August 28, 2019
By: Rebekah Gudeman
The online advertising landscape is constantly changing. New ad units and products roll out every year, and with them come opportunities to test and leverage these tools to benefit our clients. PLUS’ origins as a battle-tested, full-service consulting firm developed our emphasis on innovation and testing, and shaped our industry-defining work ethic and grind. Through our work at the forefront of the political space, we’ve received access to alpha and beta products from our partners before any other advertiser in the nation, and immediately put them to work for election victories. Now, we’re leveraging these learnings to better serve our clients in the corporate and advocacy verticals.
A key focus for our persuasion efforts is brand lift, defined as “the measurement of the direct impact your ads have on perceptions or behaviors throughout the consumer journey”. During the 2018 election cycle, Google Adwords rolled out their new MaxLift product, a tool to help advertisers easily measure ad recall, brand consideration and other key brand lift metrics, while leveraging machine learning to automatically target the most persuadable users in our audience. PLUS’ digital advertising team immediately put this tool to use to better understand the efficacy of our advertising and measure the recall effects of our creative units.
Brand Lift: The measurement of the direct impact your ads have on perceptions or behaviors throughout the consumer journey.
MaxLift uses survey responses and machine learning to identify people within our target audience who were moved the most by our advertising. Within our target audience, MaxLift segments the users most likely to be persuaded by our advertising, then targets them with our ads to elicit the maximum persuasive effect.
MaxLift constantly optimizes our advertising campaigns to target the most persuadable users and drive the maximum impact with our ads.
In testing this product, our team routinely found that our advertising dollars were spent more efficiently, that the effects of our advertising had a greater impact, and that the directionality of the recall measurement was largely correct when compared to traditional polling methods.
In partnership with a Fortune 100 corporate client, we developed a strategy to leverage MaxLift across multiple creative messaging themes. For each separate campaign, we measured and compared MaxLift results to determine which theme drove the greatest level of impact within our target audience of DC Influencers.
The first MaxLift benchmark we considered was Cost-Per-Lifted User, or the average cost to persuade a user within our target audience.
Message 1 moved the needle in our target audience at the lowest cost, requiring an investment of just $0.62 to lift a user. By comparison, Message 2 required nearly two times the investment to achieve the same result.
Next, we considered Absolute Brand Lift, or the estimated difference in positive response rates between users who viewed our ads and users who did not.
Again, Message 1 topped the charts, with content resulting in a 2.5% absolute brand lift, more than two times the lift associated with Message 2.
MaxLift is a powerful tool for advertisers across all verticals, providing insight into the impact of creative messaging outside of standard results, like impressions, views and clicks. It also moves behind measurement to help advertisers pinpoint the most persuadable user in their target audience, to maximize budget dollars and truly move the needle.
If you would like PLUS’ help measuring the impact of your ads with MaxLift, please reach out.
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