How to measure your brand awareness on Facebook

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How to measure your brand awareness on Facebook

So you’re running a campaign to increase your brand awareness on Facebook and want to understand your campaign’s effectiveness. That seems reasonable enough. It should be pretty simple, right?

Well, not really. Aside from conducting a survey, measuring an increase in brand awareness isn’t as easy as you may think.

In the digital age, where performance marketers install tracking pixels and measure online conversions with ease-to-generate, solid ROI calculations, brand marketers have always faced a much tougher challenge.

How do you measure whether your lovingly crafted advertising campaign made a person more aware of your brand?

Luckily, you’ve decided to run campaigns on Facebook, as it has a couple of metrics that help you do that.

In this blog post, we’ll run through the key components of a Facebook brand awareness campaign, how Facebook helps you measure brand awareness, and the various ways you can use this information.

But, first, let’s take a quick look at just what brand awareness is and why it’s a key metric.

What is brand awareness?

Well, brand awareness is the increase in the success of meeting the main goal of your brand advertising campaign. What’s the main goal of your branding campaign? That depends on what stage of the marketing funnel you are targeting with your campaign:

Social marketers' Top Advertising Goals for social

Social marketers’ Top Advertising Goals for social, Source

If you’re running a campaign to increase brand awareness, you’re right at the top of the marketing funnel, and the metrics you measure must reflect this.

BRAND AWARENESS KPI – AD RECALL

This is a measure of advertising effectiveness to determine whether someone exposed to your ad remembers it at a later date. Traditionally this is done through a survey—a fairly cumbersome form of measurement.

The good news?

Facebook has built a metric that estimates the ad recall lift.

So why should you focus on ad recall lift instead of looking at the increase in clicks, CTR or other more common metrics?

First, because people can remember your advert without clicking or liking it!

But, more importantly, ad recall lift is a metric that further defines somebody’s relationship with your brand. And that’s what building brand awareness is really about.

How to run Facebook brand awareness campaigns

Facebook brand awareness campaigns are at the top of the funnel to increase your brand recall. Select the corresponding option from the campaign creation screen to run a brand awareness campaign.

You go through the same campaign creation process from here with other objectives, such as Traffic or Conversions.

The core difference is the two options you have for optimizing your campaign:

  • Brand Awareness: This optimization combines reach and attention to target people more likely to remember your ads.
  • Reach: This optimization lets you maximise the number of people who see your ad in a given time. If you choose to optimize for reach you will be given the option to set a maximum number of impressions of the ad an individual is allowed to see.

So, setting up a brand awareness campaign on Facebook is pretty straightforward. Now you need to know how to measure and interpret the results of your campaign.

How to measure brand lift

As mentioned earlier in this post, the key brand lift KPI to measure is the increase in ad recall. While usually measured through a survey, Facebook has a metric that measures the estimated ad recall lift within its platform.

This is a great place to start for those without the time or money to run a survey.

ESTIMATED AD RECALL LIFT (PEOPLE)

This metric provides Facebook’s best estimate of the number of people likely to remember your ads, if asked, within two days. This number is calculated by the attention and the reach of your ads being compared with historical data about the correlation between attention and ad recall. This is based on over 300 Nielsen Brand Effect studies.

When running a brand awareness, post promotion or video campaign, this metric can be selected from the Customize Columns options under the Columns drop-down menu on the Ads Manager dashboard.

It’s important to note that factors not included in this metric can also affect ad recall, such as the quality of your creative, existing awareness of your brand and the audience you are targeting.

There are plenty of ways you can use this metric to understand more about your brand awareness campaigns:

  • Compare the effectiveness of different creatives in generating ad recall in your target audience.
  • Discover your brand’s performance with different target demographics to understand what resonates with what group.
  • See which ad placement provides the best lift: Facebook mobile, desktop or Instagram?
  • Monitor your ad recall lift over time to understand the long-term impact of your branding campaigns.
  • For larger campaigns—and bigger budgets—a brand lift survey is recommended for more accurate results.

Brand awareness study

When you run a brand lift survey with Facebook, a poll with questions about your brand is delivered to two groups of people, one which sees your adverts and another that doesn’t.

An example of a poll question could be: Do you recall seeing an ad for YOUR BRAND online or on a mobile device in the last two days?

Only certain campaigns are eligible for a brand lift study, and you need to reach out to a Facebook Sales Representative to find out if your campaign is.

Conclusion

Brand awareness is vital to any business. It’s what underpins who you are. It makes people want to “Google” something rather than just search for it.

Look back at the marketing funnel at the top of this blog. No one will ever make it down to the bottom of that funnel without awareness.

Unfortunately, most companies aren’t like Google and can’t count on most of the world’s population already knowing their name.

That’s why investing in brand awareness campaigns is so vital. Without them, there’s no point in investing in all those performance campaigns further down the funnel. Or, at the very least, those performance campaigns will become much more costly.

So understanding whether or not your brand awareness campaigns are producing a lift in recognition of your brand—and growing your awareness—is vital. Traditional digital metrics such as clicks, CTR or likes won’t yield the desired results.

Focus on your ad recall and brand lift to understand how your brand awareness campaigns resonate.

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