Brand lift tests answer one simple question. "Did your ads change how people think about your brand?"
Understanding this impact is key to proving your ROI and optimizing future spend.
LinkedIn's Brand Lift test uses an incrementality approach. That means we measure the true impact of your advertising, what happened because people saw your ads, and wouldn't have happened otherwise.
We do this by pushing short, native polls on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Audience Network, where we ask the same question to two groups. A test group that saw your ad and a control group that didn't. The difference in their responses helps demonstrate the incremental impact of your campaign.
Let's look at a Brand Lift result together.
Go to the test page to start a new test or see the result of a current one. If we view a result, LinkedIn provides a test-level summary with clear takeaways.
The action-oriented next steps provided shift the experience from reporting to decision support.
In the brand lift performance section, we can see the results for each question.
Lift detected means we observed a positive lift and there is high confidence the ads drove real impact.
Directional lift detected means we are seeing either positive or negative lift signal, but with lower confidence.
These results often benefit from more scale, longer duration, or follow-up testing to strengthen confidence.
If there was no lift detected, that signals an opportunity to adjust the campaign.
For each question, we can also see the number of respondents in both the test group and the control group.
Selecting 'View Details' gives us question-level data, where lift outcomes are clear and easy to interpret.
At the top of the lift overview, we can see Absolute Lift, which is the raw point difference, the Estimated Total Lift, which is the modeled number of people influenced by the campaign, and Relative Lift, which is the percentage change between the control and test groups.
Below, we can see the visual lift breakdown between control and test groups.
Brand lift insights helped to answer the most important questions after a campaign. "What changed?" "Why did it change?" "What's the next step?"
For example, an insight from the product consideration question could be: "The ads drove a meaningful improvement in consideration. This signals the campaign-influenced mid-funnel perception, and we can confidently scale it." And for the ad recall question: "Ads are showing a positive recall signal but with lower confidence.
The campaign creative is somewhat effective, but increasing scale, frequency, or adjusting the creative could help strengthen this result."
By focusing on the right metrics and turning results into a clear story, Brand Lift results help you make smarter decisions for future campaigns.