Display and Video Advertising in Switzerland: Formats, Costs, and Programmatic

Display advertising places visual ads, such as banners, images, and rich media, on websites and apps within ad networks like the Google Display Network, which reaches a very large share of the sites people browse. Video advertising extends the same idea to moving images, running before, during, or alongside content on platforms like YouTube and across the open web. Both are primarily awareness and consideration channels: they are excellent at making a brand visible to the right audience and at re-engaging people who have already shown interest.

The core mechanics are targeting and bidding. You define who should see the ad, by interests, demographics, context, or past behaviour, and the system serves your creative to those people, charging either per click or per thousand impressions. The strength of display and video is reach and visual impact. The risk is waste, since broad targeting can show ads to people far outside your real audience.

The right format depends on the goal, but a few are reliably efficient for Swiss budgets:

• Responsive display ads: a single set of assets that the system adapts to fit almost any placement, usually the most efficient starting point for reach.
• Remarketing display: showing ads to people who already visited your site, typically the highest-return display format because the audience is warm.
• In-stream video, skippable: short video ads where you often pay only when someone watches a meaningful portion, which protects budget.
• Bumper video: very short, non-skippable clips built for memorability and frequency at a low cost per view.

As a rough orientation for the Swiss market, display campaigns often run at a cost per thousand impressions in the lower-to-mid single-digit CHF range, while clicks tend to sit between roughly CHF 0.50 and CHF 2.00. Video costs vary more widely by format and targeting. These are indicative ranges, not fixed prices, since competition and audience strongly affect what you pay.

Manual buying means a person sets up, places, and adjusts campaigns directly, choosing placements and bids by hand. Programmatic buying automates that process: software buys ad space in real time, optimising placements and bids across many sites and exchanges based on data and goals you set. Most modern display and video buying in Switzerland is at least partly programmatic, because it is faster, scales across far more inventory, and optimises continuously.

The trade-off is control versus efficiency. Manual buying gives precise control over exactly where ads appear, which can matter for brand-sensitive placements, but it is slow and hard to scale. Programmatic delivers scale, speed, and continuous optimisation, but requires good setup and oversight to avoid spending on low-quality placements. For most businesses the practical answer is programmatic with clear guardrails: automated buying, combined with exclusion lists and brand-safety controls so the efficiency does not come at the cost of where your brand shows up.

Display and video are strongest when the goal is awareness, consideration, or re-engagement rather than capturing existing demand. If people are already searching for what you sell, search advertising usually converts better; display and video shine earlier in the journey, building recognition and keeping a brand top of mind. They are also highly effective for remarketing, turning a single site visit into repeated, gentle reminders.

They are a weaker first choice when budgets are very small and the only goal is immediate sales, since broad reach can dilute a tight budget. The most effective approach is usually to combine them with intent channels: use search to capture demand, and display and video to create and sustain it. This fits the wider channel mix described in our guide to marketing in Switzerland.

A few principles separate efficient campaigns from wasteful ones. Start with tight audience definition rather than the broadest possible reach, since precision is what protects a Swiss budget. Use strong, on-brand creative, because visual channels live or die on the quality of the asset, and that consistency is where a clear corporate design pays off. Add exclusion lists to keep ads off irrelevant or low-quality placements, and prioritise remarketing audiences, which almost always return more than cold reach.

Finally, judge results by the right metric. For awareness, track reach and view-through; for consideration and sales, track the cost per result rather than raw impressions. Reviewed on a steady rhythm and trimmed of waste, display and video become a dependable way to stay visible across the Swiss web.

At Collective Agency, we plan and run display and video campaigns that reach the right Swiss audiences without wasting budget. Get in touch with our team for a no-obligation conversation about your goals.