely to be interested in what they represent.
Display ads are also great for remarketing. They allow us to "pursue" audiences who have already interacted with our website and display various types of ads on the website, including dynamic ads that showcase products they have previously viewed.
Types of display ads
Display advertising includes several formats, each focused on achieving different marketing goals. How do you advertise on a website for each?
Traditional display advertising
In this case, we send the Google Ads system a finished product in the form of a banner, designed to always display exactly the same. Typically, it consists of a background image or photo, a slogan, and a company logo. It can also include additional information, such as a promotion, discount, or other special offer. We send these ads to the system in .jpg, .png, or .gif formats. An alternative to these banners is HTML5, which is mobile and interactive, making it particularly engaging for your audience.
Uploaded files must be sized to meet Google Ads requirements – the system allows banners in many sizes, so this is not a limitation for advertisers.
Flexible display ads
The principle behind responsive ads is slightly different. In this type of message, we upload only individual banner elements to the Google Ads system : a separate logo, at least one image, and several versions of the text. The system then analyzes the uploaded materials and combines them in various ways, testing each version of the message.
Artificial intelligence determines which form of advertising a given recipient will see on a website, based on the likely preferences of that user (based on their previous online behavior). This format eliminates the need for pre-made graphic solutions, and provides a message that's as tailored to the needs of the target audience as possible. An example of a flexible ad:
Standard remarketing ads
These banners are created for users who have already visited the website and perhaps even completed an action—for example, added a product to the cart—but haven't converted. In this case, we also send the finished material to the system, but with a slightly different message—here, the goal is not to familiarize the recipient with the brand and its offerings, but to encourage them to return to the website and complete the transaction.
Dynamic remarketing ads
Here, similarly to responsive ads, users are presented with sales messages whose components are selected by self-learning algorithms. The difference, however, is that in this case, the recipient receives an ad showing the exact products/services they previously viewed on the website.
Lightbox ads
This type of ad takes the form of a banner that, upon mouseover (or fingertip on mobile devices), expands to present a video or a set of images to the user. It can expand to the full width of the screen or to a slightly larger window. This format is designed to maximize audience engagement.
Advantages of display advertising in Google Ads
Display advertising is a useful tool for every marketer investing in Google Ads campaigns . Its biggest advantages include:
Huge reach
Given that the Google network encompasses such a wide range of portals across various industries, there's no better way to advertise your offerings than by taking advantage of the opportunities offered by display advertising. The combined reach of these sites covers over 90% of all global web users, so we can be sure that our product will be among its ideal target audience.
Increasing brand awareness
Text ads targeted to specific keywords are great for people who are already searching for a specific product, but they don't significantly impact brand recognition. Advertising on a website, on the other hand, helps users remember the company name and logo, builds initial associations with the brand, and shapes its image in the eyes of a broad audience.
Multiple targeting options
Display advertising allows for very precise targeting. Targeting options allow us to define demographics, audience interests, and online behavior. Contextual targeting is also available, placing display ads only near thematically relevant content, increasing the chances of campaign success.
Visual appeal
Images attract attention more effectively than text alone, offering much greater potential for impact. Therefore, display campaigns with engaging graphics combined with a carefully selected CTA (call to action) offer a tremendous opportunity to capture the attention of the recipient, who may subsequently become a customer of the advertised brand.
Easy-to-measure effects
We can continuously monitor the results of our display campaign. Google Analytics statistics allow us to see the ratio of impressions to conversions, which gives us a picture of the degree to which the website ad appeals to our target audience. This makes tracking results much easier than, for example, traditional banners on city streets – the measurable results are a huge advantage of display advertising and its advantage over more traditional forms of attention-grabbing.
Frequently asked questions about display advertising
This is online advertising in graphical form. Unlike text ads in search engines, it appears directly on the web pages you browse. It can take the form of traditional banners, pop-ups, interstitial ads, or even graphics displayed on websites like YouTube.
They are most often displayed within the Google Display Network (GDN), which comprises approximately 2 million websites. These include large news portals (like Onet or WP) as well as smaller thematic blogs, lifestyle websites, and video platforms. Banners can appear at the top of the page, in the background, or between paragraphs of articles being read.
Effective graphic design typically consists of a matching background (or photo), a prominent company logo, a catchy slogan, and a call to action (CTA). Promotions or discounts are often eye-catching elements. Banners are submitted in static formats (.jpg, .png, .gif) or as moving and interactive HTML5 ads.
In the Google Ads system we can distinguish, among others:
- Traditional display ads – ready-made graphics in specific sizes.
- Flexible display ads – ads in which the system itself combines the uploaded texts and images to optimally fit them to the available space on the page.
- Remarketing ads (standard and dynamic) – targeted at people who have already visited our website (dynamic ones show exactly the products that the user has previously viewed).
- Lightbox Ads – an engaging format that expands to a larger size when clicked.
Display campaigns offer enormous reach, which is crucial for building broad brand awareness early in the purchase journey. Furthermore, they offer extensive targeting capabilities (e.g., contextual targeting on thematically related pages), are indispensable for remarketing efforts, and their final results are precisely measurable in analytical systems.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- Display advertising is a graphical form of promotion on the Google Display Network, which, thanks to its wide reach, effectively builds brand awareness at various stages of the customer's purchasing path.
- Display ads consist primarily of an image and a small amount of text with a call to action (CTA), and their effectiveness is enhanced by unique graphics that build brand trust.
- Display ads are displayed across Google's extensive network of partners, and thanks to precise targeting based on page topics, audience interests or remarketing, they reach a specifically defined target group.
- Display ads include pre-built graphic banners, flexible AI-optimized formats, static and dynamic remarketing, and interactive lightbox ads, allowing you to precisely tailor your message to your campaign objective.
- The main advantages of display advertising are its huge reach covering 90% of internet users, its effectiveness in building brand awareness through imagery, precise targeting options and full measurability of campaign effects.
