SEM brand lift, maybe

Posted by Josh on Thursday, October 29th, 2009.

A recent post in the Google Retail Advertising Blog describes a study conducted by Google and Levi’s to see if search ads generated brand awareness. The study demonstrated increased brand awareness, but there are some significant caveats to extrapolating to other brands.

The study showed a significant increase in Levi’s brand awareness among people who saw an ad in the top position but didn’t click on it, as shown in the chart below.

They also looked at data for “non-consumers” which they rather generously described as people who hadn’t bought Levi’s jeans in the last 6 months, as shown below.

This data is very encouraging for Levi’s, and it might apply to other major brands, but before asserting that AdWords ads are great for brand building, consider the following:

They only looked at the top ad position, and it is not clear if the ads were placed above or alongside the search results.Â If they were located above the natural results, they arguably benefited from user confusion between ads and free listings. Eye tracking studies also show that users look ads far less often if they are further down the page.
More web-savvy searchers tend to ignore ads, particularly very technical users. Consequently, we expect brand lift would be less significant for these groups.
Levi’s is already an established brand with exceptional consumer recognition. In the 1980′s they were THE brand of jeans. This means that they were – at least in part – increasing brand “freshness” as opposed to introducing a brand to which customers are not familiar.
This study only asked users to name the Levi’s brand, and it did not look at brand characterization or any kind of follow-on activity (like sales).

In summary, there is brand lift, but the results of this study are likely to be an upper bound on increased awareness.