How brand lift studies illuminate marketing performance: FAQs for CMOs
- Michelle Andrade
- Apr 18
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 24
A scientific approach to measuring paid media's impact on actual business growth
It's 2025 -- we've all moved beyond the tired brand vs. performance debate, correct?
And we understand the importance of brand as an indicator of sustained business growth.
But the challenge remains: how do we effectively measure brand outcomes for upper-funnel paid media campaigns?
The Challenge of Measuring Brand
Common brand metrics include:
awareness
favorability
perceived quality, and
advocacy
These metrics are inherently challenging to measure because they require either:
Direct consumer feedback through surveys, panels, or focus groups; or
Indirect behavioral indicators such as branded search volume or social listening tools
There's no perfect solution! At Exverus, we prefer taking a scientific approach through brand lift studies.
Understanding Brand Lift Studies
A brand lift study measures an advertising campaign's impact on brand awareness and favorability.
Brand lift studies use a test-and-control methodology, comparing a test group (people exposed to the ads) against a control group (people not exposed to the ads but otherwise similar).
This approach offers significant advantages:
It controls for external factors that might impact brand perception, such as negative press or viral content
Unlike brand search trends or social listening, it specifically accounts for media exposure, allowing us to isolate the impact of marketing campaigns
Brand Lift Studies: FAQs for CMOs
How much does a brand lift study cost?
Brand lift studies vary in cost: they may be added-value on some ad platforms and with some media partners with minimum media spend, or from about $30K for simple digital only studies to over $150K for complex multi-channel studies.
Google Ads, Amazon Ads, and Meta offer free brand lift studies to advertisers who spend above a certain threshold and achieve a certain impression threshold to ensure enough data for a statistically significant result. The main disadvantage of these studies is the inability to account for exposure to ads from your campaign that are running on other channels that can potentially contaminate results.
Research partners like Nielsen or DISQO can measure incremental brand lift across many media channels holistically (CTV, digital audio, out-of-home, radio, you name it!) This can give your team a more complete idea of how exposures to your ad connect with real-life consumer sentiment. It’s usually less costly to run studies for online channels where ads can be tagged and more expensive to measure offline channels such as TV or out-of-home.
Long campaign flights, interim reports, online dashboards, and larger samples needed to break out results in more detail are all factors that can add to the cost of a study.
What's the minimum budget needed to run a brand lift study?
Again, it depends upon the platform and the question(s) you're trying to answer. Below are the requirements for added values studies on a couple of popular ad platforms:
LinkedIn Ads provides free Brand Lift Testing for campaigns spending at least:
$60K to answer one brand metric
$90K to answer two brand metrics
Meanwhile, YouTube brand lift studies need only:
$3,500 in the first seven days of the campaign for one metric
$5,000 in the first seven days of the campaign for two metrics
How large does my brand lift study sample size need to be for reliable results?
This question is complicated because the answer can vary so widely and depend upon many considerations.
We've seen sample sizes as low as 30, whereas Google recommends 2,000-5,000 responses per question in both the control and test groups for each lift metric.
If you need multiple breakouts, such as by audiences or creatives, you'll need a large overall sample size to have enough data for each.
How do I know who saw my ad?
Tracking ad exposure typically involves placing pixels on creative assets to digitally monitor viewership. However, this approach isn't feasible across all channels:
Many social media platforms restrict this tracking capability
Traditional channels like TV, radio, and out-of-home don't support digital tracking
The common alternative is an opportunity to see (OTS) methodology, where survey respondents' reported media consumption is matched against media placement timing.
In our experience, OTS works well for certain channels like TV or radio but yields inconsistent results for others like social media.
The methodology assumes test and control groups are identical except for ad exposure. We attempt to ensure this through sample matching based on demographics, geography, or online behaviors—but no two samples are 100% alike! The goal is similarity, not perfection.
And beware of cross-channel contamination: Modern consumers fluidly move between mobile, video, and TV multiple times daily, making channel-level impact testing challenging. When we're trying to compare ad-exposed versus non-exposed individuals, channel-level brand impact testing can be contaminated with other ad exposures.
How do I connect brand lift metrics to business outcomes?
A few ways:
Mid-funnel metrics like web traffic, customer acquisition rates, and customer acquisition cost (CAC). The more you invest in your brand, the lower your CAC should be.
Marketing mix modeling (or media mix modeling) aggregates many sources of data to provide a comprehensive, full-funnel understanding of how different marketing channels contribute to overall business growth. AI-powered predictive analytics tools model different scenarios to help us choose the right course.
Loyalty indicators like customer retention, online reviews, referrals, and consistent price premium. Your brand is strong if consumers think of you long after they've made a first purchase.
The Importance of Data Integration
Scientific measurement can be complex and messy sometimes. That's why we recommend integrating multiple data sources to corroborate brand lift results.
For example, if your study shows no significant lift from advertising, but your searches and sales show substantial increases, you have good reason to believe your campaign was effective despite the study results.
The Exverus Approach
When making complex decisions about advertising strategy or evaluating campaign performance, we believe in considering multiple information sources and leveraging expert analysis.
Our director of data analytics, Charles Lai, leads a team of seasoned statistics experts who can glean the strongest possible insights for your brand. Learn more about brand lift measurement from Charles below:
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