I have been noticing an increasing amount of chatter on blogs and forums about the current state of internet display advertising. True, companies like Right Media are making so-called “remnant display inventory” widely available like never before. But, what is this inventory? Is it lower quality than “non-remnant display inventory”?

Guess what, in most cases it is the same exact inventory.

Remnant inventory gets its name because it is leftover—- after the primary salesforce associated with the property gets its shot. Think of Forbes.com. Forbes has its own sales team selling insertion orders representing impressions on certain pages. When they sell everything that they can sell, at the highest CPM they can get, the rest gets peddled as “remnant”. Does this make it any worse? No. Does it make it any cheaper. Yes.

So, now we have the situation where remnant display inventory is becoming widely available to SMEs for what is really the first time. Should most small businesses start buying it up?

NO.

Here is the reason why most businesses and agencies are not prepared to effectively purchase display inventory, albeit cheap impressions, as part of their marketing campaigns: most of these marketers are ill-equipped to understand the effect this advertising might have on the other elements of their campaign.

Are display impressions likely to lead to clicks? Sometimes. Are those clicks likely to convert? Almost never. In fact, higher click through rates on display advertising are often not accompanied by corresponding conversion rates. Are they still valuable? Yes, absolutely.

Display impressions are for one thing, and one thing only: building brand affinity. The return for the investment made into establishing brand affinity is almost never recognized on the branding campaign itself, but on other tactics concurrently or subsequentially employed. The effects might take time to be felt. But, at the end of the day a successful display campaign will result in lower CPCs on PPC campaigns, higher conversion rates from SEO pages, and the like.

Understanding this relationship, measuring it, and optimizing to enhance it are difficult and over the heads of most marketers. So, should you dabble in display? Sure. Will it work for you? Probably not. Will you know whether it worked or not? Unfortunately, no.

This is something that, even at this point when the tools are becoming readily available to the masses, is probably best left to the professionals. But, one thing is sure, small to medium sized businesses have a ton to gain by this trend of making their marketing miniature versions of the big dogs’ marketing, using all the same types of tactics.