A brand lift study measures how an ad campaign changes consumer perceptions, such as awareness, favorability, and purchase intent. It does this by comparing people who saw your ad with a control group who didn’t.
Clicks and conversions are only part of the story. To understand whether your advertising truly moves the needle, you need to see how it shapes perception, sparks behavior change, and builds intent.
That’s why brand lift matters.
Without that insight, you’re working with an incomplete picture — and paying for it. Budgets drift into underperforming channels, promising campaigns stall, and presentations look great in a deck but fail to connect once they’re live.
A clear view of brand impact closes the gap, helping you spot what resonates, refine what doesn’t, and turn good creative into lasting results.
How Brand Lift Helps Tell the Performance Story
Marketers are drowning in numbers. Views. Likes. Shares. Each tells part of the story, often hinting at interest or preference. But to understand whether a campaign truly resonates, it helps to look deeper.
Brand lift studies add that missing layer: they show whether people remember your message, connect it with your brand, and feel more inclined to choose you.
Clicks can suggest curiosity. Video views may indicate exposure. Conversions signal action. But only brand lift reveals the perception shifts that turn moments of engagement into lasting preference.
If you want to know whether your marketing is building long-term brand value, you need more than activity metrics. That’s where brand lift fills the gap.
That gap is where marketers lose credibility. If your dashboards only show activity metrics — clicks, views, completions — you’ll struggle to make the case that marketing is driving growth. This disconnect is why so many campaigns get labeled as “awareness plays” with no clear ROI, even when they’re shaping long-term preference.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
Every brand lift study looks a little different, but the foundation is simple. Compare the exposed group to the control group. See where attitudes shifted.
Here are the big ones marketers track, and why they matter:
- Awareness: Did more people recognize your brand? Crucial for launches or top-of-funnel campaigns.
- Favorability: Did people feel more positive about your brand? Useful if you’re repositioning or working in a crowded market.
- Consideration: Are people more likely to think of your brand when making a choice? This is where mid-funnel impact shows up.
- Purchase Intent: Did your ad move people closer to buying? That’s the clearest sign of ROI.
- Ad Recall: Do people even remember seeing your ad? If not, nothing else matters.
Put together, these metrics tell a story that clicks and conversions alone never could. And they’re not just “soft numbers.” As MarTech points out, brand health metrics like awareness, favorability, and intent have been proven to correlate with in-market success, often serving as trusted proxies for actual sales. That connection is what makes them so valuable in the boardroom as well as in campaign reporting.
How to Measure Brand Lift
There’s no single way to measure brand lift, but most reliable studies use a combination of approaches:
- Pre- and post-campaign surveys: Ask the same questions before and after exposure to track changes in awareness, favorability, or intent.
- Exposed vs. control groups: Compare people who saw your ad against those who didn’t, isolating the actual impact of your campaign.
- Core brand lift metrics: Awareness, recall, consideration, favorability, and purchase intent are the most common and the most useful.
- Behavioral signals: Engagement, brand buzz, or share-of-voice online can add context alongside survey responses.
Put together, these methods show both the direct effect of your ad and how it stacks up in the bigger picture.
Where Brand Lift Studies Go Wrong
Not every brand lift study delivers insights you can trust. Some of the common traps:
- Using the wrong control group
- Asking vague survey questions
- Running a sample that doesn’t reflect your audience
When studies are poorly run, marketers lose credibility and risk future investment.
When brand lift studies go wrong, the cost isn’t just wasted research dollars. It’s wasted ad spend, misinformed optimizations, and another campaign you can’t confidently defend to leadership. And even when survey companies try to fix these issues, problems can remain. As Digiday reported, “Even after they weed out the professional survey takers, it doesn’t mean the demographics of the people who are filling the survey out match the people you’re looking for.”
That’s the crux of the issue: not all survey data is created equal. If your control and exposed groups don’t reflect the audience you’re targeting, your lift numbers won’t tell the real story.
This is exactly where Dynata’s first-party panel makes the difference. With verified, permissioned consumers across 70+ markets, our Brand Lift studies ensure your results come from the right people, not a mismatched pool that looks nothing like your target.
What a Strong Brand Lift Study Looks Like
When a study is built well, the difference is noticeable. The results don’t just sit in a deck. They actually shape what you do next.
The strongest studies:
- Use a clean control and exposed design with a solid sample size
- Measure the universal brand metrics, but also tie them to your campaign goals
- Cover the channels where your ads actually ran
- Deliver results fast enough to act on them
- Put the numbers in context with industry benchmarks
That’s when brand lift stops being “extra reporting” and starts being a competitive edge.
What’s a Good Brand Lift Result?
Marketers often ask: what does “good” look like? The truth is, it depends on the channel, creative, and audience. But industry benchmarks can help set expectations:
- Awareness: Often lifts by 5–15% in well-targeted campaigns
- Consideration: Typically shifts 3–8% depending on message strength
- Purchase intent: Usually smaller, in the 2–5% range, but highly meaningful at scale
These ranges are directional, not guarantees. A strong creative idea, supported by the right media mix, can outperform them. The point is that even single-digit improvements in perception can translate into major sales impact when applied across large audiences.
A Real-World Example: Virgin Media
Virgin Media wanted to understand how its TV Edit microsite was shaping brand perceptions. Dynata ran a brand lift study comparing site visitors with a matched control group — revealing how the experience influenced awareness, consideration, and advocacy.
The insights went far beyond clicks or pageviews. Read the full case study to see how Virgin Media used data to prove and strengthen its brand impact.
Getting the Most From Your Brand Lift Study
The value of brand lift isn’t the chart. It’s how you use it.
With reliable results, you can:
- See results fast with near real-time insights
- Isolate the impact of specific ads, channels, publishers, and audiences
- Optimize in-flight to maximize performance
That’s what turns brand lift from an experiment into a habit.
The Bottom Line
Most marketers already know what a brand lift study is. The real question is whether you’re running one that delivers insights you can believe in.
With Dynata’s Brand Lift solution, you get results built on high-quality data, real audience depth, and benchmarks that give your numbers meaning. You walk away knowing how your campaigns are shaping awareness, favorability, and intent — and how to make the next one even better.
Because at the end of the day, you don’t just need more data. You need proof that your campaigns are building a brand people remember, prefer, and choose. Without it, marketing gets dismissed as a cost center instead of being recognized as a growth driver.
Don’t let another campaign go by without proof that it worked. Dynata Brand Lift helps you measure the impact that matters and stop wasting budget on guesswork. See how it works.
FAQ
How do brand lift studies actually work?
A brand lift study splits people into two groups: those who saw your ad and those who didn’t. By comparing their responses to survey questions, you can see if your campaign changed awareness, favorability, or intent.
Aren’t clicks and conversions enough to measure success?
Clicks and conversions tell you what happened in the moment. A brand lift study goes deeper by showing how people’s perceptions shifted — which is often what drives long-term growth.
What kinds of results should I expect from a brand lift study?
You’ll usually see numbers around awareness, recall, favorability, consideration, and purchase intent. Each metric answers a different question about your campaign’s impact, from “Did people notice us?” to “Are they more likely to buy from us?”
How do I know if my brand lift results are trustworthy?
Trustworthy studies use large, balanced groups and measure across the same channels where your ads ran. The best ones also deliver results quickly and compare your numbers against industry benchmarks, so you know if your campaign truly stood out.
Why would I choose Dynata for brand lift?
Dynata’s Brand Lift solution gives you a people-based, single-source view of brand performance across every channel, device, and publisher.