By Tanit de Pouplana, on 23 September 2025
For over a decade, click-through rate (CTR) has been the go-to metric for measuring the success of digital advertising campaigns. It’s easy to track and quick to interpret. If users are clicking on your ad, you assume it’s working. However, as digital marketing matures, brands are realizing that this metric tells only part of the story. In today’s more complex, multi-touch consumer journey, brand lift is emerging as a more reliable and meaningful indicator of campaign success.
CTR measures a moment. Brand lift measures momentum. This article explores why brand lift is becoming the new standard for advertisers who care about long-term impact, not just short-term clicks.
Understanding Brand Lift
Brand lift refers to the measurable increase in consumer perception, awareness, and intent after being exposed to a marketing campaign. It’s a way of capturing whether your advertising changed how people think or feel about your brand.
For example, after seeing your ad, a consumer may be more likely to remember your brand name, recall the message you shared, or feel more favorable toward your product. In some cases, they may even express a stronger intent to purchase or recommend your brand. These shifts in perception are more predictive of long-term success than a simple click.
To measure brand lift, advertisers typically use surveys or control-exposed group studies. Platforms like YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn offer built-in tools that compare groups of people who saw your ad with those who didn’t, tracking differences in recall, awareness, favorability, or purchase intent. More advanced brand lift studies are sometimes conducted with third-party research firms, offering deep insights into brand impact across audiences, geographies, and campaign types.
Why CTR No Longer Tells the Full Story
Click-through rate is a limited view of performance, especially in the age of multi-device browsing, multitasking consumers, and passive media consumption. A high CTR might look good on a report, but it doesn't necessarily mean your campaign was effective or valuable.
One major issue with CTR is that it rewards curiosity, not necessarily interest. A user might click on an ad out of momentary intrigue, but leave the site within seconds without absorbing any of your messaging or taking meaningful action. This kind of behavior inflates CTR without indicating true engagement.
Another limitation is that CTR fails to account for passive influence. In many cases, consumers are exposed to a brand multiple times before taking any action. They might see your video in their feed, watch it halfway through, and continue scrolling without clicking, yet that exposure still contributes to brand familiarity and future intent. CTR ignores these passive impressions, even though they play a crucial role in modern advertising effectiveness.
Additionally, CTR can be artificially inflated by accidental clicks or fraudulent activity. On mobile, for example, users may tap an ad by mistake. Bots and click farms can also distort CTR, leading to misleading data that doesn’t reflect real human interest or behavior.
Lastly, CTR places the emphasis squarely on lower-funnel metrics. It’s useful for direct-response or conversion-focused campaigns, but for branding, awareness, and loyalty, it simply doesn’t capture the bigger picture.
Why Brand Lift Offers a Better Alternative
Brand lift provides a more holistic view of success by focusing on what really matters: whether your message made an impression and influenced how people feel about your brand.
Unlike CTR, which measures a quick action, brand lift measures shifts in memory, sentiment, and intent. It shows whether people remember seeing your ad, whether they associate it with your brand, and whether they’re more likely to consider you in the future. These are the kinds of outcomes that drive real business growth over time.
Brand lift also applies across the entire funnel. Whether your goal is to increase awareness, shift perception, or drive consideration, brand lift can be used to measure the incremental effect your campaign had on your target audience.
What’s more, it encourages better creativity. Because brand lift tracks recall and favorability, advertisers are incentivized to craft campaigns that are not just clickable but memorable. Storytelling, emotional resonance, visual consistency, and message clarity all play a role in generating a strong brand lift, whereas CTR often rewards clickbait tactics that may undermine your brand’s credibility.
Finally, brand lift is better aligned with how consumers experience media today. People don’t always engage with ads directly. They scroll, skim, watch with the sound off, or view from across the room. In this fragmented environment, it’s critical to measure impact beyond interaction, and brand lift is designed to do exactly that.
A Real Example of Brand Lift in Action
Imagine a consumer electronics brand launches a YouTube campaign promoting a new wireless headphone. After running the ad for two weeks, they observe that the CTR is relatively low, around 0.6 percent. On the surface, this might suggest the campaign wasn’t effective.
However, the brand also runs a brand lift study. The results show that ad recall increased by 22 percent, brand favorability improved by 15 percent, and purchase intent rose by 11 percent among those who saw the ad compared to a control group.
Despite the low CTR, the campaign made an impression. Consumers remembered the brand, felt more positively about it, and expressed a higher likelihood of purchasing the product in the future. In short, the campaign achieved what it was designed to do: it shifted brand perception.
How to Start Using Brand Lift in Your Strategy
Transitioning from CTR-focused reporting to brand lift measurement doesn’t require a complete overhaul, but it does require a mindset shift. First, marketers should align their campaign objectives with measurement methods. If the goal of a campaign is awareness or brand-building, then brand lift, not CTR, should be the metric used to evaluate success.
Next, it’s important to ensure your campaign has enough scale to support a valid brand lift study. Because these studies require statistical significance, most platforms have minimum audience size or budget thresholds. If you meet these requirements, you can often run brand lift studies directly within the ad platform at no extra cost.
If you’re running cross-channel campaigns or want more customized insights, you may consider working with a third-party research partner like Kantar or Nielsen. These firms can help you design tailored studies, benchmark against competitors, and provide detailed breakdowns by audience, region, or message variant.
Lastly, remember that brand lift isn’t meant to replace CTR entirely. Both metrics can coexist. CTR is still useful for tracking user flow and measuring immediate interest or action, especially in direct response campaigns. But when it comes to measuring long-term brand equity, brand recall, and emotional resonance, brand lift offers a level of insight that CTR simply can’t.
The Bottom Line
Getting someone to click on an ad is no longer the only, or even the most important, measure of success. Real brand growth is driven by what people remember, how they feel, and what they intend to do in the future.
Brand lift gives marketers a lens into those deeper, more meaningful outcomes. It reflects the emotional and cognitive impact of a campaign, rather than just surface-level interaction. As brands shift toward long-term thinking and full-funnel strategies, brand lift is quickly becoming the metric that matters most.
