Display Ads Best Practices 2025

Global Digital Advertising campaigns, including banner ads, display ads, and video ads expenses, will reach up to $696 billion by 2024, according to Statista reports. The average Google display ads campaign CTR rates increased to 1.08% in 2022 from the previous year’s 0.84%. Whenever you think about display ads, you can only imagine display banners. However, after 2023, display ad formats expanded to other types, such as animated media or inbuilt video.

So, what are display ads? What are the best display ad practices in 2024? Let’s find out.

What are display ads?

Display ads, usually known as banner ads, are a visual form of online advertising with various formats, like static or dynamic ads. These are banners, video ads, images, or animated gifs on websites, social media, or apps to drive traffic to brands, products, or services. Ideally, it contains an interactive display encouraging users to engage with the ads.

Why Should You Use Display Ads?

With proper display ad creatives, ad placements, and targeting, these ads will be very cost-effective to bring sales.

Display ads allow you to:

Increase brand awareness and reach a large audience
Target specific demographics and interests
Increase conversion rates
Easily track and monitor campaign stats

Display Advertising Agency

Brill Media has collectively spent over $32M in display advertising networks to deliver targeted goals, business growth, increased revenue, and sales.

Types Of Display Ads

An excellent display ad design creative and the ad format is very impactful when creating a display ad campaign. Different types of display ads are available depending on the type of product you want to sell, the targeted audience, or the goal you want to achieve.

Banner Ads: These are square and rectangular ads on the website’s top, bottom, and sides of a page or mobile app. Usually, it comes in static images, animated gifs, text, interactive, call-to-action buttons, or video ad formats.
Responsive Display Ads: These are dynamic text ads displayed based on the user’s device screen size, and they can serve different text variations of headlines and descriptions.
Interstitial Ads: This is a full-screen pop-up ad that appears between contents or when users are redirected to another page. Users forcefully need to interact with the ad to proceed further by clicking on the ad or closing it. These ads can be text, images, videos, or rich media.
Native Ads: These text ads are designed to blend with the website/app content thoroughly. It makes the user experience less disruptive by making the ad content visually the same as the website content displayed.
Rich Media Ads: Unlike static display ads, rich media ads include an element of interaction, like video, animation, flash media, or audio, whenever the user’s mouse cursor hovers over the ad.
Video Ads: These display ads are videos displayed at the bottom of the page or in the bottom left or right corner. Users need to watch the video to continue browsing the website or app.
Pop-up Ads: These ads are annoying, opening in a new tab or window whenever a user clicks anything on the page.

Best Practices for Display advertising

Nowadays, brands have access to various advertising platforms and marketing methods, including SEO, media buying, email marketing, etc., so display ads are often obsolete. However, digital display ads effectively drive sales, increase revenue, and grow your business.

With 10+ years of experience, Brill Media managed hundreds of display ad campaigns throughout various ad platforms. So here are a few best practices for display ads to increase clicks when creating display ads.

1. High Quality Creatives That Stand Out

Use high-quality images to attract the audience and make them click it. It’s not only the images; some appealing text is also needed to deliver a strong message about the ads. This a great way to A/B testing, to check which creatives are getting the most attention and cost-effective.

You can use the programmatic advertising method to deliver the same set of ad copy to different segments of audiences. For example, if you want to sell clothing, a product scenario should be a person wearing your product, and it elevates their social status confidently.

2. Design Optimized Landing Pages

Create display ad landing pages that match your brand colors and fonts and follow brand guidelines. An attention-grabbing display ad clicks to your landing page transformation should be smooth and keep the user experience active. A typical landing page leads to no attention, less visibility, high bounce rates, and fewer engagements, so make sure to follow the below guidelines to make the most optimized landing pages:

The design should match brand colors and typography
Appealing CTA (Call to Action)
Responsive landing page design
Easy to submit forms
Easy to navigate

3. Make a Bigger CTA Button

Call to Action refers to you asking users to respond to it. So, your audience should notice the CTA button immediately. Design a noticeably larger CTA button and use vibrant or dark colors that stand out completely.

You can use “Learn More” or “Try Out” as energetic verbs on the CTA button. It will be best to use such energetic verbs rather than the “Subscribe” or “Buy Now” buttons if you only sell services.

4. Understand Display Ad Sizing

Leverage how Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) or static image ads are rendered; the campaign creation and launch process will be easy, depending on that.

As per Google, image ads are shown as uploaded, which means they won’t adopt different ad slots that need to be more responsive. Google’s machine learning features control RSAs, automatically adopting different ad slots to ensure the best results for responsive devices.

5. Use Effective Typography

If your brand typography isn’t perfect, it doesn’t matter how visually appealing images are used in display ads. Don’t make the display ads overcrowded with too much text information, keep it straightforward.

Additionally, you can keep some white spaces to make it more neat and clean. Your brand’s font sets a tone for your visuals and content more clickable.

6. Keep It Simple Design

The famous KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) rule also applies to display ads. When scrolling the web, users only glance at your ads for a few seconds, and that’s when you should consider spreading your brand awareness.

The more you clutter the message, the less people remember the core message. Make simple backgrounds and focus only on the product. Ad copy should include a few words, and CTA should be clear and visible.

So, in short, to create engaging display ads, below are the core things you should keep in mind:

Use high-quality graphics, images, videos
Optimize landing page for all devices
Make the CTA button more visible
Keep brand typography and colors
Show products clearly and with less text
Add white space and the brand logo
Use responsive display ads
Test animated banners and static banners
Use unique and fun ad copy
Test, Test, Test

So you don’t need to learn rocket science to start creating effective display ads, but you can definitely improve your ad spending by using the above best practices for display ads.

Display Ads Best Practices

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