Set up Brand Lift measurement

You can align your campaigns with your marketing goals by measuring your ads’ impact on the perception of your brand using a Brand Lift study (BLS).

Brand Lift provides insight into how people feel about your product or brand with metrics such as ad recall, brand awareness, and brand consideration, rather than using traditional metrics such as clicks, impressions, or views.

Topics in this article

• Availability
• How Brand Lift works
• Check if your Brand Lift study is eligible
• Set up a Brand Lift study
• Troubleshooting Brand lift eligibility
• Best practices
• Reporting

Availability

Brand lift is available for instant reserve, and real-time bidding inventory. This includes:

• Cross-exchange line items:
  • Ads from connected TV (CTV), display, video, and audio line items
• YouTube & partners line items:
  • In-stream ads, non-skippable ads, and bumper ads
  • YouTube ad sequence line items
  • YouTube video action campaigns
  • YouTube video reach line items
  • YouTube & partners audio line items
  • YouTube Connected TV (CTV) inventory

How Brand Lift works

A Brand Lift study helps you get insight about the effectiveness of your campaign using surveys shown to groups of people at different times. This includes:

• A sample group: Consists of people who have seen your ads.
• A control group: Consists of people who are eligible to see your ads, but who weren’t shown your ads.

The responses of the control group is compared with the responses of the sample group to help get valid and reliable results about changes in ad recall, brand consideration, and brand awareness as a result of your ads.

There are differences in how Brand Lift is measured for cross-exchange and YouTube & partners line items:

• For cross-exchange line items and insertion orders: Brand Lift is measured as a snapshot. Surveys continue for 28 days or until enough survey responses are collected.
• YouTube & partners line items and insertion orders: Brand Lift is measured throughout your insertion order’s flight. Surveys continue for 14 days or until enough survey responses are collected.

How does Display & Video 360 detect Brand Lift?

Display & Video 360 is able to detect smaller changes in absolute lift the more survey responses your Brand Lift study gets. In general, the more survey responses your study gets , the more you improve the accuracy of your Brand Lift measurement.

The following table shows the amount of detectable lift based on the number of survey responses:

For example, if you want to accurately detect 0.75% changes in absolute lift:

• Since 0.75% is half way between 1% and 0.5%, you can estimate requiring a minimum response of between 20,000 and 45,000, or about 33,000 survey responses.

When to expect Brand Lift results?

You may start to get Brand Lift results once your study begins to detect lift changes.

The following is a guideline of when you may begin to detect lift results:

• High-performing line items: You may start to get results when detectable lift after approximately 2,000 responses per lift metric.
• At the recommended budget minimum: You can expect to detect lift once you get 5,600 responses per lift metric.

Learn more about how to Understand your Brand Lift measurement data.

Check if your Brand Lift study is eligible

Before starting a Brand Lift study, you’ll need to determine if your Brand Lift study is eligible. The requirements are different for cross-exchange and YouTube Brand Lift studies.

Cross-exchange recommended budget

There is no budget requirement. You can improve the chance of detecting lift with at least a $15,000 USD budget per survey question. For connected TV the recommended budget is $30,000 USD budget per survey question.

YouTube required minimum budget

If your YouTube & partners Brand Lift study contains campaigns from more than one country category:

• The minimum budget is the higher minimum of all targeted country categories. This considers the country category of paused line items.

  Example: Budget requirement for studies with campaigns from multiply countries

  If a study with 1 question contains 2 campaigns:

  An active campaign from Country A with a minimum requirement of $5,000. A paused campaign from Country B with a minimum requirement $10,000. The minimum budget requirement you’ll need to meet is Country B.
  When calculating eligibility, only the budget from the active campaign from Country A will be used.

Determine if your YouTube Brand Lift study is eligible

Display & Video 360 calculates the daily budget for your YouTube campaigns using two daily budget calculations. The final daily budget is determined by the lowest daily total sum:

• The daily budget for the insertion order: Is calculated by dividing the total budget segment for the flight by the number of days.
• The daily budget for all line items in the insertion order: Is the total sum of the total daily budget across all line items.

  Example: Determine the final daily budget

  If the minimum budget requirement is $2 a day and you have one insertion order and one line item.

  Using the daily budget calculation:

  If the insertion order daily budget is $1 per day and the line item daily budget is $3 per day. The final daily budget is the lower of the two: $1 per day.

  Since the final daily budget of $1 is less than the minimum budget of $2 a day, your Brand Lift study is ineligible. You can try to combine with other insertion orders to create an eligible study.

  The total daily budget for the product or brand is the sum of the final daily budget values for all linked insertion orders.

To determine if your YouTube Brand Lift study is eligible:

• Add the final daily budget for all active campaigns in the study across 10 days.

  Example: Add the daily budget across 10 days to determine eligibility

  If the budget requirement for Canada (Country C) for 1 survey question is $15,000 USD across 10 days, and active campaigns show the following budget allocation:

  • Day 1 to Day 5: $800 USD budgeted a day
  • Day 6 to Day 10: $2500 USD budgeted a day

  

  Then your campaigns are eligible because the sum of the budget within 10 days is over $15,000 USD

Brand Lift surveys must comply with Google Ads Policies, Platform Program Policies, and Terms and Conditions. You can't collect viewer feedback on sensitive topics.

The following sensitive topics aren’t supported for cross-exchange studies: Alcohol, gambling, health, pharmacy, and politics. Learn more About Display & Video 360 account suspensions.

• For cross-exchange insertion orders: You’ll need to set up your Brand Lift study and get approval before the insertion order start date. For connected TV, the campaign flight must be 28 days.

• For YouTube & Partners insertion orders: The study can be set up independently of the the insertion order start date. The Brand lift study will automatically begin as your line items start serving.

To set up a Brand Lift study:

1. From the advertiser level, go to Experiments.
2. Click the Lift studies tab.
3. Click Create new.
4. Enter a Lift study name. Be as specific as possible (for example, “Google Pixel 3a" instead of “Google”).
5. Click Select the insertion orders and tick the checkbox next to the insertion order you want to include in your study.
   • To get results for each insertion order, associate each insertion order with its own product or brand.
   • Brand Lift only supports adding an insertion order to a single product or brand.
6. Click Select when done.
7. Under the “Lift types” card, select Brand lift.
8. Choose up to 3 of the following lift metrics:
   • Video ad recall
   • Awareness
   • Consideration
   • Favorability
   • Purchase intent
9. Under the “Survey details” card, enter your product or brand name and up to 3 competitors for your survey.
10. Under the “Survey settings” card, select your survey question settings:
    • Language: Choose the language your ad uses in your line items, which should be the same as the product and brand.
      • If your study contains ads with multiple languages, consider creating a product or brand for each language and associating them with their corresponding ads.
      • There are experimental languages available, but the quality of the results are still being analyzed.
    • Object type: Choosing the specific category of your product or brand helps customize the wording of your survey questions.
    • Intended action: Choose the intended action you’re measuring.
11. Click Create when done.

Edit the insertion orders in an existing Brand Lift study

When you remove an insertion order from a Brand Lift study, the Brand Lift measurement stops. The survey responses are collected up until the time of removal and the results will remain available for that insertion order, but it won’t count towards the reporting for that product or brand.

To edit the insertion orders in an existing study:

1. From the advertiser level, go to Experiments.
2. Click the Lift studies tab.
3. Choose an existing study.
4. Under the “Insertion orders” card, select the insertion order you want to edit.
5. On the “Insertion orders” page, apply your edits in the Insertion order details tab.
6. When you’re done, click Save.

Re-measuring Brand Lift

You can optimize your campaign’s performance and budget efficiently by re-measuring your insertion order’s Brand lift to gain insight on lift changes over time. Re-measurement is available for both YouTube and cross-exchange studies. You can use the same setup as your original study by adding another flight once it completes or ends:

1. From the advertiser level, go to Experiments.
2. Click the Lift studies tab.
3. Choose a study from the list.
4. Under the “Lift Actions” column, click Add flight.
   • Optionally, you can adjust when you want the flight to end, by clicking End under the “Lift Actions” column.
5. When you’re done, click Re-measure flight.

Troubleshooting Brand Lift eligibility

After you create your Brand Lift study, you can check your measurement status:

1. Go to Experiments.
2. Click the Lift studies tab.
3. View your study's measurement status under the “Measurement status” column.
4. You’ll have the option to click Review & Fix if your study is not eligible.

You can use the following to help troubleshoot your Brand Lift study if it’s determined to be “Not eligible”:

Best practices

• When creating questions for Brand Lift surveys:
  • Include as much detail as possible
  • Check spelling to avoid survey rejections.
  • While you can select a generic object type and intended action, you can customize the wording of your survey question by being more specific.

    Example:

    • With a generic object type and intended action: The question in the survey would be: “Next time you buy from one of these brands, which one are you most likely to buy from?”
    • By choosing a specific “Automotive product” object type and intended action: The question in the survey would be: “Next time you choose a vehicle, which one are you most likely to choose?
• It’s not recommended that you run different device types in the same study.

Brand Lift results and reporting

You can check your study’s results once your study collects enough survey responses to detect Brand Lift:

1. Go to Experiments.
2. Click the Lift studies tab to view your list of studies.
3. Under the “Measurement status” and “Brand Lift” columns, click View report.
   • The “View report” button is automatically available when your study is able to generate results.

Instant and offline reporting is available for YouTube Brand Lift studies.

YouTube instant report

To create a YouTube instant report with Brand Lift metrics:

1. Navigate to Reports on the left hand side panel and click Instant & offline.
2. Under the “Instant reporting” tab, click View All.
3. Under the “Video” section, click Open template in the "Video: YouTube Standard” option.

You can monitor studies in the Brand Lift studies tab to determine when a report is ready.

To accurately compare YouTube and Video results, set the date range selector to a predefined time period when both were collecting responses. Custom date ranges are not currently supported.

Limitations

• Brand Lift survey coverage is limited for third-party exchange web inventory:
  • If your campaign targets mostly third-party exchange web inventory, you may not get enough survey responses, which could lead to insignificant results.
• Due to differences in cookie and device ID settings, advertisers may see fluctuations in delivery and performance when cookies or device ID are unavailable.
• Brand Lift on CTV is available in the US only.
• Non-YouTube Programmatic Guaranteed Inventory is exempt from measurement.
• Instant Reserve deals included in Brand Lift studies may underdeliver.
• Netflix inventory is not measurable by Brand Lift.