Google Display Network

For most D2C accounts the Display Network is the checkbox nobody revisits. It runs the retargeting banners that trail a cart-abandoner around the web, and it is the line item that quietly spends on mobile-game placements until an audit catches it.

The network itself is Google’s inventory of sites, apps, and videos, where image and video ads render next to content instead of next to a search query. Google documents its reach at more than two million sites and over 90% of internet users, in its own network overview. That scale is the selling point and the liability in the same sentence.

Three D2C accounts run it as something other than a banner

The clearest evidence in the teardown series is that Display is rarely doing the retargeting job its reputation assumes.

Our Place runs all 192 of its Google video ads through Display Network preview URLs (displayads-formats.googleusercontent.com) and none through YouTube, in the Our Place Google teardown of 703 ads scraped March 2026. The video library concentrates in English-speaking markets, the top being the UK (30 ads), Australia (12), New Zealand (12), the US (8), and Canada (7).

Video is expensive to produce. The account built it for the markets where Meta and YouTube bid against each other for the same view.

MUD\WTR runs 36+ blog articles as paid display ads — ASMR explainers, banana-bread recipes, breathwork tutorials — rather than product pages, in the MUD\WTR Google teardown of 480 ads scraped March 2026. One article, “What Is ASMR, and Why Is It so Popular?”, appears in 19 headline variations — more than the brand’s entire Fix Your Fix campaign on Meta, which ran eight.

That article never mentions mushrooms or coffee. It is top-of-funnel content bought as media.

Graza runs 50 display ads, 39% of its 128-ad Google account and its single largest format, in the Graza Google teardown scraped March 2026. Display is the launch vehicle: the June 2025 EVOO-can introduction alone put 18 display ads behind a new packaging format. Every quarter in the account opens a new format through Display before it reaches Search or Shopping.

None of the three is retargeting. One account distributes video through Display, one distributes editorial, one launches products.

What the low-intent surface costs

A person on the Display Network is reading, watching, or playing. A person on Search typed a query. That difference is the whole reason Display click-through and conversion rates sit below Search for the same catalog — the audience is browsing, not shopping.

The corpus shows brands adapting to that gap rather than fighting it. MUD\WTR’s blog-as-display play treats the low intent as the point: get a wellness-curious reader onto the site cheaply through content, then let Meta retargeting do the selling. The Display click is the top of the funnel, not the conversion.

The 2027 deadline that changes the account structure

Standalone Display is being retired. Google announced in May 2026 that Display Network inventory is moving into Demand Gen campaigns alongside YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, and that the ability to create new standalone Display campaigns ends in January 2027, per its Demand Gen migration notice. Existing campaigns migrate rather than disappear, with performance history carried over.

For a D2C account this reads less as a shutdown than a relabelling. The Display inventory that Our Place, MUD\WTR, and Graza rely on survives inside Demand Gen and inside Performance Max, which already routes Display placements through Google’s automated bidding. What ends is the ability to run Display as its own isolated, hand-controlled campaign — the exact setup the three teardowns above were built on.