You pay a lot for ads, but how do customers really react to them? Are they as effective as you think they are? What do customers think of your brand when they see your ads? Amazon’s new program, Brand Lift, tries to address these questions.
What Is Amazon Brand Lift?
The term brand lift is not new to anyone who has run ad campaigns before. It’s the increase in user interaction as a result of the campaigns.
Amazon Brand Lift, as the name suggests, is a program that helps marketers and brand owners determine how successful their ad campaigns are and what they can improve upon. It was launched in late 2021 and is still in its beta phase, but it does offer valuable insights.
It uses surveys that are answered by control groups (people who have not been exposed to your ads) and an ad-exposed audience.
As of writing, it’s available only to a limited number of brands that meet the following requirements:
- Must be in the United States
- Currently running Amazon DSP campaigns for at least 30 days
- The budget for the campaigns must be at least $50,000
Amazon Brand Lift is free to use for those who meet these requirements.
How Does Amazon Brand Lift Work?
When you use Amazon Brand Lift, you’re essentially conducting a study to quantify how your Amazon ad campaigns are doing. You can look at metrics such as ad recall, awareness, and purchase intent.
When you create a study, Amazon will survey at least 1,000 participants in both control and ad-exposed groups. These participants will come from the Amazon Shopper Panel, an invite-only program where people can earn rewards by completing short surveys and sharing receipts from purchases made outside Amazon.com.
So Amazon Brand Lift works hand-in-hand with Amazon Shopper Plan. The program has over 200,000 customers that actively participate monthly, and the response rate is usually greater than 50%.
You’re allowed to include at most four questions per study. There are already templates you can choose from and edit.
One Amazon Brand Lift study can help you measure up to 10 orders. To determine eligibility, the aggregate budget and duration of those orders will be used.
To ensure that the sample is significant enough to give accurate data, it’s recommended that all ad campaigns involved will have a total of at least 2 million impressions.
Brand Lift collects survey results for up to 7 days, and the results are usually ready within the week after the last day of the survey.
Amazon Brand Lift vs. Google Brand Lift
While Amazon Brand Lift is still very new, its Google counterpart has been around since 2014. However, the latter is also not available for all Google ads accounts and is limited to video ads, usually on Youtube.
Google Brand Lift is also free and measures ad effectiveness so marketers know how to improve. It focuses on non-traditional metrics such as brand awareness and ad recall as compared to more traditional ones like clicks and impressions.
Just like the Amazon Brand Lift, it deals with two groups: people who have already seen the ads and those who didn’t.
A Look Inside Amazon Brand Lift
Amazon Brand Lift can be accessed through the Amazon DSP console by following this link:
Create Study > Brand Lift > Continue > Orders > Choose Orders
When you create your study, you can immediately know if you’re eligible or not.
Again, you can add up to four questions per study that may fall on the following campaign objectives:
- Awareness
- Preference
- Favorability
- Attitudes
- Intent
- Ad Recall
You have no choice regarding the first campaign objective, however. It always has to be Awareness to prevent bias.
Choose a template and edit the questions accordingly. After creating the study, you then submit it for approval. Waiting time is usually a week or less after submission. While waiting for the decision, you can still make changes, but that would lengthen the waiting time.
Once your study is approved, it will start running when feasibility is met. Depending on how quickly your ads gain impressions, this can take more than a month or so. But once the requirements are met, the survey questions are sent out to the participants and the study runs for 7 days. Finally, you’ll have to wait for 7 more days to get the results that look like this:
From here, you can analyze whether your ads had a positive or negative lift. Use this information to improve your ad campaigns accordingly.
Final Thoughts
Currently, Amazon Brand Lift is available to only a select group of brand owners who meet their list of requirements. However, this is still in the beta phase and may be available to smaller businesses anytime soon.
Have you tried Amazon Brand Lift before? What’s the most important information you gathered from your studies?
