Brand building is a critical component of a successful business. A strong brand has lasting impacts on marketing effectiveness, marketing efficiency, product value, and market share. However, the business effects of brand campaigns can take years to realize.

Therefore it is vital that we find other methods for measuring the short- and mid-term performance of brand building initiatives in order to verify if our efforts are on track to make the desired performance effects on our business.

There are a number of ways that marketers use to measure the performance of brand-building activities, each with benefits and concerns.

Digital Advertising Metrics

Because we are not directly influencing online conversions with brand campaigns, we often look to advertising performance metrics such as impressions and website traffic as a proxy for determining campaign performance. 

These types of metrics are often referred to as “vanity” metrics because they may help us understand the effectiveness of our advertising, but not necessarily how well we have contributed to brand affinity or brand awareness. 

Metrics like impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate, cost-per-mille and cost-per-click are also strongly affected by other factors such as budget, ad platform selection and targeting criteria. The benefit of these advertising metrics is we can directly attribute performance to the messages, platforms and imagery and measure the performance of our advertisements. 

Brand Lift Surveys

In-platform brand lift surveys (or conventional market research studies) offer to help us measure the effectiveness of our advertisements at impacting brand awareness or brand affinity. These types of surveys split the audience into a test group and a control group and asks those groups the same set of questions. Via the difference in answers between the two groups, we are then able to understand the impact of our campaigns at impacting brand affinity and awareness.

There are two primary concerns with the effectiveness of brand lift surveys:

1. First, these are typically siloed to individual advertising platforms, so for a typical ad campaign, it is impossible to have a true control group (i.e. we can isolate an unexposed control group on YouTube, but cannot guarantee that group hasn’t also seen our ads on Instagram).
2. Second, and perhaps most importantly, brand is intended to impact the emotional part of our brains, ensuring that our audience is primed with strong, positive feelings about a given organization or product. Surveys are scientific, and the act of asking the question activates the rational part of our brains. In the words of Binet and Field (The Long and Short of It), “Market research therefore has a dangerous tendency to underplay the importance of long-term emotional priming and to exaggerate the importance of short-term ‘news’.”

Indirect Impacts

Often brand-building campaigns show impacts that can be measured that are perhaps indirectly attributed to the campaign. These are items like social media mentions, direct or organic website traffic, or a lift on sales. 

These are all measurable items, but because they are not directly attributed to campaign performance, it is unclear if this performance lift is directly impacted by our brand building activities. In order to understand and measure lift, we have to compare performance during a campaign period to a previous time period. As a result, it can be hard to isolate the impacts of the brand-building campaign compared to other items that could impact performance during that time period (seasonality, market conditions, competitors, etc.).

Brand campaigns are intended to impact business performance for the long-term. Therefore, any short term lift in marketing or sales performance is nice to see, but ultimately not the true marker of success for brand activities.