Search Lift measurement determines how your ads impact a person’s likelihood to search for your product or brand on YouTube and Google Search. You can use this measurement to adjust and improve your campaigns to achieve your desired marketing objectives.
In this article, you’ll learn how to set up Search Lift measurement, define your search terms of interest, and view your Search Lift measurement data.
Before you begin
A Search Lift study can be run on its own or together with a Brand Lift and/or Conversion Lift study. For example, you can run a study with both Brand Lift and Search Lift, or decide to run Search Lift only.
Search Lift budgeting
To detect the lift driven by eligible campaigns, you need to meet some minimum budget requirements. This budget ensures that your campaigns get enough impressions and search volume to have a reasonable chance of detecting lift. It’s highly recommended that the sum of the budgets of all active campaigns that are measuring the product or the brand should meet the minimum budget requirements shared in About Search Lift budget recommendations.
Example
In the US, a minimum of $10,000 USD is needed for Brand Lift, and the budget requirement for Search Lift is, therefore, also $10,000 USD. To measure Brand and Search Lift together, the minimum spend is still $10,000 USD, and not $20,000 USD, because budgets aren’t additive.
Search Lift search terms
A key part of running a successful Search Lift study is ensuring you follow our best practices in selecting good search terms. Note that when running Search Lift together with Brand Lift, the name of the product or brand being advertised and selected as the preferred Brand Lift survey answer is always included in your Search Lift study.
When setting up your Search Lift study, you’ll be asked to create search term groups. A group is a collection of related search terms to be measured in your Search Lift study. You can have up to 5 groups, but typically only 1-2 groups are needed. Within each group, you should ensure that search terms are relevant and specifically related to your product or brand and to your ad. We often find that Search Lift measurement is more successful if you focus on a few search terms that are specific and feature your brand or product names.
Using specific search terms that are carefully chosen is key, because it’s easier to detect lift for search terms that people are unlikely to search for without the ad, but likely to search for after viewing the ad. Indeed, those search terms will have a high increase in search activity relative to their baseline, making the lift easier to identify reliably.
- Select a small number of search terms. 1-5 recommended per search term group.
- Select only terms associated with your brand or product or relevant to your ad.
- Select search terms that are specific and for which you expect to have a high search volume uplift thanks to your ad campaigns.
- Do NOT select a large number of search terms or create too many groups.
- Do NOT select generic or irrelevant search terms.
- Do NOT select competitor search terms.
- Do NOT use a sentence or a search term composed of too many words as it’s unlikely that users will search exactly for the same sentence.
- There’s no need to include multiple variations of the same word including misspelling, punctuation, accents or the like as these will already be captured.
Example
Advertising for the Google Pixel 7 Pro
“Pixel 7 Pro” is a search term that is specific, and which is unlikely to be searched for without the ad. Note that using “pixel 7 pro” will include searches like “Google pixel 7 pro” and “new pixel 7 pro smartphone”. So, this term is specific but catches a wide range of queries and is a good candidate.
“Google Pixel” is a search term that’s only partly related to your ad. Some users will be searching for the “Google Pixel 6” or any other model, which will make it harder to detect a significant lift. Using such a search term is possible, but if you don’t notice lift, you should understand that it could be because the term wasn’t specific enough.
“Google” or “Pixel” are search terms that are too common and for which people will be searching regardless of your advertising. People search for “Google” for various information unrelated to the pixel phone, and people search for “pixel” which is a very common term in photography. It’ll be very hard to detect any lift with those search terms, even with a high performing ad.
“Improved Pixel 7 camera zoom” is too complex and contains too many words. It’s unlikely that enough users search for this exact sentence to detect lift. It would be better to break up this complex search term into 2 simpler search terms instead: “Pixel 7 camera” and “Pixel zoom”.
Instructions
Create and define your product or brand
- In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon
.
- Click the Measurements drop down in the section menu.
- Click Lift measurement.
- Click the plus button
.
- Fill the product or brand name to identify this study.
- Select “Search Lift” and optionally other lift types, for example, Brand Lift.
- Select the campaigns that you want to measure in this study.
- Navigate to “Search Lift Settings”
- If you’re only measuring Search Lift, you can start entering search terms. If you also measure Brand Lift, you must first click Add another group before being able to add search terms.
- Separating search terms with a comma will save the search term and let you create new ones.
- To delete a search term, click the cross next to it.
- Review the search terms, then click Save.
View your Search Lift measurement data
Search Lift measurement data is only available in the lift measurement page. You can have an overview of your results in the "Lift Measurement" table.
- In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon
- Click the Measurements drop down in the section menu.
- Click Lift measurement.
- Click the columns icon
.
- Click Modify columns.
- Select Search Lift, then click Apply.
.To view your detailed results, open your study details and visit the “Search Lift” tab.
