Lead generation
12. November 2025 6 min
Banner ads: when do they make sense, and how many impressions does your budget buy? How to assess and calculate it yourself
Banner ads are static or animated ads on websites and social media that you pay to show to people who have not searched for you. See when they fit your goal, and work out how many impressions your budget buys based on your own CPM.
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When do banner ads make sense, and what are they confused with? What decides how many impressions and clicks you get? How many impressions does your budget buy? What else do people ask about banner ads?Banner ads
Banner ads are static or animated ads on websites, in apps and on social media that a business pays to show to people who have not searched for the business or its products.
Also called: Display ads, Banner advertising, Web banners
Banner ads are also called display ads. You usually pay per impression, and the goal is most often to get more people to know your name, not to make them buy straight away.
When do banner ads make sense, and what are they confused with?
Banner ads make sense when your goal is to become known to people who are not looking for you yet. If you want to reach people who are already searching for what you sell, search ads are a better fit.
Banner ads are often confused with search ads and retargeting, because you can buy them on the same ad platforms. But they do three different jobs, and they should be measured on different numbers.
| Ad type | What it is for | Who sees it | What you measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Banner ads | Making your name known to new people | People in your target audience while they read or scroll elsewhere | Impressions, reach and whether more people search for your name afterwards |
| Search ads | Capturing demand that already exists | People who have just searched for what you sell | Clicks, enquiries and sales |
| Retargeting | Reminding past visitors of you | People who have already been on your website | How many come back and buy |
Take a bike shop owner opening a new shop in Aarhus. Nobody searches for her shop’s name yet, so search ads on that name reach almost no one. Banner ads shown to people in the local area, on the other hand, can make the name known before they need a new bike.
This advice does not always apply. If you sell a very niche B2B product to a few buyers, you quickly spend your budget on impressions to people who will never become customers. Here, search ads on the exact keywords usually work better. The same goes if you need sales tomorrow and have no time to build awareness.
What decides how many impressions and clicks you get?
Your number of impressions is your budget divided by your CPM, the cost per thousand impressions. Your click-through rate, the share of impressions that lead to a click, decides how many of those impressions end up as visits to your landing page.
You control the budget yourself. You do not set the CPM: it depends on how many advertisers want to show ads to the same audience in the same placements. The placements are on websites and in apps that have made them available through an ad network, such as Google’s, or on social media.
The narrower the audience, the fewer placements advertisers compete for, and the higher the CPM usually gets. If the bike shop owner only shows her banner to people within a few kilometres of the shop, she gets fewer impressions for her money than if she showed it nationwide. In return, the right people see it.
The click-through rate on banner ads is normally low, because people are busy doing something else. That makes clicks a poor measure on their own. A banner can have worked even if nobody clicked: people remember the name and find the shop later.
How many impressions does your budget buy?
Impressions = budget / CPM x 1,000. With a budget of DKK 6,000 and a CPM of DKK 50, you get 120,000 impressions. But you need to use the CPM from your own ad platform, not from an example.
The numbers in the example are made up. The bike shop owner needs to enter her own monthly budget and the CPM her ad platform or a previous campaign shows for the audience she wants to reach. If she has not run campaigns before, most platforms give an estimate when you set up the campaign.
How many impressions does your budget buy?
Enter your budget, your CPM and your click-through rate to see roughly how many impressions and clicks your budget covers.
The total budget for the period you are calculating, for example a month.
This is called CPM. Find it in a previous campaign or in the platform's estimate for your audience.
This is called the click-through rate. Use the figure from a previous campaign. If you do not know it, leave the starting value.
Impressions for your budget
120,000 impressions
an estimate based on your own numbers, not a measurement
- Expected clicks360 clicks
- What each click costs you16.67 kr.
- Impressions per day over 30 days4,000 impressions
- Find your CPM and click-through rate in your ad platform or a previous campaign, and enter them instead of the starting values.
- Compare the number of impressions with how many people are in your audience. If there are 20,000 people in your audience and 120,000 impressions, each person sees your banner six times on average.
- Use the cost per click as a guide, not a verdict. Banner ads are mainly there to make you known, so do not compare the cost per click directly with search ads.
- Before you start the campaign, decide what you will measure afterwards: reach, searches for your name and visits from the area.
What else do people ask about banner ads?
How do I measure the effect of banner ads when people do not click?
What is the difference between static and animated banners?
Where will my banners be shown?
What is banner blindness, and what can I do about it?
Should I choose banner ads or search ads?
What to remember about banner ads
Banner ads buy you awareness among new people, not direct sales, so judge them on relevant impressions and not only on clicks.
Your number of impressions is your budget divided by your CPM, multiplied by 1,000, and a narrow audience usually means a higher CPM.
A calculation of impressions and clicks is an estimate that only holds if you use the CPM and click-through rate from your own ad platform or previous campaigns.
If people are already searching for what you sell, search ads are a better fit than banner ads.
Review of your advertising goals
See whether banner ads or search ads fit your goal
Enter your name, your website and your email. We will look at your website and your situation and send you our assessment of where your ad budget does the most good.
- Whether your goal requires awareness among new people or reaching people who are already searching
- Which audience and area your banner ads should be shown to
- Which numbers to watch so you can see whether the campaign worked
You will hear from us within five working days. No strings attached, and what you do with it is up to you.
Would you rather talk it over a cup of coffee?
