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74% of Small Businesses Run Display Ads While ROAS Numbers Mislead

By InnovaAI Research1 min readSearchengineland

Display advertising is growing fast, with 74% of small businesses now running display or video ads. At the same time, a structural flaw in how platforms report ROAS means the numbers agencies present to clients may be significantly wrong.

Key Facts

0174% of small businesses now run display or video ads, making display a primary channel across most client categories.
02Platform-reported ROAS double-counts conversions when multiple channels touch the same purchase journey.
03Display impressions that influence purchases but receive no clicks are invisible to standard attribution, making the channel look underperforming.
04Reconciling platform data against backend revenue often produces a third number that disagrees with both sources.
05Agencies that scale display spend without fixing attribution risk losing client trust when the discrepancies become visible.

Why It Matters

▶Inaccurate ROAS figures embedded in agency reports become a credibility risk when clients begin questioning performance data.
▶Display is now a mainstream channel for 74% of small businesses, so measurement errors at this scale affect the majority of agency client portfolios.
▶View-through influence from display campaigns is systematically excluded from click-based attribution, leading to budget decisions based on incomplete data.
▶Agencies that proactively surface attribution limitations and offer model-based alternatives differentiate their reporting from commodity dashboards.

Agency Actions

Audit one active client account by comparing the sum of platform-claimed conversions across all channels against actual backend orders for the same period to quantify your attribution gap.

low effort

Deploy a multi-source attribution tool such as Supermetrics, Funnel, or Ruler Analytics to consolidate cross-channel data and reduce platform double-counting.

medium effort

Rebuild client-facing dashboards in AgencyAnalytics or Whatagraph with clear data source and attribution window labels so clients understand the basis for every reported metric.

medium effort