Are Display Ads PPC?

Display ads are PPC (pay-per-click) when the campaign charges you for clicks, and in Google Ads a Display campaign is charged per click unless it is set to viewable CPM or to pay for conversions. So a Google Display campaign can charge you per click, per 1,000 viewable impressions, or, for eligible accounts using Target CPA, per conversion. “Display” describes where the ad appears, while “PPC” describes how you pay for it, so the answer for any particular campaign sits in its bidding and payment settings rather than in the ad itself. This article explains the three billing units, how to check yours and what each one changes.

Display is where the ad shows, PPC is how you pay

Much of the confusion comes from the two terms answering different questions. Pay-per-click is a pricing model: the advertiser is charged when someone clicks the ad, and an ad that is seen but not clicked costs nothing. Display is a placement: an image or responsive ad shown on websites, in apps and on Google properties while people browse, rather than in the search results while they search.

Google describes the Display Network as reaching people across 35 million websites and apps, plus Google-owned properties such as YouTube and Gmail. If you want the background on formats and targeting, the guide to the visual ads Google shows across that network covers it. Because placement and pricing are separate settings, a display ad can be pay-per-click, and a search ad is pay-per-click too, which is why “are display ads PPC?” has a two-part answer.

There is a second source of confusion. Most articles titled “PPC vs display” use “PPC” as shorthand for search ads, the text ads that appear when someone types a query into Google. Read that way, the comparison is really search versus display: ads shown to people who are already looking, against ads shown to people who are browsing something else. That is a useful comparison, but it is about intent and placement, not about the billing model. Display bought outside Google Ads, such as a banner sold directly by a publisher, is also commonly priced per thousand impressions rather than per click, so “display” on its own never tells you how you will be charged.

The three ways a Google Display campaign can charge you

Google’s guide to choosing a bid strategy sorts bidding by goal: conversions, clicks, visibility, and views for video. For a Display campaign, those goals come down to three billing units.

The first row is the pay-per-click one, and it covers the widest range of strategies. Smart Bidding strategies set bids to win conversions, but Google’s pay-for-conversions page shows that paying for conversions is a separate “Pay for” choice under Target CPA, and Google’s Smart Bidding page for Display lists Maximize conversions, Target CPA and Target ROAS as strategies that can pay for clicks. So a Smart Bidding campaign that is not set to pay for conversions is still charged per click. In other words, optimizing for conversions and paying for conversions are two different things. If you want the wider picture of how Google Ads bidding works across campaign types, including the auction itself, that guide goes further.

The second row is the one that is not pay-per-click. Under viewable CPM you set the most you will pay for 1,000 viewable impressions, and you pay for impressions measured as viewable, which under Google’s viewability standard means at least 50% of a display ad on screen for at least one second (30% for very large ads of 242,500 pixels or more). Google says vCPM suits campaigns meant to build awareness, where the message is in the ad and nobody needs to click, such as an event announcement, and that it probably is not right when you want a direct response like a purchase or a form. It is only available in Display Network campaigns, not Search. Google’s Smart Bidding page for Display also lists a beta option in which Target CPA pays for viewable impressions, and says to ask a Google account representative about it.

Two older settings still turn up in guides and in old accounts. Google says Max CPM is no longer available as a bid strategy, and Enhanced CPC stopped being available for Search and Display campaigns in the week of March 31, 2025, with any campaign that had not been moved now running as Manual CPC. If a guide tells you to switch either of them on, it is out of date.

Pay for conversions: the option most guides leave out

The third row is the least known, and it is the one that most changes what “PPC” means. With pay for conversions, a Display campaign using Target CPA charges you for each conversion at your target, and nothing for the impressions or clicks that led to it. Google’s own example is a $10 USD Target CPA and 10 conversions in a month, billed at $100 USD.

It comes with conditions that rule out many small accounts. According to Google’s Help page, the account needs more than 100 conversions in the last 30 days, and 90% of conversions must happen within 7 days of the click, so a business whose customers usually take more than a week to decide cannot use it. It does not work with shared budgets or portfolio bid strategies, and an account can still be ineligible for reasons Google does not disclose. If you set a Target CPA above 200 US dollars, or the equivalent in Canadian dollars, Google shows a warning and charges the higher CPA you set, so its advice is to keep the target below that level or pay for clicks instead.

Budgets also behave differently. Because conversions vary more from day to day than clicks do, Google says a pay-for-conversions campaign can spend more than twice its average daily budget on a given day, while the monthly budget starts at the average daily budget multiplied by 30.4 and is recalculated if you change the daily budget during the month. For a business watching cash flow closely, that day-to-day swing is worth knowing about before switching it on.

How to check how your own display campaign is billed

You can settle the question for your own account in a couple of minutes. In Google Ads, open Campaigns, select the Display campaign and open its settings, then look at the Bidding section. The bid strategy named there tells you whether the campaign is built around clicks, conversions or viewable impressions, and the “Pay for” choice, where the campaign offers one, tells you what you are actually charged for.

Check each Display campaign on its own rather than assuming they match, because a campaign rebuilt or duplicated at some point can carry a different strategy from the rest. It is also worth checking any Performance Max campaign, since Performance Max can place ads on Display inventory as well as Search, YouTube and other Google channels, and its bidding is set at the campaign level just the same. For a Display campaign, the “Pay for” setting is the final word: Clicks means pay-per-click, Conversions means pay for conversions, and Viewable impressions or a viewable CPM strategy means you are paying for impressions, not clicks.

A worked example in Canadian dollars

The figures below are illustrative only, chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow. They are not market rates or results from any account.

Picture a Calgary home-services company with $1,500 a month for display. On click billing at an average of $1.00 per click, that budget buys about 1,500 clicks, and every dollar is tied to a click. On viewable CPM at $4.00 per 1,000 viewable impressions, the same $1,500 buys about 375,000 viewable impressions, and the number of clicks is whatever happens: if 0.1% of those viewable impressions produce a click, the campaign brings 375 clicks, and the “cost per click” in the report works out to $4.00 even though nobody ever bid that amount for a click.

Now suppose the company records about 30 leads a month across all its campaigns. That is well under the 100 conversions in 30 days that pay for conversions requires, so the option is not available to it whatever its Target CPA. Pay for conversions needs a high, steady volume of quick conversions, so a local service business whose customers take more than a week to decide would not qualify on timing either.

What the billing unit changes in your reports

The billing unit decides which numbers are worth watching. Under click billing, an ad that people see and ignore costs you nothing in media, so cost per click, click-through rate and, above all, cost per conversion are the measures that matter. Comparing cost per conversion rather than cost per click is also the fairer way to set display against search, because people who click a display ad while browsing often arrive with less intent than people who searched for the service.

Under viewable CPM, every viewable impression costs money whether anyone clicks or not, so a weak ad costs the same as a strong one and the creative needs more work before launch. Click-through rate and cost per click still appear in the report, but they are only arithmetic after the fact. Google’s viewability columns are the ones to add instead: viewable impressions, average viewable CPM, measurable rate and viewable rate, alongside reach and frequency if the goal is awareness. Judging a vCPM awareness campaign by its cost per click can lead you to cancel a campaign that was doing exactly what it was set up to do.

Mixing the two also distorts account-level figures. If a viewable CPM campaign sits in the same report or budget line as click-billed campaigns, the blended cost per click rises even though no bid changed, so it helps to report impression-billed and click-billed campaigns separately.

Which billing unit suits a small Calgary business

For a small local business, the decision follows the goal. If the campaign exists to produce calls, form submissions or sales and conversion tracking is in place, Google points to conversion-focused Smart Bidding, which on Display is billed per click unless you choose another payment option, and it notes that Maximize clicks can suit a new campaign that lacks conversion data. If the aim is awareness, such as a new location opening or a seasonal event where the ad itself carries the message, viewable CPM is the strategy Google designed for it. Pay for conversions only enters the conversation once the account clears Google’s volume and timing rules.

Display also tends to work differently from search for a small budget. Search reaches people who are already asking for the service, while display reaches people who were doing something else, so with a small budget it usually makes sense to start with search and use display for remarketing to people who have already visited the site. Whichever way you set it up, knowing whether each campaign is billed per click, per viewable impression or per conversion is what makes the reports make sense.

SEO Company To-The-TOP! is a Calgary practice, founded in 2007, where one Google Ads certified expert does the client work with no junior handoffs. If you want a second look at how your display campaigns are set up and billed, the Google Ads management page explains how the work is run. With any provider, To-The-TOP! included, ask for the management fee and the ad spend as two separate numbers before you compare offers, and for a conversation about your account, call SEO Company To-The-TOP! at (403) 308-5949.