Advertising Effectiveness Benchmarks: Brand and Outcomes Lift Insights

At DISQO, we work with advertising clients across a wide range of industries and specialties every day. From brand researchers to agency partners to media platforms, our tools and solutions help drive insights for stakeholders across the advertising ecosystem. Whether we’re working with a travel brand focused on driving website traffic, an agency interested in improving their client’s e-commerce activity, or a media company seeking to understand its unique strengths for partners, our tools provide rich, continuous data on the attitudinal and behavioral impacts of dedicated advertising campaigns.

Our benchmarks are derived from large normative datasets and uncover nuanced insights about the industries, channels, and demographics that underpin ad effectiveness. With regular updates of these benchmarks, we provide a constant pulse for marketers on what “good” looks like. Not only does this data provide a fresh view of ad effectiveness across a huge range of metrics, it also allows us to understand the nuances driving ad impact across different industry categories.

In this article, we leverage our most recent ad effectiveness benchmarks to analyze which industries lead and lag on specific Brand Lift and Outcomes Lift metrics within our database. Because our normative benchmarks span across 18 distinct industry verticals (e.g., Food and Beverages, Home and Garden, Entertainment, Utilities), we’re able to quickly compare these verticals to see which industries have unique advantages near the top and bottom of the funnel. Upon isolating a few industries where certain metrics are well above the overall average, we explore why these metrics diverge and what implications this has for today’s marketing leaders.

A quick primer on overall full-funnel marketing benchmarks

To start, let’s take a look at DISQO’s overall benchmarks for advertising effectiveness at the most general level. The below chart shows what the typical lift score looks like for the typical campaign in our normative database. These benchmarks are median values based on data from March 2021 through December 2024, and are built from approximately 1650 campaigns in total. The lift score listed represents the difference between exposed and unexposed control consumers on each metric. Definitions for each metric can be found in our larger, downloadable report.

While the benchmarks are general in nature—remember, this is looking at ALL campaigns across ALL industries—there are a few quick takeaways from these topline results.

Brand Lift is stronger on mid-funnel metrics: In general, mid-funnel metrics like familiarity, favorability, and purchase intent are the biggest movers for the average ads in our 2021-2024 database. For instance, brand favorability moves about 3 points after a typical ad campaign, which can represent a huge gain for established or emerging brands looking to win more share of wallet. In contrast, awareness metrics (unaided and aided) are slightly more resistant to lift. Unaided awareness, arguably one of the most critical metrics for staying relevant in any industry category, is also the hardest brand metric to move, with a .30 lift after a typical ad campaign.

Large-scale Outcomes Lift is extremely difficult to generate: On the bottom-half of the chart, you can see a steep dropoff as we transition into behavioral metrics. In other words, it’s easier to move attitudes (top) than behavior (bottom). This is especially true when we look at the bottom-most bars of this chart, which are focused on brand-specific outcomes. If your ad can drive consumers to actively search for your product, visit your company website, or add your product to their online shopping cart, it’s fairly clear that you’ve had a highly successful advertising campaign. 

However, getting to that point is fraught with challenges both within and outside your advertising content, reinforcing why these outcome-centric benchmarks are so much lower than brand-centric ones. That said, it’s important to note that even a 0.2% increase in brand e-commerce behavior for any given brand can have huge long-term revenue consequences, so surpassing these seemingly low benchmarks is still a high bar to clear.

Honing in on industry-level differences

Once we parse through this topline information, many marketers’ next questions revolve around whether the benchmarks apply to their specific verticals. While that inclination has its drawbacks (see our articles on evaluating normative benchmarks and applying them to your organization ), there is certainly a great deal of incremental value to be gained by analyzing benchmarks at an industry level.

Below are a few core questions we aim to answer in the remainder of this article. They help showcase the strengths of focusing on industry-specific benchmarks and provide insights into how advertising strategies necessarily differ across domains.

• Which industries have the most success moving top-funnel attitudinal metrics?
• Do industries that excel in some attitudinal metrics excel in all of them?
• Which industries drive category-level digital search and web behavior?
• When it comes down to brand-level website visits, what verticals shine brightest?

In the subsequent analysis, aimed at answering these questions, we directly compare industry-level benchmarks versus overall (topline) benchmarks. This approach allows us to assess the level of underperformance or overperformance a given vertical achieves on any metric of interest.

To conduct this analysis, we simply divide the industry-level benchmarks for any metric by the topline benchmark for the same metric, which generates a multiplier value. When that multiplier is ~1.0, this industry performs at relative parity to the overall average. However, when the multiplier moves notably higher/lower, we can infer that this industry’s typical ad performance is ‘x times’ stronger/weaker than the overall average.

Using this technique, the table below provides a view of how different industries perform versus overall benchmarks on four key metrics: unaided awareness, brand favorability, category search behavior, and brand e-commerce behavior. In the following sections, we unpack the leaders of each.

Top-of-funnel industry leaders

Unaided awareness

Starting at the top of the brand funnel is unaided awareness. This open-ended metric indicates how top-of-mind your brand is to everyday consumers, and is typically one of the first places companies need reliable strength in order to win consistent market share. When looking at how different industries perform on moving unaided awareness, the vertical that sticks out as uniquely successful is business services. These include B2B software companies, consulting firms, and other service organizations focused on supporting everyday business operations.

A quick look at the chart above shows that business services overperform the topline benchmark for unaided awareness by ~6.57x, indicating that they are more successful at moving the needle here than the advertisers as a whole. While there is certainly a good deal of variability within these industry ads, the fact remains that they are notably stronger at building unaided awareness gains from today’s advertising efforts.

Because many B2B sellers are competing in crowded marketplaces with more niche audiences, simply getting their name toward the top of a consumer’s mind is critical in garnering outreach and sales conversations. As such, successful ads in this space may not immediately impact bottom-line conversion, and may instead simply push their brand name ahead of a few competitors to maximize the likelihood of eventual consideration when the buying cycle is active. Ultimately, awareness is a critical brand metric in this space, given that path-to-purchase is much more gated and longer in nature than a simple retail transaction.

Brand favorability

Looking beyond awareness, another top- to mid-funnel metric of high importance to many marketers is brand favorability. This metric-which represents the percent of consumers who view a brand favorably - is valuable in driving consumer choice when all else is equal.

When examining brand favorability across industries (again, refer to the chart above) one clear winner emerges: Pets, which includes pet food and supplies. Ads for these types of goods are able to drive typical brand favorability lift scores at 2.28x more than the average ad.

Given the emotional attachment people have with their pets and the need to ensure they are well-cared for, garnering their favorability is a critical step in leading them to purchase. Standing out in a crowded marketplace requires ads that are emotionally relevant with clear and resonant messaging. This type of advertising is leading to above-average lift on favorability, and helping to position them for wins on physical and digital shelves.

Bottom-of-funnel industry leaders

Category search

As we transition from the top of the brand funnel (attitudes) to the bottom of the funnel (behaviors), the first metric we want to look at is category search. Plainly speaking, category search refers to whether a consumer actively searches for the product or service category (e.g., search engine, review site, etc.) in a brand-agnostic manner. For instance, if you watch an ad for a new gadget, and that ad causes you to do some research on which gadget brand is best, your ad has driven category search.

If we examine industry multiplier values for category search in the previous table (see above), Apparel & Accessories is a vertical that clearly stands out. This vertical primarily includes clothing and accessory brands, both of which are extremely competitive areas and easy to access online. Overall, ads in this category garner 2.8x the amount of category search lift as other ads, meaning they drive consumers to review sites, search engines, and other brand-agnostic locations relevant to the overarching vertical. 

Brand site visitation

Near the bottom of the brand / outcomes funnel lies brand site visitation, or the extent to which a given ad drives incremental gains in direct web traffic. For many brands, their websites and apps are sacred territory, and they dedicate an extreme amount of effort to ensuring that visitors are able to navigate to their ultimate outcome of interest. It follows that industries who are able to overachieve on brand site visitation can establish notable advantages on spend efficiency and customer conversion.

Much like its sister industry of apparel & accessories, the retail industry is successful in driving traffic to owned websites. These advertisers are able to drive a tremendous amount of web traffic, to the tune of 4.92x above the overall average. This is not necessarily surprising, as these brands have a clear call-to-action around particular apparel products and an easily-accessible purchase path.

For other industries who may look at these results and say “we can’t do what they do; retail is just a unique category,” there’s likely some truth to that assumption. Many retailers have the distinct benefit of omnichannel presence and straightforward paths-to-purchase. That said, many of these brands are still ahead-of-the-curve when it comes to the CTAs within their ads, strong branded websites, and robust first-party data allowing them to effectively retarget already engaged shoppers. For other industries that want to ensure advertising effectiveness is cascading all the way to the bottom of the purchasing funnel, connecting ads to the apps, channels, and objective sources that rank their brand highly may help drive incremental gains in site visitation lift for future campaigns.

There’s more where that came from in our Brand Lift and Outcomes Lift report

The analysis presented here is a small sampling of what’s available in our larger quarterly report. In this quarterly report - available for download now - marketers can dive into:

Category-level benchmarks for all brand and outcome lift metrics

Our four core categories include consumables, goods, services, and vehicles. Examine benchmark data from this perspective to gain the scale of higher-order benchmarks without losing all the granularity that industry-level benchmarks offer.

Every benchmark from every industry

See the exact benchmark values underlying all industry multiplier calculations from this article. Examine other brand and outcome lift metrics beyond the four discussed in-depth here, and consider building your own multipliers for specific industry and metric combinations.

Benchmarks based on a brand’s current state of awareness

We explore benchmarks for new, emerging, and established brands in our Ad Effectivenesss Benchmarks report. Understand, based on your brand’s maturity, what “good” looks like throughout the funnel and where you can expect to drive results efficiently and quickly and where you may need to temper your expectations. 

Social media’s unique influence on brand and outcomes lift

Learn how social media advertising performance stacks up to other channels. See where social media shines brightly, and where other channels have their own advantages (see our report here).

Interested in learning more about DISQO’s most recent ad effectiveness benchmarks? Download our latest report.