Forecasting and Discovering Insights with YouTube Brand Lift Data

Google’s YouTube Brand Lift Study (or BLS) is a tool for quantifying the impact of a YouTube video campaign’s effectiveness in generating brand awareness, brand awareness, ad recall, consideration, favorability, purchase intent, or brand interest. In this article, I’ll walk through the business use cases and challenges for the BLS study from both a digital marketing and data science / analytics perspective.

The article is intended for technical business analysts, particularly those also within the digital marketing and advertising industry. A thank you to Operam’s paid search team for providing the business domain knowledge behind this article and answering the countless questions I’ve asked.

How YouTube’s Brand Lift Study Works

Although each of our clients approaches their marketing methodology differently, when planning their own campaigns, Operam’s own Paid Search and Social team will typically start with a media brief for the customer segments the product might appeal to — a theatrical marketing campaign for the film The Disaster Artist, for instance, may highlight comedy fans, cinephiles, and niche comedy genre fans as targetable audiences.

A YouTube Brand Lift Study is used for multiple purposes: