Brand lift

Brand lift is the increase in brand awareness, recall, perception or purchase intent that can be credited to your advertising. It is measured by comparing people who had the chance to see your ads with similar people who did not.

Why clicks don't show it

Brand campaigns often don't aim for a click or a sale today. Someone can see an ad, remember the brand and buy weeks later, with no click in between. Metrics like reach and ad impressions show how many people were exposed, but not whether anything changed in their minds. Brand lift measures that change.

How a brand lift test works in Meta

Meta describes brand lift tests in its Experiments tool as a way to measure the incremental effect your advertising has on brand awareness, perception, recall or purchase intent. The setup follows a simple design:

1. Meta creates two audiences from the people your campaign could reach: a test group that has the opportunity to see your ads, and a control group that does not.
2. People in both groups can be asked short survey questions. Meta's Brand Lift help page says the sample group is randomly divided into test and holdout groups.
3. Because the two groups are alike apart from ad exposure, the difference between their answers is the lift from the ads.

Meta says there is no additional cost to create a test. Your ad spend is still the cost of running the campaign.

How lift is read

A common way to express the result:

Lift = (test group result − control group result) ÷ control group result

Say 20% of the control group recalls your brand and 23% of the test group does. The absolute lift is 3 percentage points, and the relative lift is (23 − 20) ÷ 20 = 15%.

A small gap needs enough people in each group to be believable. Treat a result without a clear confidence level as a hint, not a conclusion.

Brand lift versus conversion lift

Meta lists both under Experiments: a conversion lift test measures the incremental performance of your Meta ads. It is the same idea as incrementality testing. If you only want to compare two versions of an ad, an A/B test is the simpler tool.

Tips for a clean test

• Set a clear question first, such as ad recall or purchase intent, and run one campaign goal.
• Don't change creative, audiences or budget in the middle of a test.
• Give the study enough time and spend to collect a usable sample.
• Pair the result with sales data over the following weeks, since awareness can pay off late.

Example. A running shoe brand launches a six-week awareness campaign and reaches 2 million people. It runs a brand lift test with ad recall as the question. The control group recalls the brand at 8%, the test group at 10%. That is a lift of 2 points, or 25% relative to 8%. The team uses it to justify a second wave and watches branded searches in the weeks after.

In Madgicx. Madgicx does not run brand lift studies. One-Click Report shows data from Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Shopify and Klaviyo in one place, so you can read a lift result next to the rest of the account.

FAQ

What does brand lift mean?

Brand lift is the measured increase in awareness, recall, perception or purchase intent caused by advertising. It is found by comparing people who could see the ads with a similar group who could not.

How do you measure brand lift?

You run a controlled test: split the audience into a test group and a holdout, survey both, and compare the answers. In Meta this is done in the Experiments tool.

Does a Meta brand lift test cost extra?

Meta says there is no additional cost to create a test. You still pay for the ads that run during it.

Is brand lift the same as brand awareness?

No. Brand awareness is how well people know your brand at a point in time. Brand lift is the change in that awareness that your ads caused.

Related

• Related terms: Incrementality, A/B testing, Marketing mix modeling (MMM)
• In depth: Facebook ads for brand awareness

Sources

• About Experiments, Meta Business Help Center
• About Brand Lift tests, Meta Business Help Center