Measuring Display Ad Performance in 2025

For years, display ad performance has been measured using a familiar and deceptively simple trio of metrics:

• Impressions
• Cost per mille (CPM)
• Click-through rate (CTR)

But the biggest flaw in this system is just as simple: most of the data is gathered after your campaign is live—meaning you're optimizing based on results you’ve already paid for. And too often, you're paying for ads that weren’t even truly seen.

A key contributor to this inefficiency is how "impressions" are defined. Most DSPs and platforms consider an ad "viewable" if 50% of its pixels appear on screen for at least one second. That’s it. Whether a user actually notices the ad, let alone processes it, is another story entirely.

As a result, a large percentage of display ads are technically served but functionally invisible—leading to unnecessary spend and reduced performance. You're buying exposure, but not necessarily attention.

In an era where attention is emerging as a core media currency, it’s time to ask harder questions:
Are your display ads even breaking through? And if not—how can you design for attention before your campaign goes live?

Let’s take a closer look at how display ads are performing today—and how predictive eye-tracking is helping advertisers get ahead of the curve.

How Effective Are Display Ads?

Display advertising remains a widely used tool to build awareness, drive traffic, and support conversions. So yes—display ads can be effective. But how well they work depends less on whether they’re served, and more on whether they’re actually seen, cognitively processed, and engaged with.

The industry’s go-tometric, click-through rate (CTR), paints a sobering picture. According to recent data from both Store Growers (2025) and WordStream (2023), the average CTR for display ads is just 0.46%. That means more than 99.5% of impressions don’t result in a click.

Compare that to 1994, when the very first banner ad for AT&T on HotWired.com, the online version of Wired magazine, achieved a 44% CTR.

Would you have clicked?

Those days are long gone.

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Today, display advertising is a volume game: more impressions, more formats,more platforms. But with shrinking attention spans and rising competition foreyeballs, just being seen is harder than ever. This raises a more fundamental question:

Are your displayads actually being noticed—or just technically served?

Because if you're measuring success purely by delivery metrics like impressions and CTR, you're missing the full picture. In a crowded media landscape, attention—not just reach—is what drives results.

The Difference Between Attentive Reach and Low-Cost Reach

Over the years, the promise of low-cost, high-volume reach through programmatic display advertising has led to a system that’s grown increasingly complex—and often inefficient. According to a study by ISBA and PwC, only 51% of advertiser spend makes it through to the publisher, with a significant portion lost in the programmatic supply chain due to fees, intermediaries, and a lack of transparency.

What happened?

In the race to drive down CPMs, the focus shifted from meaningful exposure to sheer volume. This “low-cost impression” mindset deprioritized attention and attribution—leading to campaigns optimized for delivery, not actual impact. The result: massive volumes of impressions, but limited visibility into whether they’re seen, processed, or delivering real value. Not because of bad actors, but because the system wasn't built for attention—it was built for reach.

That’s why morea dvertisers are starting to rethink the model. Instead of optimizing purely for cost, they’re shifting toward attentive reach: ensuring that what’s paid for has a fair chance of being seen, understood, and remembered.

‍The Attention Economy

Instead of blindly focusing on CPM and CTR, display advertisers should switch from a ‘low-cost reach’ to an ‘attentive reach’ model. The World Advertising Research Center (WARC) noticed how measuring attention to ads can bring more fairness and transparency and how it’s helping brands and publishers to improve ROI. They developed a view on responding to the “battle for consumer attention” by incorporating an Attention Strategy.

Applying an attention strategy, shifting to an attentive reach model, international media-and advertising agencies like Dentsu picked up on this idea and are trying to make a change in media trading in what they dub the ‘Attention Economy’. 

Attention is becoming the new media currency. It reflects the real value of your impressions—because what good is a view if it goes unnoticed? Advertisers who prioritize attention aren't just optimizing for visibility; they’re creating more space for real emotional engagement.

So if attention is thenew benchmark, what makes a display ad actually work in 2025?

What makes a successful display ad in 2025?

Today, creating effective display ads is no longer just about producing high-quality creatives. With digital environments more saturated than ever, success depends on whether your ad captures visual attention in the very first split second.

Recent studies show that campaigns optimized for attention consistently outperform traditional CPM/CTR-driven approaches—delivering, on average, +41% in upper-funnel metrics like brand recall, and +55% in lower-funnel outcomes like conversions (Adelaide, 2025).

Targeting still matters, of course. But in a landscape where every brand can reach the rightaudience, creative clarity and visual salience are what truly setwinning campaigns apart. If your message doesn’t land within seconds, you’repaying for impressions that don’t register.

To increase thechances of cutting through, many advertisers invest in formats built to captureattention:

• Rich media to drive interaction and active    processing
• Video, which consistently outperforms static in both CTR and dwell time
• Dynamic creatives that adapt in real time to context and audience

But format alone isn’t enough. Success lies in how your ad is visually structured—to breakt hrough the noise, guide the eye, and deliver your message effortlessly. When done right, a display ad isn’t just seen—it’s processed, understood, and remembered.

If attention is the foundation of performance, then the next question is: how do you ensure your creatives are actually built to earn it? This is where AI-powered attention tools enterthe picture.

New Tech, Smarter Pre-Testing

In the AI era, one ofthe smartest questions a media strategist can ask is:

‍“How can I improve display ad performance before it goes live?”

Today’s generation of AI-powered visual attention tools can help answer that. These tools analyze how likely an ad is to be noticed—and where visual attention will intuitively go—without relying on traditional eye-tracking studies. Some of them reach predictive accuracy levels of over 90% compared to real-life eye-tracking, and deliver results instantly.

One of the biggest challenges in evaluating display ad performance is timing: insights typically come after the campaign has launched. But by pre-testing your creatives for attention, you can identify whether an ad is likely to break through—or be ignored. And if it is seen, which elements are most visually dominant and attention-worthy?

Brainsight’s AI reaches up to 94% accuracy on instant attention compared to traditional eye-tracking studies—instantly and without requiring lab setups or human participants (see xample video here).

Unlike most visual attention tools, Brainsight features a proprietary benchmarking model, built on a dataset of over 10,000+ tested ads across formats (display, social, DOOH), contexts, and verticals. This allows each creative to be scored within the context of its medium and industry, producing a reliable attention score before media spend is deployed.

The impact of this attention-based pre-testing approach has been validated in a study conducted during Brainsight’s time as part of Braingineers, a leading neuromarketing research agency. In controlled A/B tests, ad creatives that scored 65 or higher on Brainsight’s attention index outperformed lower-scoring versions with a +59%increase in click-through rate.

This doesn’t mean every campaign will see those results—but it confirms a key truth and the study's main hypothesis:

“What isn't seen, won't be clicked.

The study highlights how attention scoring helps reduce media waste by filtering out low-visibility creatives before launch. Rather than replacing creative strategy, Brainsight acts as a diagnostic layer—ensuring your most important messages have the chance to be seen, understood, and acted on.

But this also reveals something deeper: a gap in how we measure effectiveness. Somewhere between CPM (what you paid for) and CTR (what got clicked)—or, in the case of video, between reach and view-through rate—there’s a missing metric. A datapoint that tells you whether your creative even stood a chance.

As attention becomes the new currency in media planning, that gap is being filled by predictive tools like Brainsight, that forecast whether your ad will actually be seen and cognitively processed—before any engagement occurs. We could call it a PAM-score -Predictive Attention Metric- or as an innovator, why not owning it altogether with a "BAS-Score" (Brainsight Attention Score): 

“BAS is the missing metric between CPM and CTR—designed to kill ad waste before your budget does.”

‍How Brainsight and Predictive Eye-Tracking Tools work

Most modern AI pre-testing tools follow a straightforward process: you upload your ad creative—whether it's a display banner, social asset, or video still —select the intended format or channel, and receive instant predictions on how your ad is likely to perform in terms of visual attention— assuming the vieweris already looking at the ad.

Core outputs usually include:

• A heatmap indicating which parts of the creative are most likely to attract attention
• ‍Clarity feedback to help identify visual clutter or friction
• Tools to define key visual elements (like CTAs, logos, or offers) to assess whether they’re drawing attention effectively

Where predictive eye-tracking tools truly differentiate is in what they offer beyond these basics — and in the approach they take about attention.

Brainsight starts the attention journey asking: Will this ad be seen at all? Its proprietary in-context benchmark for attention is the first key insight, after which you can deep-dive into the other pretesting-insights that follow, like Peekthroughs, Gaze plots, and GenAI analyses.

Apart from this, other features are included, like platform-agnostic video-heatmaps with brand tracking options (object- and text detection), API access to enable automatedt esting and creative optimization across campaigns and channels, and more. These capabilities give advertisers the ability to fine-tune their creative early—before launch, and before media spend—helping ensure the right message is seen, clearly and quickly.

‍What is the average ROI of AI pre-testing display ads? 

The short answer: it depends.

Pre-testing for predictive attention helps boost your campaign’s visual clarity and stopping power—putting your audience right at the doorstep of your funnel. What happens next depends on the creative: once you’ve secured attention, it’s the content that drives engagement—or triggers drop-off.

By testing for attention upfront, you capture and optimize the first three seconds of instinctive viewing behaviour. It becomes the gateway to ad performance: ensuring your ad is noticed, and that the right elements are seen immediately.

Predictive attention doesn’t replace creative—it clears the path for it.

Once your ad is noticed and its key elements—like your brand, CTA, or core message—are captured, the audience will decide: engage, or move on. From that point, performance is driven by content and creative, supported by your usual optimization processes and paid data.

By eliminating ad waste early—due to weak saliency or unclear messaging—you free up budget, time, and attention to focus on the creatives that actually deserve it. Rather than spreading resources thin, you're able to double down on the ad variations with real potential to connect—because the low-impact ones have already been filtered out.

A CRO pretesting & insights tool like Brainsight starts at just €199 per month (billed annually), with generous image upload capacity—ideal for pretesting display ads at scale.

Your ROI isn’t just about performance after launch—it’s about making smarter creative decisions before it. That’s where the real value lies.

Curious how this could work for your next campaign? We’d love to show you how Brainsight fits into your process—and what kind of results you can expect.