How Advertisers Can Use Brand Lift Surveys In AdWords

Just a few weeks back a brand new tool Brand Lift surveys in AdWords was introduced to help advertisers’ measure brand impact of their display campaigns. Here are few more details about this new tool. Gross rating point was available to advertisers to measure brand campaigns, but it relied on very basic metrics like impressions and clicks. If a brand wanted to see how a campaign was affecting consumers brand favorability, brand awareness, or purchase intent advertisers had to wait for weeks and months before they could conduct a survey.

However, Brand Lift surveys in AdWords leverages the speed and scale of the internet to help advertisers get a better understanding of how their campaign is progressing. The results are delivered in real time, are far more accurate, and cost nothing.

With this new tool advertisers can simultaneously run the surveys with the campaign without additional tagging, additional fees for third party set-ups; all this from AdWords. Here is how it works:

1. Advertisers first design a basic survey from the available templates. Questions such as brand awareness, purchase intent, and other similar categories can be included.
2. Advertisers launch their video or display campaign.
3. Immediately a group will see the display ads followed by a survey. At the same time another group will not see the display ad but will see the same survey.
4. Publishers get paid to display questions on their website which in turn helps fund content and online services.
5. Google collects the anonymous and aggregated data from the two sets of respondents and gives it to the advertisers so that they can measure their campaign.

Google consumer surveys powers these surveys (Brand Lift); Google Consumer Surveys was launched in April 2012 and run across several sites like Bloomberg, NY Daily News, YouTube, SJ Mercury News, and other publishers. You are also able to see some anonymous questions pertaining to your gender, age, and other demographic indicators. The responses are all aggregated with other users to help Google show relevant ads to users based on their preferences and interests/demographics.

It is too early to predict the success or failure of the system, but advertisers are already seeing the benefit from such surveys. These surveys can also be used to measure the impact of YouTube campaigns and Google is toying with the idea of expanding this to other advertisers in the coming months.