Display advertising – what it is, what the move to Demand Gen changes and when display pays off

Definition

Display advertising is paid image and banner advertising online, on websites and in apps, shown while people read, watch or scroll. In Google Ads, the placements are bought in the Google Display Network, and the Display campaign type is being moved into Demand Gen.

What is display advertising?

In concrete terms, it is ad space on other publishers' websites, sold through ad networks. Typical placements are the box beside an article on a news website and the image ad between posts in an app.

In Google Ads, placements are allocated by auction across the websites and apps in the Display Network. You can pay per click or per thousand impressions (CPM); in Display campaigns the latter covers only viewable impressions, known as vCPM (Google). The formats are mainly image ads in fixed sizes and responsive ads, where Google combines your images, headlines and logo to fit the ad space.

How does display advertising differ from search advertising?

A search ad is shown to someone who has just typed in what they are looking for. A display ad is shown to someone who has not asked for anything. Display, in other words, tries to create demand, while search captures the demand that already exists.

Both are usually counted as PPC and are often bought in the same account. Display is not part of SEM, however, which refers to visibility when someone searches. A click from display is rarely as close to a purchase as a click from search, so the same cost per click does not mean the same thing.

Which campaign type suits which situation is covered in our run-through of the campaign types in Google Ads.

Where are display ads shown – and who chooses the placement?

Display ads are shown on websites and in apps that belong to an ad network, and in Google Ads it is Google that chooses the individual placement by default. The Google Display Network can be reached through the Display, Demand Gen and Performance Max campaign types, among others.

According to Google, optimised targeting is switched on by default in both Display and Demand Gen campaigns. The system then looks for conversions beyond the segments you have chosen.

The display buyer, then, mainly decides the goal, budget, audience signals and creative. Placements are managed after the fact, with exclusions and placement reports. In Performance Max, display also shares its budget with Google's other channels, and it is harder to see where the money ends up. Read more about why Performance Max can get expensive.

What changes when Display campaigns move to Demand Gen?

Google is moving the Display campaign type to Demand Gen, and the move is happening in stages. The announcement came in a blog post from Google on 26 May 2026, and Google's help page on the migration sets out the sequence:

• A migration tool is being rolled out in phases from June 2026.
• From a later date, new Display campaigns can only be created in Demand Gen.
• Campaigns that have not been moved, but can be, will later be migrated automatically. The help page gives no fixed date, but the blog post expects the transition to be complete by 2027.

Some things carry over. According to Google, 42 days of history come with you when you use the migration tool, and remarketing lists and Customer Match are supported in Demand Gen. Ads can also still run on the Display Network alone (Google). Other things are not supported, including manual CPC, viewable-impression bidding and bid adjustments. According to Google's help page on frequency caps, frequency caps cannot be set in Demand Gen either.

So go through the account before the move. Campaigns with manual click bids, viewable-impression bidding or frequency caps will need a new form of control. A migrated campaign cannot be turned back into a Display campaign, and the ads have to go through approval again. Move them with the tool in good time, so you have time to compare before and after.

How are display ads targeted – and where does remarketing come in?

Display ads are targeted by context or by person. Context means the page's topic, placements you choose and the words the content is about. Person means interests, demographics and your own data on visitors and customers.

With remarketing, the ad is shown to people who have already visited your website or app. A tag on the website fills a list, and the list is then used as an audience. According to Google, the list needs at least 100 active users in the past 30 days to be usable in Display, Search and YouTube. With little traffic and a low consent rate, it takes time to get there.

Not every advertiser is allowed to use its own audiences. Google's personalised advertising policy prohibits advertiser-curated audiences in the categories Google classes as sensitive, and users under 18 are not shown personalised ads.

How much control do you have over where the ad appears?

Less than in a search campaign. Control lies mainly in exclusions and frequency caps. According to Google, account-level exclusions apply to Display, YouTube and search partners, including in Performance Max. They normally take effect within 12 hours, and you can exclude up to 65,000 placements per account.

A frequency cap sets how many times the same person can see the ad. It can be set in Display campaigns, where, according to Google, only viewable impressions count towards it. After the move to Demand Gen, you need other safeguards against the ad that follows visitors around, such as a shorter time in the list and excluding buyers.

Review the placement report after the first few weeks and add anything that does not suit the brand to the exclusion list. Repeat the review when the campaign moves to a new campaign type.

How do you measure display advertising without fooling yourself?

Measure what the ad actually caused, and work in cost per conversion. Impression figures run high in display, and they say little about the business.

Convert the impression price into a cost per click

You get the cost per click with the formula CPM / (1,000 × CTR). At SEK 30 per thousand impressions and a click-through rate of 0.1 per cent, each click costs SEK 30. At 0.5 per cent, the cost per click falls to SEK 6. With a conversion rate of 2 per cent on your landing page, each enquiry then costs SEK 1,500 in the first case and SEK 300 in the second.

The figures illustrate the method; they are not benchmarks. Set the cost per enquiry against what a customer is worth, just as you do when calculating ROAS. The same logic sits behind the break-even calculator for Google Ads.

Tell clicks, view-through conversions and real effect apart

A view-through conversion is a conversion by someone who saw the ad but did not click. According to Google, these are normally not included in the Conversions column. The exceptions include Demand Gen campaigns that have optimisation for view-through conversions switched on; it is off by default. Check which conversion types and bid strategies a figure is based on before you compare before and after the move.

An attribution model cannot tell you whether the purchase would have happened anyway; it only shares the credit out between channels. That takes a test in which part of the audience sees no ads.

When is consent required for display advertising?

In Sweden, consent is in principle required when the advertising or the measurement relies on cookies or similar technology in the visitor's browser. That applies to personalised display, remarketing lists and tags that measure conversions on your website. The legal text and its exemptions are described under remarketing.

Google also sets requirements of its own. Google's user consent policy applies to users in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, and shortcomings can lead Google to restrict or switch off features such as personalisation, remarketing and conversion measurement (Google Ads Help). The visitor's choice is passed to Google through Consent Mode v2.

According to Google, non-personalised ads are based not on the visitor's past behaviour but on context, such as the page content and approximate location (Google). The same page says these ads still use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for frequency capping and aggregated reporting. So the fact that an ad is not personalised does not make the measurement consent-free.

Check that the consent management platform (CMP) and the tags do what the banner promises, and run the set-up past a lawyer or data protection officer.

When does display advertising pay off – and when do we advise against it?

Display pays off when there is a defined audience to reach, enough budget to be seen by that audience more than once, and a way to measure whether the ads made a difference. Typical uses are reaching past visitors again and building awareness of something nobody is searching for yet.

We advise against display in four situations:

• The search campaign or the tracking is not in place. Start with search ads aimed at the demand that already exists. Without conversion tracking, you cannot see whether display brings in business.
• The traffic is too low for a remarketing list. If the plan relies on remarketing and the list does not reach Google's threshold, there is no audience to advertise to.
• The goal is enquiries within a few weeks on a small budget. Then we recommend search ads on high-intent keywords.
• The website is not convincing. Someone who was not looking for you needs a clearer offer than someone who searched for you. Start with a landing page that matches the ad and measure it separately.

The same order applies when we set up Google Ads: the maths and the search campaign first, display once the tracking shows the search campaign is working.