Microsoft is leading the charge – though the company clearly has a horse in the race, with its paltry performance in the search advertising department. But it’s not alone: fellow search-laggers Yahoo and AOL are also dumping billions into fresh new display ad technology, according to the Journal.

Another impetus behind the shift toward display is new research from comScore, the Atlas Institute and Omniture that measure how consumers engage with ads, in an attempt to take the much-ballyhooed click out of the equation. The research finds that at this point in the Web’s evolution, when consumers begin to search for a product or service, they’ve already decided they’re going to go ahead an buy it – and display ads often prove to be the tipping point in what product or service they decide to buy, the Journal reports.

One report from Atlas found that consumers who were exposed to both search and display Alltel phone ads were 56% more likely to buy an Alltel product than consumers who were only exposed to search ads.