The click-through rate on a local display campaign is somewhere around one tenth of one percent. Put plainly: a thousand people see your banner and one taps it. Every owner who has ever been shown that number has asked the same reasonable question, which is why anyone buys this at all.
The answer is that the click was always a bad measure of a medium whose job is memory, not response.
What display is for
Display does not introduce you and it does not close anyone. What it does is keep you present between the moment someone hears your name and the moment they need you, which in most categories is weeks or months apart.
Think about how it actually works on you. You do not click banners. You do notice, somewhere below conscious thought, which businesses seem to be everywhere. That impression is the product.
Display is the follow-up, not the introduction. Sold on its own it is close to worthless; sold behind something that made people aware of you it is the cheapest reminder you can buy.
Retargeting is the part that earns its keep
The most valuable display you can run is aimed at people who already visited your website. They raised their hand, did not buy, and left — which in most local categories describes the overwhelming majority of your traffic.
Those people are cheap to reach again and far more likely to come back than a stranger. If you run only one display campaign, run this one. It is usually a small fraction of a plan’s budget and disproportionately responsible for its results.
How to judge it honestly
Stop reading the click column. It measures the small group of people who tapped an ad by accident or out of curiosity, and it tells you almost nothing about the far larger group who saw you, remembered you, and searched for you by name a fortnight later.
- Direct and branded search volume — did more people start looking for you by name while display was running?
- View-through conversions — people who saw the ad, did not click, and arrived later under their own steam.
- Total leads against total spend across the whole plan, not channel by channel.
- Viewability — what share of your ads were actually on screen long enough to be seen. Below sixty percent, you are buying inventory nobody looked at.
Where the money gets wasted
Two places, mostly. The first is cheap inventory: enormous impression counts at prices that seem too good, running in places no customer of yours will ever be. Ask for the placement report. If the vendor cannot produce one, that is the answer.
The second is frequency with no ceiling. Showing the same person your banner sixty times in a week does not make them sixty times more likely to buy. It makes them irritated. A sane cap is a handful of exposures a day, and any decent buy lets you set one.
The short version
Display is a supporting instrument. Bought first, it disappoints. Bought behind radio, an event, or anything else that puts your name in circulation, it quietly makes all of it work harder for very little money.
Which is the same thing we would say about most channels, and the reason we start with a plan rather than a product. The order you add things in changes the result more than the things themselves.
If someone has quoted you display on its own, that is worth a second opinion before you sign.
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