A Brand Lift study is a Google Ads measurement that uses short surveys to show whether your video ads changed how people think about your brand. It compares answers from people who saw the ads with answers from a similar group who were eligible to see them but were held back.
How a Brand Lift study works
When you set up a study, Google splits the audience of your chosen video campaigns into two groups. The exposed group sees your ads as normal. The control group meets the same targeting but is shown other advertisers’ ads instead. Both groups are later shown a one-question survey on YouTube, such as “Which of these garden furniture brands have you heard of?” with your brand and a few competitors as options.
You choose which question types to run. The usual ones are ad recall, awareness, consideration, favourability and purchase intent. Each needs its own sample, so measuring more of them needs more spend and more time.
Once enough responses are in, Google reports several figures. Absolute lift is the difference in positive answers between the two groups. Relative lift expresses that difference as a share of the control group’s positive answers. Lifted users estimates how many people changed their answer because of the ads, and cost per lifted user divides your spend by that number. If the sample is too small or the difference too slight, the result is shown as not significant rather than a number.
At the time of writing (October 2026), Brand Lift is set up from the measurement area of Google Ads, and Google sets a minimum spend that varies by country and by the number of questions. Check the current threshold in your account before planning a study, because it changes and it decides whether a smaller UK advertiser can run one at all.
Why it matters
Awareness campaigns rarely produce clicks or immediate sales, so judging them on cost per acquisition makes them look like waste. Brand Lift gives you evidence of whether the money changed anything people remember. A furniture retailer running bumper ads before a spring sale can see whether recall rose among the people reached, rather than guessing from views.
It also helps you compare creative. Running two versions of an ad in separate studies, or comparing lift between audiences, shows which message actually sticks. That is more useful than view rate alone, which tells you people watched, not whether they took anything away.
Common mistakes
- Measuring five question types on a modest budget, so none of them reaches a significant result.
- Changing targeting or creative halfway through the study, which muddies the comparison.
- Choosing awareness when the brand is already well known. If most people in the control group already know you, there is little room for the number to move; consideration or recall usually tells you more.
- Treating lift as proof of sales. It measures attitudes and memory, not purchases.
- Writing survey answer options that include brands nobody in the UK would recognise, which makes your own figure look better than it is.
How to act on it
Run a Brand Lift study when you are spending a meaningful amount on YouTube to build awareness and need to know whether it works. Pick one or two questions that match the campaign’s purpose, keep the setup stable for the study period, and decide in advance what result would make you continue, change or stop the activity.
Read the results alongside other signals such as branded search volume in Google Search Console and, where available, a Search Lift study. If you want awareness campaigns planned with measurement built in from the start, that is part of my YouTube advertising service.