Assalamu alaikum.
If you've ever asked ChatGPT whether display ads are worth it, you've probably got back a very confident, very generic answer that didn't really help. To be fair, it's not a simple question.
Web display ads — the banners and rectangles you see sitting on websites — have a bit of a reputation problem. People either think they're dead, or they tried them once, got a handful of clicks, and quietly moved on.
So I spent some time actually looking into the research. Not the stuff Google publishes telling you to spend more on Google — proper third-party studies. And the picture is more interesting than the reputation suggests, especially if you're a Muslim business trying to reach a Muslim audience.
Here's what I found.
First, the standard advice — and why it doesn't quite apply to us
Ask anyone in marketing where to start with paid ads and they'll say the same thing: search first, display later. Get your Google or Bing campaigns running, capture the people who are already looking for what you sell, then add display retargeting once you've got traffic worth recapturing.
It's decent advice. For most businesses.
The problem is that a lot of Muslim businesses are selling into categories where the search volume barely exists. If you're selling modest fashion, halal supplements, Islamic finance products, or Quran tutoring — your potential customers often aren't searching for those things, not in meaningful numbers. Either they don't know your product exists yet, they've looked before and found nothing good, or they're buying from the same two or three brands they've always used out of habit.
You can't capture demand that isn't there. Which means for a lot of Muslim businesses, display advertising isn't a support channel you add later. It's one of the only viable ways to build awareness in the first place.
That's the bit ChatGPT doesn't tell you.
So do display ads actually work?
Honest answer: yes, but not in the way most people expect.
Display is not a direct response channel. You're not going to run a banner campaign and watch orders roll in the next morning. If that's what you're measuring, you'll conclude it doesn't work and you'll be wrong.
What display does is plant seeds. Someone sees your brand on a website they trust, a few times over a few weeks, and it registers. They don't click. They carry on with their day. But the next time they need what you sell, your name is already somewhere in their head.
There's a stat that captures this well. After seeing a display ad, around 27% of consumers go on to search for that business — and when they do, conversions jump by 59%. (Keywords Everywhere, 2025) The ad didn't close the sale. It started the conversation.
Research tracking long-term ad effectiveness across European markets found that advertisers typically see around £1.87 back for every £1 spent in the short term. When you account for the sustained effects — repeat customers, word of mouth, people who convert months after first seeing your brand — that rises to £4.11 per pound. (Google/WARC, 2024) The compounding effect is real, it just takes longer than a week to show up.
There's also a frequency thing worth knowing about. Studies suggest it takes somewhere between five and seven impressions within a 30-day window for a logo to genuinely register with someone. (Amra & Elma, 2025) Five to seven times your brand needs to show up before it starts sticking. Cheap impressions, delivered consistently, matter more than people realise.
The problem with reaching Muslim audiences on the big platforms
Right, so display works. Why hasn't it worked for Muslim businesses specifically?
Two reasons, and they're both worth understanding.
The first is cost. Meta and Google are auction-based. The more specific your targeting, the smaller the auction pool, and the higher the price goes. Targeting Muslim audiences — or any tight demographic — on Meta in the UK currently costs somewhere between £9 and £18 per thousand impressions depending on the campaign. Some Muslim-specific audience segments push higher because there are fewer placements and advertisers are competing for the same people.
For a small business testing the water with a few hundred quid, that's an expensive experiment.
The second problem is context, and honestly this one matters more.
When you run ads through Google Display Network or most programmatic platforms, you get very little meaningful control over which websites your ads actually appear on. Your halal food brand's banner could end up next to content that's completely at odds with your values. This isn't a hypothetical. It happens, and most advertisers don't even notice because they're not digging through placement reports.
The platforms' answer to this is keyword exclusions and category blocklists — essentially a long list of things you're telling the algorithm to avoid. Which sounds reasonable until you realise you're trying to manually patch a system that serves billions of impressions a day and has no real concept of what halal means.
Research shows 88% of consumers think it's important that ads don't appear next to inappropriate content. (Agility Ads, 2025) For a Muslim brand, inappropriate isn't just the conventional brand safety definition. It's a values question. And no blocklist is going to solve that properly.
Why contextual placement changes everything
There's been a broader shift in the industry over the last few years, moving away from behavioural targeting — following users around based on their browsing history — toward contextual targeting, which matches ads to the content of the page they're actually on.
The reasons are partly regulatory, partly the slow death of third-party cookies. But the performance data is interesting too. Contextual ads are 50% more likely to be clicked than non-contextual ones. And 79% of consumers say they prefer ads that feel relevant to what they're reading, rather than ones that seem to be following them around the internet. (Jet-Stream, 2024)
For Muslim audiences specifically, contextual isn't just a trend worth following. It's the only model that actually solves the placement problem properly.
If your ad is placed exclusively on manually reviewed, Muslim-audience websites — by design, not by algorithm — then the brand safety question answers itself. You're not blocking bad placements after the fact. You're only ever in good ones. The halal context is baked in, because the publisher selection process makes it so.
What this means if you're thinking about running ads
Display advertising works. The research is clear enough on that. The issue has never really been whether it works — it's been whether you can actually afford to reach your specific audience, and whether you can do it without your brand ending up somewhere that undermines everything you stand for.
Those two problems — cost and context — are the ones worth solving. Not "is display dead."
To put some numbers on it: at £4 per thousand impressions, you can put your brand in front of 25,000 people for £100. At £15 per thousand on Meta targeting a Muslim audience segment, that same £100 gets you fewer than 7,000 impressions, with no guarantee of where they land. From 21 October 2026, prices depend on which country each visitor is in: see the pricing page.
This is exactly the problem HalalSpark was built around. Every publisher on the network is manually reviewed. Every ad goes through a 24-hour review before it goes live. Flat rate, no minimum spend — you can start with £20 and see what the platform actually does for your brand before committing to anything bigger.
If you've been on the fence about web ads, the risk of trying is genuinely low. Start small, see what lands.
Insha'Allah the rest follows.