For companies and brands, branding is crucial in boosting their position at the top of marketing funnels (TOFU). However, some advertisers are wary of investing significant funds into branding and traffic campaigns as the measurable impact can be minimal despite high impression numbers. Conversion campaigns are preferred as they offer tangible results such as revenue and ROAS.
Though businesses and advertisers are interested in understanding how their products and services are perceived by their customers and audience, however, it’s not easy to measure the impact of marketing efforts and branding campaigns due to the absence of appropriate tools and metrics. To address this issue, Facebook has introduced a tool in their Results & Experiment segment known as the “Brand Lift Test.” This tool enables advertisers to measure the improvement in brand awareness through campaigns by studying the increase in Facebook’s Brand Lift.
What is Facebook’s Brand Lift Study?
The Brand Lift Study allows advertisers to evaluate the actual value of their Facebook campaigns in terms of generating Brand Awareness, Video Recall, Favourability, Consideration, and Purchase Intention. The Brand Lift study can be conducted with a single advertising campaign or all active campaigns in the account. However, it is important to ensure that all campaigns have consistent messages and graphics to avoid confusion among respondents. By posing questions to a specific audience, a brand lift test accurately measures the effectiveness of advertising campaigns aimed at increasing brand awareness.
Can Brand Lift Studies be conducted in India?
Meta has suggested some minimum budgets for brand survey tests in each country based on their analysis and internal algorithm to help achieve the minimum responses needed to see statistically significant results.
This minimum requirement helps the study or test to reach enough people and have the best chance of success. As per Meta’s guidelines; one can’t run a brand survey test in Experiments unless the ad campaigns associated with the test meet the minimum budget for the audience’s country(s).
Primary Language necessary for Polls in India – English (en_US)
Minimum Budget [USD] – USD 15,000
How Facebook conducts Brand Lift Study?
Step-1
Like a standard methodology, a Facebook Brand Lift Study split the audience into two groups:
- Test Group [Audience who is exposed to the ad]
- Control Group [Audience who is not exposed to the ad]
To ensure that the results of the test are not skewed or altered by external influences or factors, the advertiser’s chosen audience is randomly divided into these two groups.
Step-2
After the ads are delivered to the test group, both the test and control groups receive a standard, one-question poll. Multiple-choice answers are provided for each poll question.
Note– The test or campaign runs for a minimum of 14 days or 2 weeks
Step-3
Over the course of the campaign, actions like completing a poll/survey or making a conversion will be recorded. Facebook’s brand lift survey tests allow advertisers to conduct randomized control trials (RCT) to test for incremental lift. Unlike traditional A/B tests (which allow for testing one variable against another), control trial testing allows advertisers to deduce an actual lift in results and the effectiveness of campaigns overall.
Step-4
At the end of the campaign flight duration, an advertiser will be able to analyze and review the responses of both groups and will try to calculate brand lift with respect to his particular product or service. All actions will be presented in the final report.
What type of questions should be chosen for the Brand Lift Study?
To conduct Meta’s Brand lift studies, advertisers must choose three questions based on their campaign objectives and optimization events. These questions may relate to various factors such as video recall, brand recognition, engagement with the brand, favorability, or purchase intent. It is essential to include all the necessary information while paraphrasing the original text.
Below are 3 sets of questions that could be framed while configuring a Brand Lift study:
- Brand awareness: Have you heard about our Brand/services in recent times?
- Reminder message: What product or brand do you associate “2 minutes” with?
- Ad-reminder: Do you remember seeing an ad for our brand product or service online on a mobile device in the last 7 days?”
How do I measure Brand Lift in Facebook Ads?
Step-1 Go to the Ad Manager and navigate to the ‘Test and Learn’ section.
Step-2 After that, an advertiser needs to set the eligibility criteria within the budget.
Step-3 To ensure unbiased data, advertisers must exclude brand-lift audience targeting from their active Facebook campaigns during and 28 days after a test, while also setting the budget at the campaign level. It’s important for advertisers to have clear business goals and align their poll questions with the desired results.
Note – An advertiser must have clarity of business goals and his poll questions should be in alignment with what results he wants to achieve
As a best practice, it is advisable to have a test period between 2 weeks to 90 days, and the campaign should remain active during that time without the advertiser making any changes to it. Also, the target audience should be around 18 years old
Brand Lift study can be set at – Account, Campaign, and Campaign Groups level. An advertiser can customize the region, vertical, schedule and language, and content (awareness, favorability, familiarity, recommendation, and recall) of the poll.
Lastly, it is very important that the campaign language should match the poll question language.
What are the best practices that should be considered while creating a Brand Survey test?
1. Align the brand survey polls/ questions with the advertising objectives
When selecting poll questions for a brand survey, it is important for advertisers to consider their advertising objectives. Along with the typical ad recall question, advertisers can include two additional questions to gauge awareness and favorability, which are especially useful for measuring TOFU. However, for measuring MOFU and BOFU, questions related to intent and recommendation are more effective.
An advertiser must show their brand name/ Unique value proposition in their ads. For example, if an advertiser wants to survey their audience about a brand recall, then Meta recommends that they should highlight or feature their brand logo and name prominently in their ad creative.
Meta recommends that the advertiser’s chosen Page name should appear in their brand survey – which means that their Page name becomes subject to the ad policies. Meta’s ad policies are different from the Page policies. Further; if an advertiser’s Page name violates meta’s ad policies, then meta won’t run advertisers’ brand survey.
2. An advertiser need to set an effective campaign to run Brand Lift Study
Meta always recommends testing the Brand lift study with a new campaign – if an advertiser runs a brand lift test by increasing the budget of an existing campaign that is several weeks old, the test won’t be effective to capture its prior impact and only analyze a portion of the campaign’s overall performance. Hence; an advertiser should create a new campaign that has a specific objective of testing brand lift.
As per the recent meta’s brand survey age requirements – brand lift tests will only survey people over 18 years old. Hence; an advertiser should assure that their ad audience is under the age of 18.
An advertiser must set an appropriate budget – depending on the country or region where they are running their brand lift test, different budget minimums apply.
Don’t use one ad campaign in several lift tests simultaneously – Meta recommends maintaining the scientific rigor required of lift tests, there can’t be one campaign active in multiple tests at the same time.
3. Advertiser needs to set an effective campaign schedule
According to Meta’s recommendation, the Brand Lift Study campaign should run for a minimum of two weeks, but it is advisable to conduct the tests for four weeks or even up to 90 days if it takes longer to obtain a minimum of 500 responses from the advertiser’s brand survey. It is essential to include all the information while paraphrasing the original text.
To ensure accurate results, an advertiser’s test schedule should coincide with their campaign’s schedule. The timing of the audience survey should coincide with the start and end of the brand lift study test’s ad campaigns. It is also important to consider other marketing activities that may impact the results, such as highly competitive ad auctions during holidays or an unusually high spending period. Therefore, it is recommended to conduct Metarecommend testing under typical advertising strategy circumstances for the most valuable and practical results.
What results will an advertiser receive from Brand Lift Study?
As per the current trend; it is observed that the Initial results will become available once the surveys have received 250 responses. Once the study is finished, and after ten business days, an advertiser will receive a presentation with the complete results. This BLS report will include:
- Details of the campaign with a complete analysis
- Demographics-wise breakdown of results
- Industry-wise Benchmarks for campaigns in the client’s related industry and region where the study was conducted
- Steps and tips to further optimize the campaign
- Breakdown of winning responses
To sum up, it is important to compare outcomes among different target groups and determine if there is a significant improvement among the test group. Often, the funds allocated for marketing campaigns are sufficient to conduct such studies, so it is advisable not to dismiss the idea due to financial constraints. Such research is invaluable for assessing the brand’s position in the market and devising new business strategies.
