How to conduct a brand lift study—from process to metrics

Are you curious about how your brand is performing in the market? Do you want to know if your marketing campaigns are actually making a difference? If so, it’s time to conduct a brand lift study.

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to design and execute a successful brand lift study that delivers actionable insights.

What is brand lift?

Brand lift is a critical indicator that measures the change in consumer perception, awareness, and purchase intent resulting from exposure to a brand’s ad campaigns. It helps businesses understand the effectiveness of their advertising efforts in building brand equity and driving customer engagement. By measuring brand lift, marketers can identify which campaigns are working and which are not and learn how to adjust their strategies for better results.

Why brand lift matters

There are many reasons why you should invest in measuring brand lift. Here are a few of the top reasons.

Informed decision-making

Brand lift studies generate actionable insights that allow marketers to refine their campaigns. For example, if a campaign to increase brand awareness shows low ad recall, marketers can adjust the creative elements or targeting parameters to improve effectiveness. This data-driven approach helps you allocate marketing resources efficiently, maximizing the impact of your advertising campaign.

Proving ROI

Measuring brand lift provides a clear picture of the return on investment (ROI) for marketing activities. By understanding how campaigns influence key metrics such as brand awareness, consideration, and purchase intent, businesses can justify their advertising spend. For instance, a significant increase in purchase intent following a campaign can directly correlate with higher product sales, thereby proving the financial benefits of the marketing efforts.

Competitive advantage

Brand lift metrics offer insights into how your brand is perceived relative to competitors. For example, if your brand shows higher favorability than competitors, it indicates a strong market position. In contrast, if your competitors outperform, you can use these insights to improve your advertising strategy and make your brand stand out. This competitive intelligence is valuable for maintaining and improving market share.

How to conduct a brand lift study: a 7-step blueprint

Designing and conducting a brand lift study can be complex, but careful planning and execution can yield valuable insights that inform future marketing strategies. Here are the key steps to designing and conducting a brand lift study.

Step 1: Define your objectives

The first step in conducting a brand lift study is clearly defining your objectives. What do you want to learn from the study? Are you looking to measure the impact of a specific campaign, or do you want to gain a holistic understanding of your brand’s health? Your objectives will not just guide the rest of the study design process but also the actionable insights you derive at the end.

Step 2: Identify your target audience

Who are the consumers you’re trying to reach with your marketing efforts? Make sure your target audience for the study aligns with the audience you’re targeting with your campaigns. Consider factors such as:

• Demographics (age, gender, income, education)
• Psychographics (interests, values, attitudes)
• Behaviors (purchase history, brand loyalty, media consumption habits)
• Firmographics (industry, company size, location, revenue)

Defining your target audience will help you create a representative sample for your study and ensure that your findings are relevant and actionable.

Step 3: Choose your research methodology

You can choose from several consumer research methodologies for a brand lift study.

As you choose the best-suited methodologies, make sure to consider factors such as your research objectives, target audience, budget, and timeline. You may also want to use a combination of methodologies to better understand your campaign performance. Here are a few top ones to consider.

Surveys

Online surveys are popular for brand lift studies because they allow you to reach a large audience quickly and cost-effectively. You can create and distribute your survey using platforms like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics. When designing your survey, consider factors such as question type, order, and length to ensure high-quality data collection.

Interviews

In-person or phone interviews can provide in-depth insights into consumer perceptions and behaviors. They allow you to probe deeper into respondents’ answers and uncover nuanced insights that may not be captured in a survey.

Focus groups

Focus groups bring together a small group of consumers—typically six to 10 participants—to discuss their perceptions and experiences with your brand. They can provide rich qualitative data and allow you to observe group dynamics and interactions.

Social media listening

Social media listening tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch allow you to monitor and analyze conversations about your brand on social media platforms. This can provide insights into consumer sentiment, brand perception, and trending topics related to your brand. Social media listening can be a valuable complement when used with other market research methodologies in a brand lift study.

Step 4: Develop your questionnaire

Once you’ve chosen your methodology, it’s time to develop your questionnaire. Your questionnaire should include survey questions that measure the key brand lift metrics you’re interested in, such as:

• What ads do you remember seeing recently?
• Do you recall seeing an advertisement for [brand] in the past 30 days?
• What brands come to mind when you think of [product category]?
• Which of the following brands have you heard of?
• On a scale of 1-5, how likely are you to consider [brand] when purchasing [product category]?

When developing your questionnaire, it’s important to remember a few best practices. Use clear and concise language to make questions easy to understand, and avoid leading questions with a mix of open-ended and closed-ended ones. Make sure to keep it short to minimize respondent fatigue, and test it initially with a small sample of respondents to identify any issues.

Step 5: Collect the data

With your questionnaire developed, it’s time to collect your data. If you’re using a survey, distribute it to your target audience through email, social media, and other channels. Consider using incentives, like gift cards and discounts, to encourage participation and increase response rates.

If you’re conducting interviews or focus groups, schedule sessions with participants and record their responses. Whenever possible, it’s best to involve an unbiased third-party administrator to lead the sessions, ensuring a comfortable, neutral environment that encourages open and honest feedback.When collecting such data, it’s important that your sample is representative of your target audience to minimize bias.

Step 6: Analyze your results

Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to analyze the results. Start by cleaning your data and removing any incomplete or invalid responses. Then use statistical analysis tools, like IBM SPSS software, to identify trends and patterns in the data.

For example, you might find that a certain age group is more likely to engage with your product or that loyalty is stronger among customers with a higher purchase frequency.

While you can analyze basic data manually, statistical tools provide deeper insights, helping you spot correlations and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Here are some common statistical analysis approaches you can use for brand lift studies:

• Descriptive statistics: This gives you a summary of your data, like the average (mean), middle value (median), and how spread out the data is (standard deviation). It helps you see the overall picture and identify any outlying or unusual responses.
• Inferential statistics: Inferential statistics allow you to make generalizations about a larger population based on a sample of data. For example, you can conduct surveys after a brand awareness campaign to understand its larger impact.
• Regression analysis: This technique helps you understand how factors (like ad exposure or age) affect brand lift metrics (such as awareness or purchase intent). It identifies which of these variables have the biggest impact, making it easier to understand what drives changes in these metrics.
• Text analysis: If you collected open-ended responses in your survey or interviews, use text analysis techniques like sentiment analysis or topic modeling to identify common themes and patterns in the data.
• Segmentation analysis: This analysis breaks down your data into different groups, like age or prior brand awareness, to see if specific segments responded better to your campaign.

Step 7: Develop actionable insights

The final step in conducting a brand lift study is to develop actionable insights based on your findings. Consider the following questions:

• What are the key takeaways from the study? What did you learn about your campaign performance and its impact on your overall marketing efforts?
• Which marketing strategies are working well, and which ones need improvement?
• What are the next steps for your brand based on the results of the study?
• Did the campaign improve brand awareness as intended?
• Have consumer perceptions shifted in line with your goals?
• Which specific strategies contributed to the results, and what adjustments are needed?

By aligning your insights with your initial objectives, you can ensure that the outcomes directly inform your future marketing strategies—be it your creative development, media planning, or targeting strategies.

How to measure brand lift: 5 essential indicators to track

To effectively measure the impact of your marketing efforts on brand perception and performance, it’s crucial to track the following brand lift metrics and indicators.

1. Ad recall

Ad recall measures the percentage of consumers who remember seeing your brand’s advertisements after exposure. This metric helps you evaluate the memorability and effectiveness of your ad creative in capturing the attention of your target audience.

Ad recall can be broken down into two components:

• Unaided ad recall: Unaided ad recall measures the percentage of consumers who can spontaneously recall your ad without any prompts, indicating the ad’s memorability and impact.
• Aided ad recall: Aided ad recall, on the other hand, gauges how many consumers recognize your ad after being given a specific cue or prompt, reflecting the effectiveness of your ad in creating a lasting impression.

A high ad recall indicates that your campaigns are successfully breaking through the clutter and leaving a lasting impression on consumers.

You can use the methodology of control vs. exposed groups to measure ad recall. The control group is made up of people who haven’t been exposed to your ad campaign. They serve as a baseline, representing the level of ad recall and other brand metrics without the influence of your advertising efforts. The exposed group is made up of individuals who have seen your ad campaign.

By comparing the ad recall rates between these two groups, you can determine the effectiveness of your advertising in creating memorable impressions and driving brand lift. After conducting your campaign, survey both the control and exposed groups to measure their ad recall rates. If the exposed group demonstrates significantly higher ad recall compared to the control group, it indicates that your campaign has successfully created lasting impressions and improved brand memorability.

To measure ad recall, consider using tools like Dynata, which allows you to survey the exposed group and compare their recall to a control group. You can also use brand tracking software like Latana or Qualtrics to monitor ad recall over time.

2. Brand awareness

Measuring brand awareness is fundamental to understanding your brand’s position in the marketplace. It can be assessed in three ways:

1. Top-of-mind awareness: Top-of-mind awareness measures the percentage of consumers who mention your brand first when asked about a specific product category. This metric indicates how well your brand is embedded in consumer consciousness.
2. Spontaneous awareness: Spontaneous awareness measures the percentage of consumers who can name your brand without any prompts, regardless of the order in which it is mentioned.
3. Aided awareness: The percentage of consumers who recognize your brand when presented with a list of brands in your category.

Tracking these metrics helps you evaluate how effectively your marketing initiatives enhance brand visibility and recognition, allowing you to identify areas for improvement in your brand-building efforts. You can use a tool like YouGov BrandIndex to track brand awareness across different markets and consumer segments.

3. Brand consideration

Brand consideration reflects how likely consumers are to include your brand in their decision-making when purchasing. By tracking brand consideration, you can assess the impact of your marketing efforts on moving consumers further down the sales funnel and closer to a purchase decision.

There are three ways to measure brand consideration:

• Consideration set inclusion: This is the percentage of consumers who include your brand in their list of options when considering a purchase in your product category. You can use surveys or polls to ask consumers which brands they would consider when purchasing your category.
• Brand preference: This is the percentage of consumers who prefer your brand over competitors when considering a purchase in your product category. You can use a MaxDiff analysis using a tool like Cojoint.ly to determine the relative preference for your brand compared to competitors. MaxDiff asks respondents to choose the most and least preferred options from a set of alternatives.
• Purchase intent: This is the percentage of consumers who express an intention to purchase from your brand in the near future. You can create surveys asking consumers to rate their likelihood of considering your brand on a scale (e.g., 1-5 or 1-10). Use tools like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey to conduct brand consideration surveys and track changes over time.

4. Purchase behavior

Understanding consumer purchase behavior is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of your brand lift initiatives. This helps you understand the ROI of your marketing efforts and identify opportunities for driving conversions. There are two main metrics to consider when measuring purchase behavior:

1. Purchase frequency: Purchase frequency denotes the average number of times consumers purchase from your brand within a specific period (e.g., monthly, quarterly, or annually). This metric helps you assess customer loyalty and the effectiveness of retention strategies. You can use tools like Adobe Analytics to track the average number of purchases per customer within a specific time period. You can also calculate this manually by dividing the total number of purchases by the total number of unique customers.
2. Purchase recency: Purchase recency points to the average time elapsed since a consumer’s last purchase from your brand, providing insights into customer engagement and retention efforts. Use RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis to segment your customers based on their last purchase date with a tool like Klaviyo to automate this process.

To gain a more comprehensive view of purchase behavior, consider tracking metrics such as average order value, customer lifetime value, and repeat purchase rate. Use tools like Adobe Analytics or Mixpanel to monitor these metrics and identify trends over time.

5. Brand favorability

Brand favorability measures the overall positive or negative sentiment consumers hold toward your brand. This metric helps you understand how consumers perceive your brand in terms of quality, trustworthiness, and overall reputation. Tracking brand favorability over time allows you to identify shifts in consumer sentiment and assess the impact of your marketing efforts on building a positive brand image and fostering customer loyalty.

You can measure brand favorability in two ways:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS calculates the percentage of consumers likely to recommend your brand to others minus those unlikely to recommend it. A high NPS indicates strong customer loyalty and satisfaction.
2. Brand attribute ratings: These ratings assess how consumers rate your brand on specific attributes, such as quality, value, trustworthiness, and innovation, as well as how your brand is perceived compared to competitors and against your industry benchmarks.

Tools like Kantar can help you measure brand favorability and sentiment across different touchpoints and campaigns.

Brand lift case studies: Yelp’s impact on boosting brand performance

Many businesses are leveraging Yelp’s extensive user base, targeted advertising capabilities, and robust analytics to achieve improvements in brand sentiment, relevance, and overall performance. Explore three case studies demonstrating the impact that Yelp’s advertising solutions have on brand lift.

Visa enhanced its brand sentiment

Visa partnered with Yelp to launch a display campaign using Yelp Audiences to improve consumer sentiment toward Visa as a brand that supports small businesses. This resulted in a 12-point lift in consumer sentiment, showing how Yelp has strengthened the emotional connection between Visa and its target audience.

Bulwark Exterminating achieved brand relevance on par with the oldest players

Bulwark Exterminating, a pest control company, aimed to boost its brand lift and relevance and compete with well-established players in the industry. In some locations, Bulwark Exterminating achieved brand relevance that was on par with companies that had been in the business for over a century. This is a testament to the power of Yelp’s platform in helping relatively newer brands establish a strong presence and effectively connect with their target audience.

LaserAway’s Yelp Ads influenced purchase behavior

LaserAway, a leading provider of laser hair removal and aesthetic services, utilized the Yelp Conversions API (CAPI) and Yelp Audiences to boost brand visibility and awareness at various stages of the customer journey.

An in-depth analysis revealed a 13x return on ad spend (ROAS), indicating purchase behavior. Additionally, 60% of new customers interacted with a Yelp ad before converting, demonstrating the ad’s impact in influencing consumer behavior and driving long-term brand lift.

Brand lift: a must-have in your brand marketing toolkit

Measuring brand lift is a critical component of understanding the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and identifying opportunities for improvement. By tracking key metrics across ad recall, brand awareness, brand consideration, purchase behavior, and brand favorability, you can gain a comprehensive view of your brand’s performance and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategies.

Make sure to use a combination of tools, surveys, and analytics to monitor and analyze your data regularly. By staying attuned to your brand’s health and making informed adjustments to your marketing initiatives, you can drive meaningful improvements in brand perception and performance over time.

As you put these insights into action, remember that brand lift is just one piece of the larger brand-building puzzle. To truly solidify your brand’s position in the market, you must also focus on measuring and improving brand awareness. Start by exploring these key metrics and strategies for measuring brand awareness.