How to Measure Ad Recall and Brand Lift: A YouTube Optimization Guide

Do you have a solid strategy for measuring the effectiveness of your YouTube marketing campaign? Have you considered analyzing specific performance metrics like brand lift and ad recall scores to understand the relationship between consumers and your brand?

If you advertise on YouTube, it takes more than flashy ads with effective CTAs to encourage users to take action.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to measure ad recall and brand lift and use the findings to optimize your video campaign’s impact on target consumers. But before we begin, let’s define ad recall and brand lift and discuss their benefits.

What Is Brand Lift?

Brand lift measures a video marketing campaign’s effectiveness in influencing consumer actions, behaviors, and brand awareness. This metric examines consumer perceptions of a brand after launching a marketing campaign.

The idea is to better understand how well video ads influence a consumer’s relationship with a brand throughout the customer journey. Advertisers can use those findings to optimize video marketing campaigns and improve their brand image.

To better understand brand lift, you need to examine several metrics. Here’s a sample of those metrics:

• Awareness: The extent to which consumers are familiar with a brand.
• Ad Recall: How well consumers can recall and attribute an ad to a specific brand.
• Purchase intent: How inclined target customers are to purchase an item or a service from a specific company.
• Web traffic: The number of users who visit a company’s website.
• Conversions: The number of purchases and other actions consumers take after exposure to a brand’s offers.

Why Is Brand Lift Important?

Brand lift reveals meaningful insights that can tackle campaign challenges and help develop better advertising strategies to address consumer needs. Here are a few benefits of brand lift:

• Helps optimize spending: By understanding which videos perform better, you can modify spending habits and focus on ads that generate excellent campaign results.

• Provides audience engagement insights: With brand lift, you can dive deeper into engagement levels by understanding how specific messaging tactics influence brand perception.

• Generates more sales: Brand lift data can be instrumental in making informed video advertising decisions that increase company sales.

What Is Ad Recall?

Ad recall is a different campaign metric. While brand lift focuses on a video campaign’s impact on the overall brand perception, ad recall measures how memorable an ad is to a target audience. When thinking about ad recall, ask these questions:

• How likely will an audience attribute an ad to the correct brand?
• Will they remember the ad content?
• Do audiences perceive a brand positively or negatively after recalling an ad?

Companies usually measure ad recall with surveys, asking audiences if they remember a specific ad and if they can identify the correct brand or company.

Ad recall focuses on memory, and this metric can be useful for optimizing your campaign. Analyzing ad recall is an essential element of brand lift metrics as it identifies the effectiveness of your messaging tactics and sees which ones increase brand awareness. With ad recall, you can also:

• Uncover useful advertising campaign trends.
• Understand the creative elements that make appealing ads.
• Modify video marketing strategies to improve consumer reach and brand recognition.

How to Measure Brand Lift and Ad Recall for YouTube Advertising Campaigns

Knowing how to measure ad recall and brand lift is an essential part of a YouTube advertising campaign, and you can use the same measurement strategy for each. While surveys are your best friend, you’ll want more than a standard questionnaire to get accurate results.

You’ll need to use the Brand Lift Study tool—a free tool advertisers can use to measure their video ad impact on brand perception.

Here’s what you do:

1. Identify a product or a brand you want to advertise for the study.
2. Select the survey questions for your study.
3. Let Google create two groups from your segments: a randomized control group that doesn’t see your ads and an exposed group that does.
4. Allow Google to show your surveys on YouTube to the two audience groups as your campaign runs.
5. Analyze the response differences between the group that viewed the ads and those that didn’t.

The Brand Lift Study tool is an excellent resource for gathering information on clicks, impressions, and views, all essential in determining consumer brand perception. The tool also helps with ad recall as it assesses how well people who have seen your ads can remember them.

Improve Ad Recall and Brand Lift with Channel Factory

Learning how to measure ad recall and brand lift is an excellent way to gain valuable consumer insights that you can rely on to modify your YouTube marketing campaign. Channel Factory is here if you need a trusted partner to optimize your ads and improve ad recall and brand perception.

With our contextual alignment solutions, we’ll ensure your ads appear alongside content your audience finds relevant and engaging, which means you’ll see improved results in audience engagement and brand awareness.

Contact us to see how we can improve your ad performance.

For more information on contextual alignment, download our YouTube attention performance guide.