Facebook’s Estimated Ad Recall Lift: Everything You Need to Know

Today, we’re looking at Facebook’s Estimated Ad Recall Lift: what it is, why it matters, and how to leverage it to your advantage. We’ll also see how it works with the Brand Awareness objective in your Facebook marketing campaigns.

What’s a campaign “objective”?

A Facebook campaign objective is the purpose of your marketing campaign. There are objectives for things like traffic, conversions (sign-ups, sales, etc.), impressions, and one for brand awareness.

Each of these objectives provides different metrics and gives you different data.

When you’re creating your campaign, you just select brand awareness during campaign creation.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: how the heck can Facebook measure brand awareness?

It sounds tricky, but they’ve found a simple way to do it. But first, let’s define the metric so you know exactly what it means.

What is Facebook’s Estimated Ad Recall Lift?

Estimated ad recall lift is a metric used in Facebook’s Brand Awareness campaigns.

It shows how many people Facebook estimates will remember seeing your ad within a two-day window.

The metric allows you to measure the overall effectiveness of your brand awareness campaign on the world’s biggest social media platform.

When you stop and think, that’s pretty incredible!

Unlike other more concrete campaign types, brand awareness has always been difficult to track. Marketers have had to rely on impressions historically, but Facebook’s ad recall lift now measures the memorableness of an ad and brand!

Okay, but why is it called a “lift”?

Because that’s the core of the objective here: to lift the memorableness of your brand.

That “lift” in memorableness for a number of people polled indicates brand awareness success. 

Key factors like engagement, messaging, and visual appeal can make the brand awareness campaign a success or a flop.

If your ad isn’t memorable, people won’t remember it. If it’s engaging and connects with the right audience, there’s a good chance people will remember it in a few days.

How does Facebook’s estimated ad recall lift work?

Facebook shows the ad to your target prospect audience list. If your ad is engaging enough, your total ad recall estimate will be higher. If it’s boring, or something just doesn’t work, it will be lower.

We ran a retargeting campaign for a brand we manage and you can see the estimated ad recall lift in this screenshot.

As you can see, the number of people estimated to remember our ad within two days was 4,710 of 48,636 that were reached (9.68%).

Other platforms don’t offer this type of ad recall metric so it’s nice to have the insight when advertising with Facebook.

In order to estimate the lift, Facebook polls a sample set of those that viewed the ad and asks them if they remember seeing the ad.

Based on the responses, Facebook estimates how many people will remember seeing your ad in 2 days.

Here’s an example of one of those polls.

Can you tweak the polling intensity?

Yes, you actually can. You can tweak the intensity of the polling from automated to an upgraded version by requesting the upgraded polling service. 

As Facebook states, “A brand lift study is required for the most accurate measurement of ad recall. However, if your campaign doesn’t meet the criteria to conduct a full study, the estimated ad recall lift (people) metric can be an accessible alternative.”

The upgraded version presumably puts a bit more thought, resources and scrutiny into the final metric “results.”

This would obviously be worth it for any campaign where big bucks and big market share are on the line.

So, yes, from a brand awareness perspective, this is an amazing and essential metric.

Because if you have compelling ads that effectively focus on your brand positioning, you can guide your brand recall upward.

Who can run the upgraded ad recall poll analysis?

The individualized upgraded poll analyses are only for qualified ad accounts right now.

In layman’s terms, “qualified” just means for bigger monthly ad spend, and that you filled out your account fully, of course. Most lower-spend accounts are running the automated (“estimated”) ad recall lift analysis on each survey.

What’s the takeaway?

If you’re looking to make your brand more memorable, Facebook’s brand awareness campaign is a good route.

The recall metric is more powerful and measurable than simple impressions. It’s a good way to aim for a concrete return on marketing metrics when comparing brand awareness campaigns alone or against other campaigns. 

Got a nagging question? Just ask us!