Your guide to brand lift surveys for effective advertising (+ 20 examples!)

Brand lift occurs when an advertising campaign sparks a positive shift in how people perceive and engage with your brand. A brand lift survey is the best way to measure this ad campaign effectiveness.

Brand lift surveys will help you understand and quantify the impact of your ads in a way that goes beyond short-term wins like sales revenue. The key brand metrics they collect can tell you a lot about the state of your brand and the strength of your ad strategies. 

So, how do you launch a brand lift survey? Find out what you need to know, from common brand lift study questions and survey examples to tips for actionable insights. 

What is a brand lift study? A brand lift survey, or brand lift study, is a tool marketers use to measure changes in consumer perception of a brand as a direct result of an advertising campaign. These changes aren’t usually reflected in immediate sales, so a brand lift survey is a valuable way to capture the impact of ads on consumer behaviors.

Brand lift surveys may cover a variety of metrics, including: 

These brand lift metrics ladder up into your overall brand health and help you assess your brand equity. They're often considered key performance indicators for ad campaigns.

What should you ask in your brand lift research? It all depends on what metrics will be most useful and you want to learn about your ad campaign’s impact. Here are brand lift survey questions for a brand lift study, broken down by category: 

Related: Explore brand tracking resources that will help you understand, analyze, and optimize your brand impact.

Integrating brand lift surveys into your market research program can do wonders for your marketing efforts and strategies. That’s because brand lift indicates the success or shortcomings of advertising initiatives and gives you valuable insight into the long-term impact of advertising effectiveness. 

Measuring brand lift helps you:

Why wait until the end of your advertising campaign to assess its effectiveness? When you measure brand lift midway through a campaign, you can reorient your approach if it turns out that the advertising is less successful than you’d hoped.

By capturing insights on how your advertising impacts customer awareness, interest, and desire to purchase, you’ll get a complete picture of how effectively your advertising shapes customers’ actions and brand perception.

Imagine that you and a direct competitor have created an in-store ad campaign. If you only focus on how customers perceive your brand, you’ll miss important market research context. By comparing your brand desirability with your competitors, you’ll get a broader view of campaign performance relative to competing campaigns. 

Brand lift metrics can boost your multi-channel marketing tactics by revealing where your ads have the most impact. For instance, brand lift survey data will allow you to compare perceptions and performance of ads run across social media platforms, traditional print media, and broadcast media. And once you’ve seen which channels are working better than others, you can adjust your ad spend accordingly.

Finally, brand lift helps you to maximize the growth of your brand. If your brand lift study shows that your advertising is working, you can be confident that extra spending is likely to generate even more lift—or confirm minimum budget requirements for future campaigns.

Let’s take a closer look at the types of metrics that can help you understand brand lift. Most are collected via brand lift surveys—and it's helpful to think about them in the context of the three main stages in the marketing funnel: awareness, interest/consideration, and conversion. 

Brand lift surveys will help you determine whether your ads break through the noise. Are they memorable? Do viewers perceive your brand in the way you hoped? Two key metrics here are attention and brand linkage.

How well do viewers notice and remember your brand? You can measure attention by showing survey respondents an unbranded version of your ad and asking if they recall seeing it. For a more complete analysis, consider your ad’s ability to capture attention alongside traditional metrics like impressions and interaction rates.

Brand linkage assesses whether viewers correctly associate your brand with an unbranded visual representation of your ad. This metric reveals how well your ad connects its messaging to your brand, rather than just the broader product category.

While promoting awareness of your brand is a crucial first step in brand lift, it’s meaningless without customer interest. Three areas you should consider evaluating to measure interest are message communication, perceptions of brand attributes, and ad diagnostics.

Is your brand’s strategic message really being conveyed by your ad? In other words, did viewers pick up what you were putting down? 

Ideally, you should conduct ad testing before your ad launches to ensure its message is striking the right chord with your audience. However, a brand lift study can also give you valuable insights. Did your ad’s message change how people see your brand? Was the message understood and absorbed into your brand image? 

Does the ad improve perceptions of key brand or product attributes? For example, suppose you created an ad campaign for an affordable, eco-conscious sneaker. In that case, you might be interested in learning whether ad viewers found the brand and core product to be more ethical, more sustainable, cheaper, or more appealing than competing products.

Once an ad is run, you should prioritize getting performance data like interaction times with the ad or the number of likes and shares it generates on social media. However, this data will be much more valuable with context from your brand lift metrics. 

By capturing respondent ratings on the ad's likability, believability, relevance, and entertainment or informational value, you can understand why it is performing the way it is. 

Consideration metrics look at the ad's “response”: whether customers are more motivated toward the brand after seeing the ad, more likely to try or buy the brand, or whether their perceptions of the brand have improved. Are your ads persuasive enough to cause attitudinal changes (changes in consumer feelings, opinions, and beliefs) and behavior changes (changes in what consumers do)? 

Were people persuaded by the marketing messages contained in the ad? Are they more likely to consider or buy the brand after seeing the ad (measures of brand consideration and purchase intent), or are they likely to consume the brand more often (a measure of frequency)?

This captures whether people feel more positive or favorable toward a brand after seeing the ad. For example, viewers of an ad about a brand’s new ethically-made Bluetooth speakers might see the brand in a more positive light. This brand favorability is even more revealing if you compare it to a competitor's.

Sometimes consideration metrics can be captured via social media. However, the number of shares and likes on a digital ad is just one slice of the big picture. Surveys are an easy and potentially more accurate way to see how people feel—and they can be used in conjunction with other digital research into ad effectiveness. 

To make sure that your ads are effective on desire before they even launch, you should also consider ad testing.

Measuring brand lift’s not difficult, but it requires a thoughtful approach. Like any marketing efforts, your brand lift surveys will get better results if you've aligned on goals, audiences, and your analysis plan ahead of time.

First thing first: You need to pinpoint the goals of your ad campaign to know what metrics you should prioritize. Depending on your ad objectives, these might include:

You’ll need to reach two groups with your brand lift survey:

The responses from your control group will provide a baseline that you can compare against your control group. Keep in mind, the general demographics of the two groups should be the same. 

Refer back to the goals of your ad campaign and the metrics that you need to collect. Your survey questions should support those goals. If your company is a relatively new startup, your focus might be more on brand awareness or ad recall. In that case, you’ll want to make sure your brand lift survey includes a fair share of questions to see if your ad put your brand top of mind for people.

Aim to include a mix of question types in your survey, but don’t overwhelm respondents with too many questions. Use your brand lift goals as a guide so you stick to asking what’s most important. Want some expert help? The SurveyMonkey Question Bank and built-in AI are beneficial for crafting clear questions that will get you the brand lift data you need.

Remember, you shouldn’t wait until your campaign is over to measure brand lift. While your ads are live, send your survey to both the control and exposed audience groups. You’ll be asking the same questions to both, so you can compare metrics for brand perception, purchase intent, ad recall, or any other brand lift details you need to uncover.

When your results are in, it’s time to compare and analyze the responses you received. Calculate the percentage difference in responses between your control group and exposed group to find out the amount of “lift” caused by your ads.

For example, if 70% of the exposed group said they’ll consider purchasing from your brand in the next year and 30% of the control group said the same, there’s a 40% lift in brand consideration.

Once you’ve taken time to really dig into your data and understand the impact of your campaign, you can put those insights to work. Maybe your brand awareness and brand engagement increased, but purchase intent was flat. Based on that insight, you could consider updating your ads with a more explicit call to action or more spotlight on the features that appeal most to your audience.

Brand lift insights will help you iterate wisely. Use them to inform future campaign effectiveness—from ideation to audience targeting to any special deals you offer.

How can you set up your brand lift study for success and gain valuable insights? It’s crucial to avoid common pitfalls that can compromise the quality and reliability of your results. Here are some mistakes to watch out for:

With SurveyMonkey, it’s easy to run brand lift studies and measure the impact and effectiveness of your ads. Want even more brand insights? Start with ad testing to predict your ad's impact before launch and ensure you’re investing in the right campaign—the ultimate cost-effectiveness.

Learn more about improving brand health with surveys or get started with our Brand Tracking Template.