Mastering Brand Lift: Understanding the “true” lift on Meta

To succeed in today’s dynamic digital marketing landscape, it’s crucial to accurately measure the impact of brand and product launches. How can this be achieved effectively? In this piece, Johan Elmqvist presents a new methodology for measuring brand impact.

Written by Johan Elmqvist, Paid Social expert, on April 3, 2025 | Reading time: 5 minutes

Mastering Nuanced Measurement in Digital Marketing

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, understanding the nuances of Brand lift studies can be a game-changer. With advertisers spending big budgets, there is a substantial risk of contaminating what’s important; namely being able to measure the effect of brand and product launches in a nuanced and truthful manner. This is precisely what we achieved in a recent project with an industry leading client.

A New Methodology for Measuring Brand Impact

Many brands struggle to measure the true impact of their marketing efforts. One challenge lies in distinguishing between the actual impact of specific brand or product launch campaigns when there is potential contamination of other high budget campaign activities (mainly an Always-on/Evergreen campaign setup) running simultaneously. Our client faced this exact issue, seeking to understand how their ongoing marketing activities influenced their brand and product launch campaigns, having had Brand Lift Study results below benchmark for the last couple of years. Having utilised Brand Lift Studies on Meta for the initial phase of the launch, again with low or non-statistical lifts, we developed a new methodology hoping to be able to measure a more truthful impact of the campaign. This new methodology also gave the client the opportunity to measure the impact of their Always-on/Evergreen campaign setup through Brand Lift Study.

Ad recall fig 1: Old product launches and the initial brand lift study for the new product launch

The key insights

Through a detailed multicell brand lift study, we uncovered several key insights:

• Audience Segmentation: By separating audiences into distinct groups (namely isolating a holdout group, the Always-on/Evergreen campaigns, and the new product launch campaign in separate cells), we could accurately measure the impact of different campaign elements without contamination from one another.

Ad recall fig 2: Old product launches, the initial brand lift study for the new product launch, and the new brand lift methodology

• Benchmark Comparison: The new lift methodology made the campaign outperform Meta’s industry benchmarks, highlighting the true effectiveness of the campaign without contamination from the Always-on/Evergreen campaigns. It also showed how prominent the Always-on/Evergreen campaigns were in driving lift across Ad recall, Brand awareness and Consideration.
• Incremental Reach: The new product launch campaign successfully penetrated new market segments, exceeding standard benchmarks for unaided ad recall – achieving the highest lift results for a product launch since the company started using Brand Lift Studies to measure its product launches.
• Consideration Boost: The new product launch campaign came in slightly above Meta’s consideration benchmarks, while the Always-on/Evergreen activities significantly increased brand consideration, proving their value in influencing purchase decisions.

Implications of the study

This study was performed exclusively on Meta’s platforms. Users within each respective cell could’ve been exposed and thereby affected by advertising on other marketing platforms which can influence their recollection, awareness and consideration of the brand and the new product outside of Meta’s eco system. The new product campaign launch had an initial launch phase a couple of months earlier which made users aware of the product before this campaign. However, this launch strategy was the same as previous launches and the old product launch campaigns was detecting low or non-statistical lifts for Ad recall, Brand awareness and Consideration.

Effective Measurement Reveals True Brand Lift

This case study underscores the effectiveness of the right measurement methodology in isolating the observed campaign without contamination. It also shows how Always-on/Evergreen activities drives brand lift, particularly among audiences already engaged with the client. By strategically optimizing campaign elements and isolating product/brand campaigns from the Always-on/Evergreen campaigns, there is opportunity to understand the true campaign impact without contamination from other campaign activities on Meta’s platforms.

About the author

Johan Elmqvist is a Paid Social expert in the Paid media team at Curamando, with a background in ecommerce verticals fashion, automotive, personal care, betting and apps.

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