A New Era of Brand Awareness Metrics Has Arrived

We are entering an exciting new era for brand awareness metrics. Before, when brand awareness was discussed in terms of ROI, brands have been left wanting and wondering: “If we invest X amount of dollars, how much are we really getting back in return?” However, those days are swiftly moving behind us.

There are now a number of innovative measurements that we currently have (or will have in the very near future) to allow us to start calculating the impact of brand awareness on Facebook and other digital channels beyond more than just impressions.

Here are three of those measurements:

1. Ad Recall Lift

Ad recall lift measures how many people saw your ad and are likely to remember it two days later. Facebook uses their knowledge of each user’s typical behavior and attention to posts and ads (as well as 300+ brand studies) to calculate this metric.

This is most helpful when you want to prove that users are seeing your ads, engaging with them, and actually remembering them later on. It is also very valuable for optimizing your creative to be the most relevant and attention-catching units possible.

2. Attention Impressions

Attention impressions measures how many of the impressions that were served were actually paid attention to. Facebook uses their knowledge of each user’s typical behavior and attention to posts and ads, and then compares their behavior and attention to your post in order to get this metric. This metric is also used in the calculation of ad recall lift.

3. Viewable Impressions

Viewable impressions measures how many impressions served were actually viewable (50% within the user’s screen for more than two seconds). Facebook is integrating with Moat (one of the web’s largest digital advertisement search engines) to do this.

Why Do These Brand Awareness Metrics Matter?

The value of the metrics listed above is that they are finally making brand awareness testable.

Most brand awareness buys still only optimize to hit lowest CPM (cost per thousand impressions) AKA most impressions and views — but that doesn’t give advertisers any room to test out audiences and actually learn. This optimization also does not mean that advertisers are hitting the right audiences or that the audiences they think they should be hitting actually care about the ads.

Paying attention to and optimizing for all three of the metrics above will allow advertisers to ensure best performance, all while allowing them to learn about their audiences along the way.