Performance metrics like CTR and CPA can tell you how efficiently your ads are delivered, but they don’t tell you whether your brand message actually landed. If only there was a way to go beyond clicks and cost…
A brand lift study helps you determine the effectiveness of your ads in changing perceptions and improving the way people see your brand.
This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about brand lift study methodology, from control/exposed group design to choosing the right survey questions, interpreting results, and deciding whether to use a platform tool or a third-party provider like Happydemics.
By the end, you’ll know exactly how to brief your team or agency on running a lift study — and how to turn the results into smarter marketing decisions.
What is a brand lift study?
A brand lift study is a research methodology used to measure the impact of advertising on brand perception; things like awareness, ad recall, favourability, or purchase intent.
Instead of focusing on clicks or conversions, it measures how exposure to a campaign changes how people think or feel about your brand.
Why brand lift matters
For campaigns designed to build long-term equity, not just drive immediate action, brand lift studies offer a crucial way to justify spend and track success beyond last-click attribution. They help answer questions like:
Did more people become aware of our brand after the campaign?
Are exposed audiences more likely to consider or prefer us?
How did the campaign shift perception in key segments?
This can help teams build a more holistic view of their campaigns, instead of focusing solely on lead generation and impressions.
When to run a brand lift study
You don’t need to run a brand lift study for every campaign, but they’re especially valuable when:
- You’re launching a new product or service
- You’ve invested heavily in brand awareness or video media
- You want to test creative impact across segments or channels
- You need to defend brand investment in performance-driven environments
- You’re trying to validate your media mix or platform strategy
In short, if your campaign is designed to influence minds rather than drive immediate clicks — brand lift is how you measure whether it worked. This is where brand lift measurement becomes essential to reveal the true impact of your campaign.
How brand lift studies work: methodology explained
At the heart of any brand lift study is a simple question: did seeing this ad change the way someone thinks or feels about the brand?
It’s a little trickier to find that out in comparison to other marketing metrics. But here’s how it’s done.
Control vs exposed audiences
Exposed group: People who have seen or heard your ad
Control group: A statistically similar group who did not see the ad
By comparing survey responses between the two groups, you can isolate the incremental lift, the difference in brand perception directly attributable to the campaign.
For example:
If 40% of the exposed group remembers seeing your brand and only 28% of the control group does, your ad recall lift is +12 percentage points.
How audiences are split
Depending on the platform or provider, the split can happen in different ways. Either Platform lift tools (like Meta or Google) randomly segment users before the campaign starts, or third-party providers (like Happydemics) recruit respondents based on ad exposure via surveys or mobile tracking.
The key to accurate and actionable results is to ensure that both groups are comparable, similar demographics, geographies, devices, and behaviours.
Measurement timeline
Most brand lift studies are conducted over a set campaign window, often 2–4 weeks. It’s important to:
Wait until there’s enough ad exposure to generate impact
Keep the survey fieldwork short to reduce external influence
Ensure the control group does not recall the ad throughout the measurement period, recognizing that they may have been exposed but are not expected to remember the ad.
Other methodology considerations
Ad frequency: Overexposure to your ads can lead to messaging fatigue, skewing results and reducing the overall effectiveness of the campaign.
Channel mix: If your campaign runs across YouTube, Meta, TikTok, etc., consider cross-channel lift studies that take into account all the platforms you operate on.
Sample size: The bigger the sample size, the more accurate your results. It’s always best to aim for the largest sample size your budget allows.
Choosing the right survey questions
When it comes to brand lift studies, question choice is crucial. The strength of the study depends heavily on the quality and relevance of the survey questions you ask. These questions are designed to detect shifts in key brand metrics between your exposed and control audiences.
Below are some of the most common brand lift survey questions and how to use them:
1. Brand familiarity
“How familiar are you with the [Brand]?”
This measures how well your audience recognizes and recalls your brand, offering insights into the depth of their knowledge and engagement. It helps gauge whether people simply know of your brand or have a stronger, more meaningful connection with it.
2. Ad recall
“Do remember seeing / hearing this ad”
This tests how memorable your creative was and whether the brand attribution stuck. Platforms like Meta and YouTube use this as a primary lift metric.
3. Brand Image
“This is an advertisement for [Brand]. What image does it give you of the brand?”
This measures how your audience perceives your brand after being exposed to your campaign. Unlike awareness metrics, brand image focuses on the emotional and psychological associations that consumers have with your brand, indicating how favorably they view it.
4. Consideration
“In the future, would you consider buying the [Brand]”
Consideration is a mid-funnel metric that signals commercial intent, useful when you’re trying to move audiences toward purchase, especially in competitive categories.
5. Purchase Intent
“Today, do you intend to buy a product or a service from the [Brand]”
This is a high bar. While rarely the primary metric in brand lift studies, it’s a useful signal of longer-term ROI when included alongside other indicators.
How many questions should you ask?
While it’s tempting to measure everything, too many questions can introduce survey fatigue — reducing data quality.
Platform studies (e.g., Meta, TikTok) typically use 2–4 questions due to the pre-existing profiling data they rely on. These studies are designed for quick insights but with less flexibility in segmentation.
At Happydemics, we take a more comprehensive approach. While still keeping it concise, we add an extra layer of depth by including:
One memorization question to ensure ad recall
Two to three profiling questions to gather demographic and behavioral data
Key KPI questions tailored to your campaign’s specific goals (e.g., don’t ask purchase intent for a top-funnel campaign)
This brings us to just under 10 questions, which strikes a balance between the granularity of the KPIs and maintaining survey efficiency.
Awareness vs. perception: know the difference
Awareness measures recognition and recall — but when looking at brand recognition vs brand awareness, recognition focuses on whether people correctly identify your brand from its assets or messaging.
Perception metrics like favorability and consideration measure how people feel about your brand — and whether they’re open to engaging with it.
A successful brand lift study doesn’t just tell you whether people saw your ad — it tells you if it actually moved the needle.
The difficulty of built-in platform brand lift data
Most major advertising platforms offer built-in brand lift tools, which are convenient if you’re running large campaigns directly through those ecosystems. But each platform comes with its own methodology, limitations, and spend requirements.
Different methodologies, a lack of transparency and limited measurement options make these homebrewed brand lift platforms cumbersome when trying to pull cross-platform data together for brand lift studies.
But just how different are these platforms? Lets see:
Meta brand lift studies
How it works: Meta (Facebook & Instagram) randomly assigns users into test (exposed) and control groups before your campaign begins.
Metrics supported: Ad recall, brand awareness, message association, favourability, purchase intent.
Minimum spend: Typically $30,000–$50,000 per cell (audience segment), though this varies by region and setup.
Limitations:
Black-box methodology (you don’t see the full calculation model)
Limited customisation of survey questions
Can’t measure cross-platform or offline effects
Google brand lift
How it works: Google uses randomised control groups across YouTube or Google Display Network, measuring lift via YouTube surveys or Display interactions.
Metrics supported: Brand awareness, ad recall, consideration, favourability, purchase intent.
Minimum spend: Varies, but often starts around $50,000–$100,000, depending on campaign complexity.
Limitations:
Works best for video formats
Less flexible in question wording or survey timing
No demographic segmentation beyond what Google provides
TikTok brand lift studies
How it works: TikTok runs studies via partnerships with measurement vendors (e.g. Kantar, Nielsen) or through TikTok’s Brand Lift Study Beta.
Metrics supported: Ad recall, brand favourability, purchase intent.
Minimum spend: Often requires $25,000+ depending on market and partner.
Limitations:
Still evolving — not as mature or self-serve as Meta/Google
Third-party costs may apply
Limited transparency into audience segmentation or delivery logic
While these tools are valuable, they work best if you’re only advertising on a single platform and don’t need custom questions or cross-channel insights.
If you want more flexibility or need to run a study across platforms, formats, or geographies, a third-party brand lift provider can bring together insights from all platforms, into a single view.
Find out how Happydemics allows you to measure cross-channel brand lift with ease.
Interpreting your brand lift results
Running a brand lift study is only half the job. Knowing what to do with the results is where the real value lies. A well-run study will give you percentage-point changes in key metrics (e.g. +8 points lift in awareness), along with a confidence level indicating how statistically reliable that change is.
Understanding statistical significance
In most brand lift studies, a result is considered statistically significant if there’s at least 95% confidence that the difference observed between the control and exposed groups is not due to chance.
Put simply, if your lift is statistically significant, it means you’re very likely seeing a real effect from your campaign.
Key concepts to know:
- Confidence level (usually 90%, 95%, or 99%): How sure we are that the result reflects a real difference. A 95% confidence level means there’s only a 5% chance the result happened randomly.
- Margin of error: A range around your result that accounts for sampling variability. The smaller the margin, the more precise your estimate.
- Sample size: The number of people surveyed in each group. Larger sample sizes lead to more reliable results and narrower margins of error.
If you see a +6% lift in brand favourability with a ±2% margin of error at 95% confidence, your “real” lift could be anywhere between +4% and +8%. But you can be 95% confident that the lift isn’t just due to chance, it’s a result of your ad exposure.
When a result isn’t statistically significant
This doesn’t necessarily mean your campaign failed but it means the data wasn’t strong enough to prove the impact with confidence. It may indicate:
Your sample size was too small
The exposure wasn’t high enough
The baseline awareness was already high (leaving little room to grow)
You chose a metric that didn’t align well with the campaign’s objectives
In those cases, the study can still guide your next steps, especially if you segment the results (e.g., a non-significant lift overall might still reveal a strong signal in one demographic).
Diagnosing poor results
Not all brand lift studies show a positive result. Even if they aren’t the results you were expecting, you can still get value from the data. If you see no meaningful lift, it could be a signal that:
Your creative didn’t resonate emotionally
Frequency was too low to make an impact
The audience was already familiar with the brand
Your media mix diluted the message
Poor results could still give you the information you need to change your ads for the better. If the data isn’t showing what you wanted it to, consider making these changes like refining your messaging, adjusting your targeting or reallocating budget to higher-performing channels or segments.
Whether your brand lift results show a clear win or a mixed picture, they give you something that performance metrics alone can’t: a window into real audience perception. But as with any measurement, the value lies in how you apply what you’ve learned and in the tools you use to get there.
That’s where the choice between platform-native and independent brand lift studies becomes critical.
Choosing a Third-party brand lift platform
Built-in tools from platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok are useful — especially if you’re running large campaigns within a single ecosystem. But they also come with limitations: black-box methodologies, limited customisation, and an inability to measure cross-channel impact.
If you want more control over your survey design, greater transparency in how lift is calculated and the ability to measure impact across multiple platforms or media types with deeper segmentation, then a third-party brand lift provider like Happydemics can help you go further.
Unlike platform-native tools, Happydemics gives you:
- Fully customisable survey questions aligned to your exact campaign objectives
- Multi-channel and cross-market tracking — from digital to OOH and beyond
- Real-time dashboards with statistically validated insights
- Clear, actionable results you can segment by audience, media channel, or creative
Brand lift studies aren’t just a research exercise, they’re a way to bring emotional and behavioural impact into focus. They help you answer questions like:
- Is our creative driving awareness?
- Are we shifting brand perception in the right direction?
- Can we justify more investment in upper-funnel media?
With the right methodology, the right questions, and the right partner, you can move from instinct to evidence — and make decisions that drive both brand equity and business outcomes.
Want to measure brand impact with clarity?
Happydemics helps you track, validate, and optimise campaign effectiveness across every channel with insights you can trust.
