Marketers love big numbers, a viral spike, a record-breaking conversion rate, or a chart that shoots straight up. Yet when it comes to advertising effectiveness, the real story of growth is often written in smaller, steadier lines.
A 2-point lift in purchase intent may look like a modest gain. Still, it can represent thousands of new customers, millions in incremental revenue, and a measurable shift in market momentum. Those two points are the difference between being remembered and being chosen.
According to DISQO Ad Effectiveness Benchmarks with results from over 1,750 cross-platform campaigns, the average brand sees a 2.3-point lift in purchase intent. That small number signals a powerful truth: advertising works not through giant leaps, but through cumulative steps that build real business impact over time.
Lift captures the force of progress. It quantifies how attention becomes preference, how familiarity builds trust, and how every campaign contributes to long-term growth. When measured with precision and context, lift reveals the compounding value of effective advertising, proof that even small shifts can create outsized outcomes.
In the following, we explore why incremental lift holds extraordinary value, how it scales across audiences and outcomes, and why it remains one of the most reliable indicators of durable brand growth.
Lift captures the rhythm of brand movement. It shows how advertising influences perception, how sentiment evolves, and how campaigns create momentum across the full spectrum of awareness, engagement, and action.
Each type of lift reveals a different facet of performance. Awareness indicates visibility. Consideration reflects relevance and intent. Favorability indicates persuasion, the point at which a brand transitions from being recognized to being preferred.
Across DISQO’s benchmarks, the median favorability lift is just under 3 points. At scale, that shift is profound. For a brand with a base favorability of fifty percent, an incremental three-point increase represents hundreds of thousands of people who now view the brand more positively than before campaign exposure.
That change may feel subtle, but it reshapes the competitive landscape. Favorability is often the bridge between familiarity and intent, the early signal that the brand narrative is resonating and trust is taking hold.
What lift clarifies:
Across channels and audiences, these signals create a more complete understanding of campaign performance. They show how perception compounds, how frequency amplifies, and how creative quality sustains momentum.
For marketers and media leaders, lift serves as a foundation for smarter decision-making:
Lift is the language of progress. It does not seek spectacle, but clarity. It demonstrates how even the smallest upward shift in sentiment can serve as the catalyst for substantial brand growth.
The compounding power of incrementality describes how these small, measurable improvements in marketing performance accumulate into exponential long-term gains. When each campaign builds upon the learnings and results of the one before it, it creates a cycle of continuous optimization and sustained growth.
In marketing science, incrementality testing isolates impact. It identifies what outcomes would not have occurred without a campaign and distinguishes them from actions that would have happened organically. This clarity is what gives incrementality its strategic weight. It moves marketers beyond assumptions, revealing the portion of performance directly driven by advertising.
What incrementality measures
Incrementality testing compares two groups of consumers under the same conditions: one exposed to advertising and one unexposed. By analyzing the differences in attitudes or behaviors between them, marketers can quantify what is truly additive. This separation of organic activity from campaign-driven outcomes defines the integrity of the measurement.
Incremental growth
When results from incrementality tests are applied repeatedly, the gains multiply. Each optimization feeds the next, much like compound interest. A campaign that improves its incremental ROI by even five percent each quarter can deliver substantial cumulative growth over the course of a year. The impact intensifies as each new decision is informed by proven, causal insights from prior campaigns.
Strategic importance of incrementality
Modern advertising measurement has evolved from attribution models that assign credit to touchpoints toward incrementality models that prove impact. This evolution is critical in an environment shaped by data privacy, cross-platform complexity, and reduced tracking signals. Incrementality testing provides a stable foundation for evaluating media effectiveness, creative resonance, and audience response.
Incremental lift and brand growth implications
Incremental gains, when understood, strengthen brand lift measurement discipline over time by:
The compounding power of incrementality transforms short-term lift into lasting growth momentum. Each verified gain informs smarter planning, sharper targeting, and stronger creative performance, ensuring that every campaign not only performs but advances the brand’s long-term equity and efficiency.
Lift gains its true significance at scale. Even the smallest improvements in awareness, favorability, or conversion can translate into major business outcomes when applied to large audiences and repeated over time.
A 1 or 2 point lift may seem modest, yet for a brand reaching millions, that shift represents hundreds of thousands of additional consumers moving closer to purchase. When multiplied across multiple campaigns, the effect compounds into significant financial growth and strengthened market share.
This is the scale multiplier in action. Each incremental improvement in brand sentiment, attention, or behavioral response contributes to the next. Campaigns become more efficient, media strategies sharper, and creative performance more precise. Over time, this compounding creates a self-reinforcing cycle of effectiveness, where every small, validated gain expands overall marketing impact.
In a world where clarity and efficiency define success, scale turns modest lifts into momentum. It transforms incremental movement into meaningful growth, proving that even the smallest measurable progress can carry extraordinary weight when consistently realized across audiences, channels, and time.
Growth does not come from isolated wins. It comes from understanding how every campaign contributes to the next and how each incremental gain compounds into sustained brand performance. Lift reveals that continuity, the measurable thread connecting awareness, favorability, and behavior into one clear picture of progress.
DISQO’s 2H 2025 Ad Effectiveness Benchmarks highlight this cumulative strength. Spanning more than 1,700 campaigns across industries, they quantify how small, consistent improvements create enduring impact. The data shows that every percentage point of lift represents real people influenced, real outcomes achieved, and real value generated.
For marketers focused on advancing efficiency and proving impact, these benchmarks help teams evaluate performance relative to the market, their competitors, and refine strategy with precision, understanding how lift translates into business outcomes.
To see how your campaigns compare, explore DISQO’s 2H 2025 Ad Effectiveness Benchmarks. They provide a comprehensive view of what effective advertising looks like today and how incremental progress continues to build the brands of tomorrow.