Key Points
- Brand lift measurement reveals how a campaign actually shifts how people think about, feel toward, and interact with your brand, going far beyond simple exposure metrics.
- A brand lift study compares exposed and unexposed audiences to measure lift across key metrics such as awareness, familiarity, favorability, consideration, ad recall, message association, and purchase intent, each representing a stage in the marketing funnel.
- Dynata’s approach uses first-party, opted-in panel data to tie respondents 1:1 to ad exposure and maintain precisely matched test and control groups for accurate, bias-free results.
- Brand Lift is reported with 95% statistical confidence, and frequency analysis helps determine how many ad exposures drive the strongest brand response.
- Tracking brand lift over time builds benchmarks that reveal what messages resonate, prove ROI, and guide smarter creative and media optimization across campaigns.
What is Brand Lift Measurement?
Traditional metrics like clicks or impressions show you how many people interacted, but not what moved them. Brand lift uncovers the “why,” revealing if your campaign truly changes minds, feelings, or actions.
Brand lift measurement gives marketers a window into how campaigns shape perceptions and feelings. Tracking awareness, favorability, and intent reveals if your advertising is truly building a stronger brand.
Brand lift studies compare a group exposed to your campaign to a control group that hasn’t seen it. The difference shows your campaign’s measurable impact.
Common Objectives of Brand Lift Measurement
- Understand audience perception shifts by channel or message.
- Optimize campaigns in real time to improve ROI.
- Validate media effectiveness and creative resonance.
- Benchmark performance across campaigns and markets.
6 Key Brand Lift Metrics to Track
No single metric captures brand lift. Instead, a blend of metrics gives you the full story. Here are six to watch:
1. Brand Awareness
Measures the likelihood of people to recall your brand after seeing the ad, as compared to an unexposed control group.
Example metric: % increase in unaided or aided brand awareness..
2. Ad Recall
Measures how well people remember your ad and associate it with your brand after exposure.
High ad recall shows that your campaign not only captured attention but also linked its message back to your brand in consumers’ minds. If people can remember who the ad was for and what it communicated, it signals effective brand message linkage and strong creative alignment.
Example metric: % of respondents who correctly recall both the ad and the brand featured within it.Insight: High ad recall with low brand linkage may be due to creative resonance without brand clarity, which may indicate an opportunity to refine messaging or visual cues.
3. Brand Familiarity
Measures how well people recognize your brand and understand what it offers beyond simply knowing it exists.
Brand familiarity reflects the strength of prior experience or exposure, showing whether audiences feel knowledgeable enough about your products or services to describe them confidently.
High familiarity signals that your marketing has built a clear, consistent impression of your brand in the marketplace.
Example metric: % of respondents who say they “know a lot” or “know some” about your brand’s products or services.Insight: A lift in familiarity without a corresponding lift in favorability may indicate your audience is aware of your offerings but not yet convinced of their value, indicating an opportunity to refine positioning or value messaging.
4. Brand Favorability
Measures how positively people view your brand after exposure to the campaign.
Helps evaluate message tone, visual appeal, and emotional connection.
Example metric: % of respondents who say…
Insight: Low brand favorability could indicate a larger brand issue in addition to the audience’s sentiment associated with the campaign message itself. Seek additional clarity with follow up questions or studies.
5. Consideration and Purchase Intent
Shows whether exposure to your campaign nudged people closer to buying. After the campaign, check for real-world actions like purchases or searches to see if intent turned into measurable results.
Example metric: % of respondents saying they’re likely or very likely to purchase.
6. Message Association
Measures whether your message is associated with your brand after exposure.
Indicates clarity of creative and message-brand alignment.
How to Measure Brand Lift Effectively: Best Practices
To get results you can trust and act on, build your brand lift study around these best practices:
1. Define Clear Objectives
Start by pinpointing what you want your campaign to achieve and which part of the funnel matters most, whether it’s awareness, perception, or intent. Make a clear prediction for each goal before launch, such as ‘This ad will boost awareness.’ This ensures you measure what really matters, not just surface stats.
2. Establish a Control Group
Ensure your study includes an unexposed audience for a valid comparison. This isolates the impact of your campaign from other factors.
Instead of relying on anonymous or third-party cookies, effective brand lift studies use first-party, opted-in panel data to ensure precise exposure tracking. Each respondent is tied 1:1 to whether they were definitively exposed (or unexposed) to the campaign, enabling accurate test and control comparisons without contamination risk.
Dynata’s test and control groups are carefully matched across key demographics and behaviors to isolate true campaign impact and eliminate sampling bias.
3. Use the Right Sample Size
Larger sample sizes lead to more accurate results. Work with a partner with sufficient panel scale that is skilled at recruiting balanced, representative panels.
4. Choose the Right Time Frame
Ensure your campaign runs long enough to collect a statistically reliable number of completed responses. From a measurement standpoint, the focus is on reaching the required sample size within each exposure group to detect meaningful lift. Dynata’s reporting also includes frequency analysis, helping advertisers understand how many times a user needs to see an ad to generate the optimal brand response.
Why Brand Lift Measurement Matters
Brand lift metrics help marketers prove the effectiveness of their campaigns and provide actionable insights to help improve them. They offer:
- Cross-channel insights: Insight into which channels, both individually and collectively, work best to drive positive outcomes.
- Confidence in creative decisions: Knowing what messages resonate
- Optimization insights: Adjusting media mix, targeting, or spend
- Proof of ROI: Linking awareness and perception gains to business outcomes
Make brand lift measurement a staple in every major campaign. This unlocks insights into how your ads spark engagement and build brand value. Tracking across campaigns multiplies your impact and energizes marketers to drive growth.
Over time, tracking brand lift across campaigns builds a powerful feedback loop, helping teams connect awareness to advocacy and creativity to measurable business outcomes.
FAQs
Q1: How long should a brand lift study run?
Most studies run for the duration of a campaign typically a minimum of 1-3 months to capture sufficient exposure and response data.
Q2: What are the four levels of brand awareness?
Brand awareness typically develops in stages. In a Dynata Brand Lift study, awareness questions are part of the upper-funnel KPIs that gauge how effectively advertising builds visibility and understanding of a brand.
Common awareness stages include:
- Brand Recognition: When consumers can identify your brand by name, logo, or packaging.
- Brand Recall: When people can remember your brand without a prompt (“Which toothpaste brands come to mind?”).
- Top-of-Mind Awareness: When your brand is the first recalled in its category, signaling strong mental availability.
- Brand Familiarity: When consumers know what your brand offers and feel informed enough to describe or compare it confidently.
Advertisers often customize these questions to align with their specific campaign KPIs. Dynata’s methodology allows flexibility. Brands can tailor survey wording to match their marketing objectives while maintaining consistent, statistically valid measurement across studies. Our research team is available to assist clients with developing custom surveys to meet their specific KPIs.
Q3: What KPIs go beyond brand awareness?
While awareness measures how well a campaign captures attention, Dynata’s Brand Lift solution also tracks mid- and lower-funnel KPIs to show how media influences attitudes and intent.
Additional KPIs include:
- Consideration: Whether consumers would consider purchasing or engaging with your brand in the future.
- Brand Favorability or Perception: How positively people feel about your brand after exposure.
- Message Recall or Linkage: Whether respondents connected the ad message back to the brand.
- Likelihood to Recommend (Brand Advocacy): Whether consumers would recommend your brand to others, signaling trust and satisfaction.
- Purchase Intent: How likely people are to buy your product or service after seeing the ad.
Together, these metrics reveal the full-funnel impact of advertising, from awareness and perception through consideration, recommendation, and intent, helping marketers understand how campaigns influence both mindset and action.
Q4: Can brand lift metrics predict sales?
Brand lift metrics do not replace sales data, but they give early signs about future revenue by showing how your campaign shifts consumer mindset and intent. To prove ROI, compare your brand lift findings with sales or conversions. Linking perception changes to sales or sign-ups helps prove your campaign’s financial impact and guides smarter marketing decisions.
Q5: How long does it take to get brand lift results?
Brand lift results are typically available within one to two weeks after campaign launch, depending on audience size and response volume.
Dynata collects responses in real time, and preliminary results can be viewed in the interactive dashboard as soon as the study begins reaching statistical reliability.
This near real-time visibility lets advertisers monitor early performance and track changes in awareness, favorability, and intent throughout the campaign.
Q6: What does brand lift study reporting look like?
Dynata’s Brand Lift Dashboard provides a visual, intuitive way to explore your results. The dashboard shows lift scores and statistical significance across all measured KPIs, such as awareness, familiarity, favorability, message association, consideration, recommendation, and purchase intent.
Advertisers can view results by audience segment, frequency, and creative, helping identify which exposures drive the strongest impact.
Charts and downloadable summaries make it easy to share results with internal teams or agencies, demonstrating the campaign’s effectiveness at each stage of the marketing funnel. Results are analyzed at a 95% confidence level, with statistical significance clearly displayed in Dynata’s reporting dashboard so advertisers can interpret lift with confidence.The dashboard also allows you to adjust confidence levels to enable a look at directional results.