Brand lift
Brand lift is the measured change in what people think about a brand after seeing the ads. A survey goes to people who saw the ads and to a similar group who did not. The gap in awareness, memory, or liking is the lift. It is not a sales number.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
How a brand lift study works
Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. Typical ads run on Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. A summer YouTube campaign can look expensive on last-click sales. Brand lift is how the drink brand checks whether the ads registered at all among women who were never going to buy this week.
The platform randomly holds back a portion of the target audience from seeing the ads. Both the exposed group and the holdout receive the same short survey: have you heard of this drink brand, would you consider it, can you recall the ad. The gap between their responses, tested for statistical significance, is reported as the lift. The randomization is what makes it a study rather than a poll. Without a control group you are measuring what that audience already thought.
What brand lift can tell you
Brand lift can tell you whether the creative registered at all. Which of two executions is more memorable. Whether the message landed with active women over 50, since results can be broken out by segment. It is one of the few ways to compare creative on something other than clicks. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. A trail-run cut can beat a kitchen-counter cut on recall even if the kitchen cut gets more site visits from existing fans.
Brand lift also gives upper-funnel work a defensible number, which matters when brand budget has to survive a performance review. A 6 point awareness lift is not revenue. It is still more than a screenshot of a pretty ad.
What brand lift cannot tell you
Brand lift does not tell you revenue impact. A recall lift is not a sales forecast, and converting one into the other requires assumptions you will not be able to defend. Use incrementality when the question is money. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The brand still needs a holdout on purchases if the CFO (chief financial officer) asked about incremental orders.
Small studies also produce noisy results. A lift figure without a confidence interval and a base sample size is a headline, not a finding. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. If the control group is 400 people, a 2 point gap can be noise.
Common brand lift mistakes
- Running a study on a budget too small to reach significance, then reporting a drink brand's point estimate.
- Changing creative mid-study, which makes the result unattributable to anything.
- Ignoring frequency. Lift usually depends on how often people saw it, not just that they did.
Lemonado
See this number in Lemonado
Lemonado reads spend and results together from the platforms you connect, so you can ask for this metric without building a sheet. It can also act on what it finds, inside rules you set.