Glossary
What is a brand lift study and how does one work?
Updated
Definition
A brand lift study measures whether an advertising campaign changed what people think, by comparing survey answers from people exposed to the campaign against a matched control group that was not, on metrics like awareness, ad recall, consideration, and intent.
The mechanics are a controlled experiment run inside ad delivery. The platform holds out a randomized control group that qualifies for the campaign but does not see it, then surveys both groups with the same questions. The difference between exposed and control answers is the lift, reported per metric with a confidence read. Because assignment is randomized before exposure, lift studies support causal claims in a way brand tracking, which just watches metrics move over time, cannot.
The practical constraints decide who can use them. Platform studies (Google, Meta, and the other major ad platforms offer them) require meaningful spend and impression volume before the survey math works, which is why lift studies are a scaled-campaign tool. Vendor-run studies through research firms extend the method across channels at study-level cost. Either way, the study measures the campaign, in the flight, on the platform: it is an event, not a monitor.
What a lift study cannot do is watch the space between campaigns, catch a competitor's launch eroding your consideration, or explain why a metric moved. Mature teams pair the two instruments: lift studies for causal reads on big flights, continuous behavioral tracking for the always-on trendline between them.
How this shows up in Waldo
Waldo is the between-flights instrument: daily tracked conversation, ad activity, and audience signals for your brand and the category, snapshots stored permanently so the baseline never has holes. Teams run it under and between lift studies so a causal result lands on a trendline instead of in a vacuum.
Questions teams ask
How much do brand lift studies cost?
Platform-run studies are typically free to eligible campaigns but gated by spend and impression minimums that put them out of reach of small flights. Vendor-run cross-channel studies are priced per study, generally at research-project cost rather than tool cost.
What is a good brand lift result?
Depends on the metric and the baseline: recall lifts run larger than intent lifts, and low-awareness brands have more headroom. The disciplined read is a statistically significant lift on the metric the campaign was designed to move, not a big number on whichever metric happened to move.
What is the difference between brand lift and brand tracking?
A lift study is a causal experiment around one campaign; tracking is longitudinal measurement of the same metrics over time regardless of campaigns. Lift answers "did this flight work"; tracking answers "where is the brand, and what changed."
Related terms and reading
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