Brand lift
brand lift
The measurable increase in brand awareness, perception, or intent after a marketing campaign. How much a campaign moved the needle.
Brand lift measures the change in brand perception caused by a specific campaign. You survey your target audience before and after the campaign. Did brand awareness increase? Did favorability improve? Did purchase intent go up? The difference is brand lift.
Brand lift studies require a control group: people who were not exposed to the campaign. Compare the exposed group to the control group. If 20% of the control group is aware of your brand and 35% of the exposed group is aware, the brand lift is 15 percentage points.
Brand lift is the primary measurement for awareness campaigns that do not have direct conversion goals. When you sponsor a conference, run a brand video, or publish a research report, the goal is not immediate clicks. You are paying for impressions and awareness. The goal is shifting perception. Brand lift measures whether the perception actually shifted.
Examples
Brand lift from a conference sponsorship.
Pre-conference survey of attendees: 18% are aware of your brand. Post-conference survey: 42% are aware. Brand lift: 24 percentage points. Additionally, favorability among aware respondents increased from 3.0 to 3.8 (out of 5).
A video campaign with measured brand lift.
LinkedIn runs a brand lift study on your video campaign. Control group: 12% consideration intent. Exposed group: 19% consideration intent. Brand lift: 7 percentage points. At the scale of the campaign (200k exposed), that represents 14,000 additional people considering your product.
Brand lift justifies awareness spending.
The CFO questions the $200k podcast sponsorship. No direct leads. The marketing team shares brand lift data: unaided awareness among the podcast audience went from 5% to 22%. Purchase intent doubled. The CFO approves renewal.
In practice
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Frequently asked questions
How do you measure brand lift?
Run a survey with two groups: one exposed to your campaign, one not (control). Ask about awareness, favorability, consideration, and intent. The difference between the groups is the brand lift. LinkedIn, Google, and Meta offer built-in brand lift studies for campaigns run on their platforms.
What is a good brand lift result?
A 5-15 percentage point increase in unaided awareness is strong for a single campaign. Any measurable increase in purchase intent is meaningful because B2B purchase intent is hard to move. The absolute numbers matter less than the trend: is each campaign lifting the brand incrementally?
Related terms
The sum of every perception, association, and feeling people have about your company. What they say about you when you are not in the room.
The commercial value of customer perception. Strong brand equity means customers pay more, stay longer, and refer others.
The percentage of total market conversation that mentions your brand compared to competitors. How much of the conversation you own.
The number of times your ad or content is displayed. Counts views, not people. One person seeing your ad three times is three impressions.
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