Google Display Ads: When They Work and How to Set Them Up

Google Display ads for Indian businesses: the 2026 move into Demand Gen, targeting, ad specs, placement exclusions and how to measure results honestly.

Published 27 August 2026 by Web Hippo in Paid Ads

Google Display ads are the image and video ads you see on news sites, blogs, apps and Gmail, bought through Google Ads and served on the Google Display Network (GDN). They are cheap to show and easy to waste. A Pune D2C brand can remind thousands of past site visitors about an abandoned cart for a few hundred rupees a day, and it can just as easily pour the same money into stray taps from a free ludo game.

This guide covers what display advertising is good for in India, what changed in 2026 when Google began moving Display campaigns into Demand Gen, how to set up targeting and responsive display ads, the placement exclusions we apply to every account, and how to read view-through conversions without fooling yourself.

What Google Display Ads Are and Where They Show

Display ads are visual ads: a banner, an image with a headline, or a short video. The Google Display Network is the pool of partner websites and apps that sell ad space through Google, and Google describes it as more than 2 million sites and apps. Depending on the campaign type, the same ads can also appear on Google's own surfaces such as YouTube, Gmail and Discover.

The big difference from Search is intent. A Search ad reaches someone typing "dentist near Kukatpally". A display ad reaches someone reading cricket scores who might need a dentist one day. Expect far lower click-through rates, cheaper clicks and weaker intent per click. If CPM, CPC and CTR are unfamiliar, our guide to CPC, CPM and CTR explains each one.

The main display ad formats

Responsive display ads (RDAs): you upload headlines, descriptions, images and logos, and Google assembles them to fit each ad slot. This is the default for most advertisers.
Uploaded image ads: fixed-size banners you design yourself, such as 300×250 or 728×90. More control, more design work.
HTML5 ads: animated banners. Inside Demand Gen, Google lists these as coming soon, planned for late 2026.
Feed-based ads: product images pulled from your Merchant Center feed, mainly for e-commerce remarketing.

The 2026 Change: Display Campaigns Are Moving Into Demand Gen

In May 2026, Google announced that standalone Display campaigns would get a new home in Demand Gen. Demand Gen is Google's campaign type for visual ads across YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps (in beta), and it now includes the GDN. Most guides ranking for this topic still describe the old setup, so here is what Google's help page says about timing:

June 2026: a phased rollout of a migration tool that moves existing Display campaigns into Demand Gen.
"Coming later": new Display campaigns can only be created within Demand Gen. Existing ones stay editable until migrated.
"Coming later": remaining eligible Display campaigns are migrated automatically, with no action from you.
Completion: Google's blog says it expects the transition to finish by 2027.

Display-only buying survives. Demand Gen has channel controls at the ad group level, so you can keep an ad group on the GDN alone, and Google recommends exactly that when migrating so your settings carry over cleanly.

What you lose and what you gain

Google says advertisers adding the GDN to Demand Gen see a 9.5% increase in ROI on average. That is Google's own average across its advertisers, so treat it as a reason to test, not a forecast for your account.

When Display Advertising Makes Sense in India

In the accounts we audit, display earns its money in a few specific jobs and loses it almost everywhere else.

Display remarketing. Showing ads to people who already visited your site. A Kukatpally dental clinic can remind visitors of its implants page for weeks after they leave. This is the most reliable use by a distance.
E-commerce with a product feed. Showing the exact products someone viewed, with the price in rupees, to bring back abandoned carts.
B2B account targeting. A Hyderabad SaaS company can build custom segments of people who search for competitor names or industry terms, add its CRM list through Customer Match, and keep its brand in front of a small, known set of buyers during a long sales cycle.
Local or niche awareness ahead of a launch, admissions season or festive sale, where you judge success on reach and later branded searches, not on direct leads.

Uploading customer lists for Customer Match means processing personal data, so check your consent records first. Our DPDP checklist for marketers covers what the law expects.

When display wastes money

Cold prospecting on a small budget with a lead goal. Automated bidding needs conversion data. Without it, Google finds the cheapest clicks, which are rarely your customers.
Junk placements. Low-quality sites built mainly to show ads, and pages unrelated to your business.
Mobile app placements. Games and utility apps where ads sit next to buttons. In our experience these produce high click-through rates and almost no engaged visits: accidental taps, paid for in full.
Crediting display for sales it did not cause, by counting view-through conversions as if they were clicks. More on that below.

Display vs Demand Gen vs Performance Max: Which to Use

With Display folding into Demand Gen, the real choice in 2026 is between a GDN-only Demand Gen ad group, a multi-channel Demand Gen campaign, and Performance Max. This is how we decide:

The 30-conversion line is a rule of thumb. Google's own Demand Gen migration tips suggest merging ad groups with fewer than about 30 conversions in 30 days. Performance Max has its own traps, especially brand traffic, which our Performance Max guide covers in detail.

How to Set Up a Display Campaign in 2026

Menu names in Google Ads change often. These steps follow Google Ads Help as of September 2026:

1. Fix conversion tracking first. Import or set up the conversions that matter (enquiries, purchases, booked calls) and check they fire. Our GA4 and attribution guide shows how to verify them.
2. Set account-level exclusions using the checklist below, before any money is spent.
3. Create a Demand Gen campaign, choose your goal, budget and bid strategy.
4. In each ad group, set channel controls. Choose GDN only if you want a classic display campaign, or add YouTube, Discover and Gmail.
5. Add audiences or content targeting, one theme per ad group.
6. Build responsive display ads with the full set of image sizes and a logo, which Demand Gen requires.
7. Leave it alone for a week or two, then check the placement report ("Where ads showed").

Targeting Options Explained

Audiences: who sees the ad

Your data: website visitors (remarketing lists), app users and Customer Match lists.
Custom segments: people who searched for certain terms on Google or browse certain kinds of sites. Useful for B2B and niche products.
Google's segments: in-market, interests and demographics. Broad, and best used as a starting signal.
Lookalike segments (Demand Gen only): people similar to a seed list you provide.

Content: where the ad shows

Content targeting uses topics, specific placements (a named site, app or YouTube channel) and display keywords. One detail catches people out: Google now shows ads on content that matches any of the topics, placements or keywords you add, not all of them. Adding more content targets widens reach. It does not narrow it.

Optimised targeting

Optimised targeting lets Google go beyond your chosen audiences to find people it thinks will convert, using your targets as signals. It can help prospecting campaigns with plenty of conversion data. For remarketing, we switch it off wherever the setting appears, because the whole point is to reach people who already know you.

Responsive Display Ad Specs

Source: Google's responsive display ads specs page. Google's other pages add detail. Its RDA best-practices page recommends square images at 1200×1200, lists optional vertical 9:16 images and caps each image at 5,120 KB. Demand Gen image specs add vertical 4:5 (960×1200) and 9:16 (1080×1920), allow 40-character headlines and cap logos at 150 KB.

Placement Exclusion Checklist

This is the list we run through before launching any display spend. Exclusions set at the account level apply to Display, Demand Gen and Performance Max, and they override campaign and ad group settings. You can hold up to 65,000 placement exclusions per account.

☐ Set exclusions at account level under Content suitability in the Tools menu. Demand Gen only honours content suitability exclusions at this level.
☐ Exclude the app categories you do not want, such as games, if they are irrelevant to your buyer. The old one-line trick ("GMob mobile app non-interstitial") no longer exists; Google replaced it with device targeting, app category exclusions and individual app exclusions.
☐ Choose your inventory type and excluded content, such as sensitive topics, according to your category. Healthcare and finance brands should be stricter.
☐ Enter domains without "www." so the exclusion also covers subdomains and subpages. Country domains (.com, .in) need separate entries.
☐ Check the placement report every week for the first month. Exclude placements with clicks but no engaged sessions in GA4.
☐ Flag suspicious click-through rates. A placement with a CTR many times your average and near-zero time on site is usually accidental taps, not interest.
☐ Keep a shared exclusion list and reuse it across client or brand accounts rather than starting from zero.

Bidding and Budget for Display

GDN in Demand Gen supports Maximise conversions, Target CPA, Maximise conversion value, Target ROAS, Maximise clicks and Target CPC. Manual CPC and viewable CPM are gone. If your campaign has conversion history, start with Maximise conversions or Target CPA. If it is new with no data, Maximise clicks with a Target CPC cap is a reasonable bridge for a few weeks. Google advises keeping bid changes within 15% and waiting a week between them.

Remarketing budgets are usually smaller than people expect. Here is an illustrative calculation for that Kukatpally clinic:

If you give that campaign ₹15,000 a month, the extra money has to go somewhere. It goes into showing the same people ads far too often, or, with optimised targeting on, into people who never visited your site. Size remarketing budgets from the audience, not from what is left over.

Measuring Display: View-Through vs Click-Through Conversions

A click-through conversion is someone who clicked your ad and then converted. A view-through conversion is someone who saw the ad, did not click, and converted later within the window you set. For Display Network ads, the last impression before the conversion gets the credit.

In most campaign types, view-through conversions are for reporting only. They appear in the "View-through conversions" and "All conversions" columns, not in "Conversions".
Google lists Demand Gen as an exception, alongside App campaigns and Performance Max for store goals. After migrating, check which columns your reported conversions come from.
View-throughs cannot be reported from browsers that block cross-site cookies, so the number is incomplete as well as generous.

Our view: treat view-throughs as a hint that display is reaching the right people, never as revenue. Someone who saw a banner and later searched your brand may have bought anyway. For a fairer answer, run Google's Conversion Lift (supported for GDN in Demand Gen) if you qualify, or pause display in one city for three weeks and compare branded searches and enquiries against a similar city that kept running.

Display rewards patience and punishes loose settings. If you want a second pair of eyes on placements, exclusions or the Demand Gen migration, our Google Ads management team can audit your account and tell you where the display budget is actually going.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last checked September 2026. Google is still rolling out the Display to Demand Gen migration, so settings, dates and supported features may change. Check Google Ads Help before you build.