Brand Lift Study: What Is It and Why Does It Matter

In a recent article, we discussed the topic of unaided recall – the metric that quantifies the rate of individuals who can recall a brand or product without any hints – and today we’re going to do the same for a related topic: Brand lift studies.

Like unaided recall, a brand lift study is a method to measure brand awareness, but it doesn’t stop there and also relies on a different approach.

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves!

To understand the importance of brand lift studies, let’s get the basics sorted out first.

What does brand lift mean?

Brand lift is how the marketing and advertising industries refer to an increase in brand awareness levels during and after a campaign.

Note: Brand awareness is a broad term, and brand lift studies rely on specific KPIs to measure it. More on this below.

What is a brand lift study?

A brand lift study is a method to measure the impact of a marketing or advertising campaign on aspects like brand recall, consumer behavior, and attitudes toward the brand.

In short, doing a brand lift study is helpful to understand how well a campaign resonates with the target audience, or how the campaign influences the audience’s decisions (such as purchase decisions).

What does a brand lift study measure?

We mentioned brand awareness, and that’s right – brand lift studies measure the extent to which the target audience recalls a brand after being exposed to a campaign.

On top of this, brand lift studies also measure the following:

• Brand recall: The ability of consumers to remember your brand. Within a brand lift study, brand recall is usually aided (i.e. you ask the audience if they recall a certain brand and share the brand’s name, logo, products, etc).
• Brand favorability: How consumers feel about your brand. This is not an open question, so you have to ask about specific perceptions (i.e. quality, trustworthiness).
• Purchase intent: Do consumers consider purchasing your product or service after exposure to the campaign?
• Conversions: While not the primary metric, you can also use a brand lift to track conversions. However, there are more efficient ways to do this, particularly when talking about digital campaigns.

There are additional metrics you can track with a brand lift study. These measurements are offered by the platforms that offer brand lift studies natively, such as YouTube or TikTok.

For example, if you do a brand lift study for a YouTube campaign, Google allows you to measure aspects like number of lifted users, cost per lifted user, absolute brand lift, and exposed positive response rate, among others.

What is an example of a brand lift study?

While there are different ways to execute a brand lift study, chances are you’ve been exposed to one on YouTube.

The platform is famous for including brand lift study surveys after an ad or video, and they usually look like this:

Survey questions can vary depending on what is being measured. In the example above, it’s safe to assume that the brand lift study is measuring two things with one question:

• Brand recall (as they don’t name the brand in the survey).
• Brand favorability.

What are the elements of a brand lift study

The basic elements of a brand lift study include:

• A marketing or advertising campaign (duh).
• Exposure: The channels and audiences that are effectively exposed to the campaign.
• Control group: Similar to the target audience, but not exposed to the campaign.
• Surveying: The questions we ask the target audience to assess the changes in the metrics we’re measuring.
• Data analysis, insight gathering, and campaign optimization.

Optionally, you can also use baseline measurements of the metrics you wish to track when available. Otherwise, you’ll always have the control group for contrast.

In summary, a brand lift study is a standard quantitative research process to measure the effects of a campaign on its target audience.

Which social media platforms support brand lift studies?

Since brand lift studies help measure aspects that are not easy to quantify (such as a feeling towards a brand), many platforms offer brand lift study features natively, including LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Let’s take a quick look at them.

LinkedIn: Brand lift testing

LinkedIn’s version of brand lift studies is called “Brand lift testing”, and can be accessed through the Test section in the Campaign Manager.

As a true brand lift study, LinkedIn allows you to measure the impact of ads by surveying people in test and control groups.

The juice is in the metrics that LinkedIn allows you to measure, a list that includes gems like top-of-mind awareness, employer familiarity, and aided recall.

On the not-so-bright side, brand lift studies on LinkedIn are pricey, and you’ll have to dole out 100k+ on a LinkedIn campaign to qualify for one brand metric question.

YouTube: Brand lift measurement

Google offers brand lift studies for YouTube, which can be run on a number of YouTube items, such as in-stream ads, non-skippable ads, and videos (among others).

You can run brand lift studies for 14 and 28-day periods, and budget requirements are significantly lower than LinkedIn’s.

For instance, measuring a single question starts at $5k (depending on the country), and measuring 3 questions costs up to $60k (this is the campaign budget baseline).

Facebook and Instagram: Brand lift tests

Brand lift tests – which is what Meta calls brand lift studies, offer brands the possibility to measure differences in campaign performance between two subsets of people (those who’ve been exposed to the campaign, and those who weren’t).

While simple and direct, the only bottleneck is that your brand lift study may have to pass through an examination by a Meta account representative.

Aside from that, there’s also a campaign budget requirement that varies from country to country; in the US, you’ll have to spend at least $30k to be able to deploy a brand lift study.

TikTok: Brand lift study

You gotta love how TikTok didn’t beat around the bush when it comes to naming things by their name: Brand lift studies is how brand lift studies are called…on TikTok.

The key differentiator, however, is that the platform’s brand lift studies are aligned with the basic TikTok experience, supporting music and motion graphics.

On the other hand, to access the possibility of running a brand lift study on TikTok, you’ll have to spend north of $100k on a campaign.

X and Reddit: Brand surveys?

At one point, there was an effort by X to roll out brand surveys, and they kinda did, but it’s not something any brand can access straight away.

If you search for this feature in X’s documentation, you’ll come across half-baked FAQs that describe how brand lift studies work on X, but provide little context and no access points to create and deploy one independently.

Reddit, on the other hand, offers an advertising product called “Advertiser promoted surveys”, which can be accessed through the platform’s ads center.

Public documentation on this product is quite scant.

Conclusion: When to run a brand lift study

Based on the information we shared above, you can consider running a brand lift in many scenarios.

For example, if your brand is growing fast, a brand lift study can help you get a better understanding of baseline awareness of your brand on a certain platform.

You can also do a brand lift study to check whether your marketing plan is on par with trends, or else just a victim of these.

For instance, say that you’re running a trendy influencer campaign. In this case, a brand lift study will help you understand whether this type of sponsored content is driving purchase intent (or not).

From a methodological standpoint, you’ll want to avoid brand lift studies whenever you’re running different campaigns for your brand (say, campaigns for different products). There’s a data contamination hazard there.

Wrapping up!

Hopefully, this wasn’t too much to digest in one sitting, but in case it was, we’re always up for a conversation on how to improve your social media marketing efforts.