The proliferation of highly measurable marketing channels and performance marketing have led to a lack of trust in branding channels like CTV or programmatic. But these campaigns can be highly effective.
Direct response campaigns are inherently more measurable because their impact can be credibly linked to conversions. A lack of simple correlation doesn’t mean that branding campaigns aren’t as effective. The methods of measurement are more complex, but they are feasible, and effective.
As marketers, the key question we want to answer is “Should I keep spending my budget on this campaign?”
We aren’t going to go into incrementality, holdout tests, or media mix modelling in this article. While those are excellent methods to determine the impact of branding campaigns, let’s assume they’re out of reach.
So what are some easily accessible metrics that can act as a good indicator of a branding campaign’s effectiveness?
Common Branding Campaign Metrics
These are the metrics that we’re all familiar with. They measure engagement and interaction and are primarily a measure of creative performance. These are the metrics that advertisers use because this is all the data they have access to.
Reach and Exposure Metrics
Impressions: Tracks how many times your ad is shown to viewers, providing a foundational measure of ad delivery and audience reach.
Unique Households/Reach: Measures the number of unique viewers or households exposed to your ad, giving a clearer picture of campaign reach beyond raw impressions.
Frequency: Measures how many times a unique viewer sees your ad, helping you balance between building awareness and avoiding ad fatigue.
Cost Per Mille (CPM): Calculates the cost of delivering 1,000 ad impressions, helping allocate budgets effectively across platforms.
Engagement and Completion Metrics
Completion Rate: Measures what percentage of viewers watched your ad from start to finish, particularly valuable for video ads.
Viewability: Tracks what percentage of impressions were actually viewable (typically defined as 50% of the ad’s duration or more).
Cost Per Completed View (CPCV): Measures what advertisers pay when an ad is viewed to completion.
Pretty Good Metrics
So what’s the solution? We want metrics which measure actions that are valuable to your organisation and can be reliably linked to your branding campaigns.
Survey-based Metrics
Survey-based metrics like ad-recall can be valuable, but they can be expensive and prone to bias. Ad recall is valuable as it demonstrates that your audience noticed your ad. But remembering an ad and taking an action are quite different.
Website Traffic
We see website traffic commonly used as a measure of brand awareness, but it’s often abused. It’s very easy to run campaigns that drive large increases in traffic, but too often that traffic doesn’t result in meaningful actions.
Traffic has value as an indicator, or rather a drop in traffic is a good indicator of a problem, but it shouldn’t be used as a key metric to measure branding campaigns. If the goal is to actually increase marketing performance, website traffic is too unreliable.
View-Through Conversions
View-through conversions are touted as the next best thing. These are a good indicator, but the threshold for a view is half the ad on screen for one second which isn’t very convincing. And this won’t work for campaigns on a channel like CTV.
Accessible, Reliable Branding Campaign Metrics
Lift in Branded Search
Branded search lift effectively demonstrates how your advertising impacts consumer behaviour by measuring the increase in searches for your brand or product after ad exposure. This metric offers several advantages:
Indicates Brand Awareness Growth
A positive search lift shows that your ads are successfully increasing brand awareness, with studies showing branded search ads can increase brand awareness by up to 80%.
Measures Upper-Funnel Impact
Search lift helps quantify the often difficult-to-measure upper-funnel effects of awareness campaigns, serving as an early indicator of brand health.
Connects Advertising to Search Behaviour
It demonstrates the “halo effect” of advertising by tracking how exposure to ads on platforms like Meta drives subsequent search activity.
Provides Incremental Measurement
Using test and control groups allows you to measure the true incremental impact of your campaigns rather than just correlation.
How to calculate lift in branded search
Lift in Branded Search = (Actual Branded Search Volume – Expected Branded Search Volume) / Expected Branded Search Volume x 100%
Ideally this is measured using a control group and a test group, but you could forecast expected branded search volume instead of using a control group.
For example, if your expected branded search volume is 3,000 and your actual branded search volume was 3,500, your Lift in Branded Search is 16.6%.
Cost per Lifted User
Cost per Lifted User goes one step further to combine cost with impact so that you have a more granular view of efficiency.
How to calculate Cost Per Lifted User
Cost per Lifted User = Total Campaign Cost / (Total Audience x Lift Percentage)
For example, if your campaign reached 1,000,000 users and generated a 5% lift in branded searches, you have 50,000 lifted users. With a campaign cost of $100,000, your CPLU would be $2.00.