As brands make the shift away from traditional metrics like clicks to modern metrics like ad recall, how can they ensure they are accurately measuring campaign performance?

Brand measurement is always a hot topic for both publishers and advertisers, particularly in light of the eradication of third-party cookies. With advertising analytics constantly evolving, publishers are seeking alternative ways to measure the success of their campaigns and track brand performance. 

This is where brand lift comes in.

How can brands effectively measure how their ads are shifting and shaping consumers’ perceptions and behaviours? Today, metrics like ad recall, brand awareness and consideration are much more useful than traditional metrics such as clicks, impressions or views. Publishers have already started making the shift away from the standard metrics for performance and are turning to new methodologies to drive brand uplifts. 

Now, it’s even easier to demonstrate the success of campaigns by investing in brand metrics to track brand lift score. Indeed, our work with publishers like The Guardian has seen some real tangible results for their advertisers.

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Over the course of three months, the publisher measured 50 different campaigns across 35 different brands including Netflix and Samsung, serving 9,500 readers who have been exposed to a campaign with a survey. Their goal was to understand how the campaign delivers on metrics like brand awareness, consideration, preference and intent. 

When you combine these metrics, you get a total brand uplift score. The Guardian offers brand studies to all their advertising campaigns costing over £10,000. These studies typically measure brand lift by analysing organic search traffic or using surveys to receive direct consumer feedback regarding a brand’s harder-to-hit metrics. As a result of these brand studies, The Guardian has now developed a planning tool, Modern Metrics, to make recommendations to ad buyers depending on their objectives and the type of brand metric they are trying to move. 

While brand metrics to measure campaign success certainly predates digital advertising, anchoring around an easily understandable and universal metric is a welcome change for advertisers who find themselves in an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.

By collaborating with The Guardian, Brand Metrics helped the publisher monitor the right attention metrics and data points to measure brand uplift in a way that doesn’t rely on cookies. They are well aware that first-party data leads to higher brand lift so by partnering with data management platform Permutive, The Guardian was able to build 350 first-party data audience segments. With Brand Metrics on hand to survey readers on campaign effectiveness, the publisher found that campaigns using the Guardian’s first-party data had on average a brand lift 65% higher than Brand Metrics’ average. 

When using The Guardian first-party data, the proportion of impact on preference and intent metrics was 39% higher than average. Indeed, campaigns that ran in so-called ‘hard news’ environments—like politics or Covid-19 content—delivered a 22% brand uplift versus the average. 

So as agencies adapt to a cookieless future, Brand Metrics is on hand to provide cookieless measurement for more accurate brand lift scores.

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