Bold Way Media — Display advertising creative | boldwaymedia.com
The numbers a display report is built on: what counts as seen, what counts as a click, and how long credit lasts after each.
Viewability is defined by the MRC standard. A display impression counts as viewable when 50% of the creative's pixels stay on screen for at least 1 continuous second; a video impression needs 50% of the player in view for 2 continuous seconds. Anything shorter is served but not seen.
Click-through rate is the share of impressions that produced a click. Reported display CTR sits around 0.05-0.1%, while search ads commonly run 1-3% — both swing widely by sector and placement, so a report should be read against the range for its own category, not against a universal benchmark.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Conversion windows decide how long a creative gets credit for a result. The defaults are 30 days after a click and 1 day after an impression: a conversion arriving later is not counted in most reports. That asymmetry is why click-through conversions always outnumber view-through ones.
Read together, the three metrics answer different questions. Viewability asks whether the ad could be seen at all, CTR asks whether anyone acted on it immediately, and the windows decide which later results the campaign is still credited with.
The creative limits behind these numbers — the ~150 KB static cap, the 1-5 MB HTML5 band and the 2-second load budget — are on Preparing and Trafficking a Banner Set (/creative-traffic-checklist), and the units they apply to are mapped on Standard Display Ad Sizes (/display-ad-sizes).
Further reading