Brand Recognition: Does it Impact Online Advertising?

purple giraffe, marketing, outdsourced marketing, social media marketing, brand recognition, media, social media

Brand recognition can mean the difference between your business being front of mind, or just another fish in the sea.

On average, 82% of investors and 59% of consumers say brand recognition is an important factor influencing their purchasing decisions.

It’s increasingly difficult to determine the impact of an ad on brand recognition due to an oversaturated contemporary mediascape.

The average consumer saw 2,000 advertisements in their day-to-day life 40 years ago, whereas in 2021 it was between 6,000 to 10,000 brand ads every single day. Meanwhile, human attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to only eight seconds today, according to a recent Microsoft Corp. study. That’s one second less than the attention span of a goldfish! No wonder it’s hard to escape the ocean of advertisements vying for consumer attention.

Ad views and brand recognition

It takes between five to seven ad views to begin generating brand awareness, according to Tailor Brands’ 2021 Branding Statistics.

Measuring specific results of your campaign’s impact is the best way to ensure your business is effectively generating brand awareness. It gives your business necessary insight to optimise future campaigns.

Two key metrics can give an indication of how effectively your ad may be generating brand recognition: impressions and ad recall lift. 

How to use impressions to track brand recognition

An impression is the number of times your content appears on a singular user’s screen.

Impressions can be measured across most digital marketing formats, including social media advertisements, Google Ads, and email direct marketing (EDM).

To optimise your ads for impressions, focus on creating campaigns with ‘reach’, ‘brand awareness’, or ‘video views’ objectives. These are common categories online advertising platforms offer.

You should also ensure your ads showcase strong brand assets such as your logo, brand colours, slogan, and related audio to ensure a golden thread of branding.

The likelihood of brand recognition via this metric can be estimated by comparing reach (which is the number of individual screens the ad appears on) with impressions, thus determining whether the ad has been seen by the same people multiple times.

How to use ad recall lift to track brand recognition

Ad recall metrics track the effectiveness of your advertisement on brand recognition. Whilst impressions measure delivery of your ad to consumers’ screens, ad recall lift indicates how many people absorb your advertisement’s content.

Surveys measure ad recall by questioning your memory of specific ads. Today, digital advertising platforms offer their own ad recall measurement techniques.

In Meta, the estimated ad recall lift metric is available for targeting options such as post engagement, video views, and brand awareness. It measures how many people are likely to remember your advertisement within two days of seeing it.

Meta shows advertisements based on machine learning, tracking behaviour and ongoing polling of consumers. The results of a full ad recall survey are projected from this data for an approximate ad recall metric, estimating the effectiveness of your ad on creating brand recognition.

So, how do you start?

The first step to generating brand recognition is to ensure your ads are attention-grabbing and engaging so that they’re memorable.

Then measure, optimise, repeat, measure, optimise, repeat.  Slow and steady wins the race.

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Alice Kerr

Alice Kerr

Alice is a young marketing and communications professional with a passion for writing and content creation. After completing her Bachelor of Arts and majoring in English and History, Alice spent two years working within the communications and creative industries. She is now enhancing her skills by completing further study with a Graduate Certificate in Strategic Communications and is excited to continue extending this knowledge and passion within her work at Purple Giraffe.

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