What's Estimated Ad Recall Lift And How Does Facebook Calculate It?

When using the brand awareness, video views, and page post engagement objectives on Facebook ads, one of the metrics we look at, is estimated ad recall lift. But what does it represent, and how does Facebook calculate it?

Facebook explains that “estimated ad recall lift (people) is the estimated number of people likely to remember your ads within 2 days.” It marks the difference between “predicted recall” among people who saw your ad, as opposed to those who didn’t. However, as Facebook also notes in the post explaining the metric,

[quote]ad recall surveys historically include a percentage of people who say they’ve seen your ads when they weren’t shown them. This percentage is factored into estimated ad recall to calculate lift.[/quote]

To be able to see estimated ad recall lift (people) in your Ads Manager, you will need to customise one of your columns and add the metric to your view. But be warned. It is only an estimate, and Facebook says it “may be imprecise.”

Do you know what Facebook’s estimated ad recall lift (people) metric is?

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Facebook calculates estimated ad recall lift (people) by looking at three things:

– the number of people you reached with your ads,
– how much time people spent looking at your ad
– the historical relationships between the attention people give ads
– the results from ad recall surveys

The metric is influenced by many factors. The creative, the existing awareness of your brand, your audience, all can be tested for effectiveness. In fact, it is very useful to compare how effective one tactic is to another, and will help you choose your audience and creative effectively. But if you do decide to measure it more accurately for larger campaigns, Facebook recommends that you conduct brand polling previously.