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Head of Marketing - Earned Media
Marketing | Digital Marketing
Increasing CTR in DV360 isn’t about hacks or shortcuts. It’s...
By Narender Singh
Feb 16, 2026 | 5 Minutes | 
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Getting people to click on your ads? That the whole game, isn't it? You've spent hours setting up your Display & Video 360 campaign, mapped out your targeting, uploaded your creative assets. Then you check back three days later and your CTR is hovering around 0.07%. Ouch.
Here the thing about increasing CTR in DV360: there no silver bullet. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What works is a combination of smart targeting, creative that doesn't look like every other ad out there and constant tweaking based on what the data actually shows you. Not what you think it shows you.
Let start with the obvious that too many advertisers forget. People don't click display ads because they're bored and looking for something to do. They click because something interrupted their scroll at exactly the right moment with exactly the right message.
That timing piece? That programmatic whole value proposition. Search ads have intent handed to them on a silver platter. With display, you're essentially predicting when someone might care about what you're selling. DV360 gives you the tools to make educated guesses, but they're still guesses.
Think about it. A luxury watch ad shown to someone comparison shopping for budget airlines isn't going to increase CTR in DV360 no matter how gorgeous your creative is. Show that same ad to someone deep in articles about executive presence and career advancement? Different story entirely.
Most campaigns live or die right here. Your targeting needs to be specific enough to reach people who actually care, but not so narrow that you're showing ads to 47 people nationwide.
Layer your audiences. Don't pick between demographics or interests. Use both. Stack them. If you're pushing premium home gym equipment, targeting "fitness enthusiasts" alone is lazy. Add household income data, recent search behavior around home workouts, contextual signals from health and wellness site visits. Now you're getting somewhere.
DV360 lets you pull from multiple audience sources at once. Your first-party CRM data, third-party segments you're paying for, Google affinity audiences. The campaigns that actually perform use all three. They catch people at different points in their journey.
Custom intent audiences deserve your attention. These are people actively searching for things related to your product right now. Someone googling "best rowing machine for home use" is infinitely more likely to click than someone who just happens to be male, 35-44, interested in fitness. Target that intent.
Real talk: most display ads are terrible. They scream "advertisement" from a mile away and people have trained themselves to scroll right past. Your creative needs to stop that scroll. You've got maybe two seconds before they're gone.
Your value prop needs to be instantly clear. Can someone who half-paying-attention understand what you're offering and why it matters? If not, start over.
Dynamic creative optimization in DV360 is honestly one of the platform best features. You can test headlines, images, CTAs, even color schemes and the system automatically serves the winners to different audience segments. This isn't some nice-to-have feature. It how you systematically improve performance without rebuilding campaigns every week.
Ad sizes matter more than people think. Sure, a 300x250 banner is standard, but larger formats like 728x90 leaderboards or 300x600 half-page units generally drive better engagement. Test your way into what works for your specific audience and placements.
How you bid changes everything. Not just what you pay, but who sees your ads and when. If you want to increase CTR in DV360, your bidding strategy needs to align with getting in front of engaged users, not just cheap impressions.
Start with viewable CPM if you're not sure where to begin. At least you're only paying when your ad is actually viewable, not buried at the bottom of a page no one scrolls to. But once you have decent conversion data, switch to Target CPA or Maximize Conversions. Let the machine learning do what it good at.
Frequency capping is non-negotiable. Showing someone the same ad 15 times doesn't increase CTR. It pisses them off. Cap it at 3-5 impressions per week and use sequential messaging if you need multiple touchpoints. Tell a story. Don't just hammer the same message repeatedly.
Context drives performance more than most advertisers realize. An ad for enterprise software performs completely differently on TechCrunch versus TMZ, even if the demographic profile technically matches. Someone reading about cloud infrastructure is in a different headspace than someone reading celebrity gossip.
DV360 contextual targeting lets you align ads with relevant content. Use it. Someone mid-article about digital transformation is way more receptive to your B2B pitch than someone watching fail videos on YouTube.
Equally important: exclude the garbage. Check your placement reports weekly and block sites with tons of impressions but zero engagement. These placements eat your budget without driving results. YouTube channels, sketchy mobile apps, content farm websites. Block them ruthlessly.
When you show ads isn't some minor detail. B2B software ads running at 2 AM on Saturday? Probably not your best use of budget. Retail promotions might crush it on Wednesday evenings when people are browsing from their couch.
DV360 dayparting features let you concentrate spend during peak performance windows. Start broad, collect data for a couple weeks, then look for patterns in your hourly performance. You might find your audience is most engaged during lunch breaks or after 9 PM. Shift your budget accordingly.
Seasonal timing matters too, though this should be obvious. People click retail ads more during Q4. B2B picks up at the start of fiscal quarters. Travel spikes when people are planning vacations. Work with these patterns instead of against them.
Mobile, desktop and tablet users are different animals. They behave differently, they respond to different creative approaches and they convert at different rates. Check your device-level performance religiously.
Mobile creative needs to be built for mobile, not just shrunk down from desktop specs. Text large enough to read without zooming. Buttons big enough to tap accurately. Load times under two seconds or people bounce. Mobile users also respond better to video and rich media formats, probably because they're already in a content consumption mindset.
Connected TV and audio are growing fast in DV360. The engagement rates can be significantly higher than display. The trick is matching format to where your audience actually spends time.
The campaigns that consistently increase CTR in DV360 aren't lucky. They test relentlessly and actually learn from the results instead of just collecting data.
A/B test properly. One variable at a time so you know what actually making a difference. Changed the headline and the image simultaneously? Great, now you have no idea which one mattered. Run disciplined experiments with proper sample sizes before declaring winners.
But here the thing everyone forgets: CTR alone doesn't mean much. A high click-through rate from people who immediately bounce is worthless. Monitor the whole funnel. Viewability, engagement time, conversion rate, actual ROAS. Sometimes a slightly lower CTR with higher quality traffic beats high CTR from tire-kickers every single time.
Improving CTR in DV360 is ongoing work. The digital advertising landscape shifts constantly. New formats emerge, audience behaviors change, competitors adjust their strategies. What crushes it this quarter might need tweaking next quarter.
Start with the fundamentals: tight audience targeting, creative that breaks through, smart bidding, contextual relevance. Then build optimization discipline through systematic testing and honest data analysis. Figure out what moves the needle for your specific campaigns and do more of that. Sounds simple because it is simple. Just not easy.
Remember that CTR is a means to an end. The actual goal is driving valuable actions from the right people at an acceptable cost. Keep that bigger picture in mind as you optimize and you'll build campaigns that don't just get clicks. They deliver business results.
These strategies give you a solid foundation, but every brand has unique dynamics. Your data will tell you things that no blog post can. Listen to it. Trust it. Be willing to kill tactics that aren't working, even if they should work in theory.
Success in programmatic isn't about getting everything perfect on day one. Nobody does that. It about being incrementally better this week than last week and maintaining that improvement trajectory week after week. With disciplined optimization and the right approach, you can absolutely increase CTR in DV360 and drive meaningful performance improvements. Just don't expect it to happen overnight.