Brand lift

Brand lift is the effect of advertising on the brand rather than on immediate sales: awareness, consideration, intent, or an observable proxy such as branded searches. Like any incremental effect, it needs a counterfactual: what the outcome would have been without the campaign. A brand lift study builds one by comparing a group exposed to the campaign with a group that was not.

Platforms offer lift studies inside their own audience: the platform randomises who sees the campaign and reports the difference. That is a real incrementality measure, but it is limited to that platform’s audience and rules, and it does not measure every channel’s contribution, so the design and the readout should be checked. Where the unit is a region rather than a user, a geo-lift experiment can estimate brand lift without user-level data when a suitable brand outcome is measured by region: advertising changes in some regions and not in others, a synthetic control built from the untreated regions gives the counterfactual, and the gap is the lift. Branded search by region is a common outcome for a brand campaign measured this way, because television creates the branded searches that a dashboard otherwise credits to search.

Two things to keep in mind when reading a result. Lift comes with an interval, and a lift whose band crosses zero is not distinguishable from flat. And a channel with long carryover shows its effect over weeks rather than days: in a media mix model, that shows up in the adstock and the baseline trend, and the plan says how much of a channel’s return is deferred rather than immediate. Brand measurement in the Media Planner uses the same model as sales measurement; see marketing measurement for brands.