Best Practices for Running a Brand Lift Study

Please be sure to read about Meta’s approach to measurement and the available tools in other blog posts in this series:

Get a Better Understanding of Digital Marketing with Meta's Measurement Solutions

Best Practices for Running a Conversion Lift Study

Measurement-Minded Media Planning

As a government, political or nonprofit organization, you may use Meta’s measurement tools to learn about the effectiveness of your creative, make ad buying more efficient, and help improve your campaign results.

One of the tools you may choose to leverage is a Brand Lift study. Brand Lift uses experimental design to measure incremental brand results. It does this by polling people to assess the impact of a campaign on metrics such as brand awareness, ad recall, favorability, and intent. (Note that Brand Lift and other measurement solutions may not be available for all advertising campaigns.) Brand polling surveys both people who had the opportunity to see your ads and people in a holdout group. This survey then calculates the incremental effect your ads had on brand awareness, ad recall, favorability, or intent.

Once you’ve understood Measurement-Minded Media Planning in preparation for your campaign, review the following checklist before setting up Brand Lift. Aim to answer “Yes” to the questions below to help ensure you are set up for success.

Media planning

• Is your Facebook campaign objective aligned to your marketing goal so you are optimizing for the results you value?
  • For example, if your marketing goal is to drive awareness of your organization, choose the Awareness objective and consider optimizing for reach or ad recall lift.
  • Brand lift studies are best suited for campaigns that have Awareness and Engagement objectives, optimizing for reach, brand awareness, video views, or engagement.
• Have you considered the length of your campaign?
  • Your campaign must run for a minimum of 14 days, and a maximum of 90 days. A longer study makes it easier to achieve sufficient polling and less likely to achieve negative results. .
• Do the creatives meet our best practices?
• Have you planned your average weekly frequency to target between 1 and 2 impressions per week?
• Does your budget meet the minimum requirement?
  • We set minimum budgets in each country based on our analyses to help achieve the minimum responses needed to see statistically significant results. This helps your test reach enough people and have the best chance of success.
• Have you confirmed your organization isn’t running any active campaigns targeting the same audience with similar creative that won’t be included in the study?
  • Studies with high rates of these ads may have a harder time achieving conclusive lift and it may even lead to negative lift, if the performance of the other ads is better than that of the measured ads.
  • Combine all campaigns for the same organization into the study or stagger campaigns to eliminate overlapping target audiences.

Meta Advantage+ tools

• Are you using Advantage+ campaign budget so our system can help allocate your budget to the most efficient ad set?
• Are you targeting a broad, qualified audience leveraging Advantage+ audience?
• Are you using all available placements by leveraging Advantage+ placements?

Brand Lift set up

• Do the Brand Lift poll questions align with the true goals of the ad campaign?
  • For example, if your goal is to increase awareness of your blood donation initiative, are you asking an awareness question? “Have you heard of [name of blood donation initiative]?”
• Do the Brand Lift questions align with the creative message and ad copy?
  • For example, if your creative featured a call to action to "Drive slowly to save lives", are you using that same phrase in your questions?
• Are the questions easily understandable and succinctly phrased?
• Are the questions independent from each other?
  • People will only see one poll question at a time. Poll questions are not served in sequence.

To help you with getting started, here is a summarized checklist of requirements and recommendations to maximize the effectiveness of your Brand Lift studies and gain valuable insights to refine your future campaigns.