What is Ad Impact?

This article covers:

What is Ad Impact and how do we calculate it?

Ad Impact in our platform tells you, whether your ad had an effect on brand salience, the key indicator of brand’s size. A successful campaign contributes to salience growth, or as we say: it lifts brand salience. Therefore, we determine campaign’s Ad impact based on brand lift and how good it is compared to other ads (learn more about benchmarks here).

What is brand salience?

Brand salience shows how big of an imprint the brand has in customers’ subconsciousness. We introduce a specific buying situation to the respondent and ask, what brands he/she thinks of. The total number of respondents naming your brand out of the whole target group is your brand salience %.

Example of salience question: “Imagine you want to have breakfast at a fast food restaurant. What brands come to your mind?”

How do we measure ad’s effect on brand salience?

As the key indicator of ad impact we use brand lift, quite like any established industry-standard leaders in advertising (Google, YouTube, Facebook and others). We specifically use the lift of brand salience. But where does the number come from, when we say that brand lift of an ad was XY pt?

1. Brand lift

To calculate brand lift, we divide the sample into two groups:

“Ad-viewers”: those who recall seeing the ad before.
“Non-viewers”: those who don’t recall the ad (they’re the so-called control group).

Then we look at the level of brand salience in group A vs. salience in group B. The difference between brand salience levels in those groups is brand lift. A successful campaign results in high brand lift. In other words, a great ad makes brand salience grow.

Example: Below is data for Amazon’s “Holidays deals” campaign (complete report here). The barcharts show Amazon’s brand salience in the situation, when people need to buy something online. The yellow bar shows salience among Ad-viewers (45 %) while the grey bar displays salience among Non-viewers (38 %). The difference between these two is brand lift (7 percentage points). So, among people who recall seeing this ad, Amazon comes up in their mind more often when they need something online. Compared to other campaigns, that’s average brand lift. Learn more about benchmarks here.

2. Lift of salience in total population

For big brands, a slightly different take on brand lift is sometimes vital. And that’s a look on how much the ad helped the brand in total population. In other words, where was the brand before the campaign and where it’s now, regarding brand salience.

That leads us to brand lift in total population, the second lift metric we show in Ad impact chapter. We compare brand salience in the whole sample (“Now”) vs. brand salience among people who don’t recall seeing the ad (simplified as “Before campaign”, the same people as in “Non-viewers”).

That implicitly takes into account how many people actually saw the ad and how good of an imprint it made in their mind. This detail is shown in Reach (% of people who recall seeing the ad).

Example: Amazon’s brand salience in total population is now at 40 % (yellow bar). When we look at salience just among people, who don’t recall seeing the ad, their salience is at 38 % (grey bar). The difference is 2pt, which is what we call brand lift in (total) target population. So in the whole population, Amazon’s brand grew by 2pt in brand salience thanks to this ad.

3. Message lift

The last section in Ad impact chapter is a detail on messages. We present a selection of three messages which the ad aimed to communicate about the brand. And just like above, we determine whether the ad made the brand’s link with the message stronger, or not. In other words, we look at lift in messaging.

Again, the intent is to find the answer to the following: Do people, who recall seeing the ad and recognize the brand (“Ad-viewers”) link the messages to your brand more often than those who don’t recall the ad or the brand in it (“Non-viewers”)?

Example: In Amazon’s “Holiday deals” video, multiple messages were communicated. As we see below, the links between the messages and the brand are quite high (from around 50 % in making loved ones happy to around 70 % in fast delivery). However, this ad has not contributed much to building stronger links between the messages and Amazon. The only lift is in the message of “buying holiday presents” – the ad helped to make this link stronger by 5pt.