Brand lift

Brand lift is the change in a brand metric, such as ad recall, awareness, favorability, or stated purchase intent, that a campaign caused, as opposed to the level of that metric on its own. It is typically measured with a brand lift study: surveys are shown to a group exposed to the campaign and a comparable holdout group that was not, and the difference in survey responses between the two groups is the lift.

This design makes brand lift a form of incrementality testing applied to upper-funnel brand outcomes rather than to sales or conversions, which is what a conversion lift study measures instead. It differs from simply tracking reach and frequency or share of voice, which describe how much a campaign was delivered, not what effect it had on how people think or feel about the brand.

Brand lift matters because most of what upper-funnel and brand advertising is meant to accomplish, awareness and perception, cannot be observed directly from clicks or purchases. The main pitfalls are studies run with samples too small to detect a real effect, and survey-based measurement that is itself noisy and sensitive to question wording, so results are usually treated directionally rather than as precise point estimates.