Facebook brand lift studies are an important tool for measuring the effectiveness of Facebook advertising campaigns. They allow advertisers to determine how much their ad exposure on Facebook influences key brand metrics like awareness, consideration, and favorability. But conducting a statistically significant brand lift study requires careful planning, large sample sizes, and can come with a hefty price tag.
What is a Facebook brand lift study?
A Facebook brand lift study measures how people’s perceptions of a brand change after being exposed to ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Audience Network compared to an unexposed control group. It provides insights into how ad campaigns are influencing key brand KPIs.
Some of the most common brand lift studies include:
- Brand awareness – Measures how ad exposure affects unaided or aided brand awareness
- Brand consideration – Tests if people are more likely to consider the brand after seeing the ads
- Brand favorability – Evaluates how ad exposure influences people’s opinions and feelings towards the brand
- Message association – Checks if people associate specific messages or ideas with the brand after seeing the ads
By running brand lift studies throughout an advertising campaign, advertisers can determine which creative strategies and messaging resonate best with their target audiences.
Why are Facebook brand lift studies valuable?
Here are some of the key benefits of running Facebook brand lift studies:
- Quantify campaign ROI – Brand lift studies help estimate the monetary value of improved brand metrics like awareness and favorability generated by campaigns.
- Optimize ad strategy – The results can reveal which aspects of an ad or campaign are working or need refinement to boost effectiveness.
- Benchmark performance – Brand lift provides a quantitative benchmark to compare campaign performance against KPIs.
- Inform media planning – The studies may indicate the ideal ad frequencies, placements, and budgets required to lift brand metrics.
Without brand lift studies, advertisers are essentially flying blind and can miss opportunities to optimize campaigns around the creative and messaging that actually resonates with their audiences.
How do Facebook brand lift studies work?
Facebook brand lift studies use scientific survey methodology and exposed and control groups to measure ad effectiveness. The process involves these key stages:
- Set up exposed and control groups in Facebook’s A/B testing tool.
- Expose the exposed group to the ad campaigns.
- Survey both exposed and control groups with brand metrics questions.
- Compare brand lift between the exposed and control groups.
- Analyze results to identify optimal creative and media strategies.
The key is having a large enough sample of representative respondents in both exposed and control groups to achieve statistical significance. Facebook suggests at least 1000 respondents per group for nationally representative studies in the United States.
What are the costs to run a Facebook brand lift study?
Running statistically significant Facebook brand lift studies requires a considerable budget investment. Here are some of the main costs involved:
Survey respondent costs
Reaching 1000+ survey respondents in each exposed and control group is essential for statistically significant results. Advertisers must pay survey providers to screen, recruit, and survey all these respondents. Professional survey panels usually charge around $5-15 per complete survey.
So for a robust study with 1000 respondents per group and a $10 survey cost, the survey costs alone would be:
- Exposed group: 1000 respondents x $10 = $10,000
- Control group: 1000 respondents x $10 = $10,000
That’s $20,000 in surveys costs for one brand lift study.
Ad spend to reach survey respondents
Advertisers need to spend enough on Facebook ads to reach and expose their desired 1000+ respondents in the exposed group. The required ad spend depends on factors like audience size, targeting, competitive dynamics, and media costs.
But as an illustration, reaching 1000 respondents nationally could easily require $10,000+ in Facebook ad spend at typical Cost Per Thousand Impression (CPM) rates.
A/B testing setup
Facebook’s free A/B testing tool allows you to set up exposed and control groups for brand lift studies. But if using a 3rd party survey provider, some additional costs may be involved in setting up the A/B tests and integrating the surveys.
Analysis and reporting
Properly analyzing the brand lift data, generating visualizations, and pulling key insights together into reports is crucial. Many advertisers work with insights providers who charge around $5000+ for analysis and reporting on a single brand lift study.
What’s the total cost for a statistically robust study?
Adding up the main costs involved, a single robust study on Facebook could total:
- Surveys: $20,000+
- Facebook ads: $10,000+
- A/B test setup: $2,000+
- Analysis and reporting: $5,000+
That comes out to around $35,000+ for a single statistically significant study measuring the brand lift of a Facebook campaign for a national advertiser.
And big brands often need to run multi-wave studies across different campaigns, audiences, and time periods. So it’s not uncommon for total Facebook brand lift research budgets to reach well over $100,000.
Tips for reducing Facebook brand lift study costs
Here are some tips to help reduce costs for Facebook brand lift studies:
- Start with smaller test groups (500 respondents or less per group) to validate your methodology and questions.
- Only ask the most essential brand lift questions to keep surveys short and inexpensive.
- Test different survey providers to find most cost-efficient option.
- Negotiate lower CPMs with Facebook for ad exposure budget.
- Work with insights partners who provide flexible analysis packages.
- Stagger studies throughout multi-wave campaigns.
Running iterative tests allows you to perfect your research approach before investing in large-scale studies. Though statistical significance is lower with smaller sample sizes.
Is the investment worth it?
While expensive, Facebook brand lift studies provide measurement and insights that are impossible to achieve through other methods. The learnings they provide into optimal campaign creative, messaging, targeting, budget allocation, and more can dramatically improve marketing performance.
For large brands spending millions on Facebook advertising, brand lift studies deliver an excellent return on investment if they help refine and boost campaign effectiveness. Even minor lift in brand favorability metrics can add up to millions in incremental value.
As Facebook advertising becomes more crowded and costly, the scientific measurement and optimization provided by brand lift studies has become virtually essential for any high-spending brand marketer.
Conclusion
In summary, Facebook brand lift studies can cost tens of thousands of dollars each when factoring in survey fielding, ad exposures, analysis and reporting. But they return exponentially more value by optimizing campaigns around the creative and messaging that truly resonates with target audiences and lifts key brand metrics. In today’s highly competitive social media landscape, brand lift studies have become an indispensable measurement tool for sophisticated marketers.