What is D2S in search arbitrage?
D2S means display-to-search. Visitors are bought with display-style advertising, including banner, discovery and image ads on networks such as Google's Demand Gen placements, and sent to a page that earns from a search feed. It is the same trade as native-to-search with a different buying channel and different creative formats.
Display-to-search covers a wide range, from image ads in feeds and inboxes via Google Demand Gen to programmatic banners. The appeal is reach and cheap impressions. The risk is intent: someone who taps a banner while reading something else is less likely to follow through than someone who chose a headline.
The label is used loosely. Some people file paid social under D2S, others call it Social-to-search. What matters to the feed is not the name but whether the source is approved and whether the creative text passed in referrerAdCreative matches the page. Display traffic also carries more invalid traffic risk on open exchanges, so placement controls matter.