Attribution
Display advertising
Also called banner traffic.
Display advertising is paid placement of banners and other visual ads on third-party sites or apps. It usually buys attention rather than intent.
How it is measured
Display is measured by impressions served, viewability, clicks, and the conversions linked by a click or a view. Landing visits are tagged with a medium such as display.
Separate click-based from view-based results. A conversion credited because someone was shown an ad and bought later is a weaker claim than one that followed a click.
Worked example
A local credit union buys 400,000 banner impressions over two weeks for a savings promotion. Clicks are 520, a rate of 0.13 percent. Tagged sessions reach 480 and 17 accounts are opened.
The platform also reports 41 view-through conversions. The credit union tests with a no-ads region and sees 12 comparable account openings, so about 29 of the 41 view-through numbers would have happened anyway.
How it differs
Display advertising is the channel. An impression is the unit it is sold in. The channel includes many formats; the impression is the counted unit within them.
Common errors
Judging display by last-click. Ignoring viewability. Counting every view-through conversion. Paying for placements on low-quality sites. Using the same CTR target as search.
In practice
Tag display links with a clear medium. Check the viewable share of impressions. Add a holdout test before treating view-through results as real.