Every marketing leader we meet asks us a version of the same question. Not "should we be on YouTube?" or "which creators should we use?" but "how do I prove this is working?"
So we went and checked what marketers actually type into Google. We ran more than 2,000 searches through Google's own suggestions and collected almost 11,000 real queries. "How to measure brand awareness" came back in nine different forms. Marketers are asking whether influencer marketing is "worth it", "dead" or "losing credibility". Under almost every theme sat the same anxiety: proving value.
This report answers those questions. It covers the pressure CMOs are under, why the easiest numbers to report are often the least useful, how brand building really pays back, and a practical way to measure brand awareness and the return on social, YouTube and creator content.
The short version
- The pressure is real. Marketing budgets have been stuck at under 8% of revenue for three years while CFOs, CEOs and boards demand more proof.
- Brands measure what is easy, not what matters. 94% of big brands judge influencer work on reach, but only 23% on sales.
- Brand building pays back slowly. 58% of advertising profit arrives after the first 13 weeks, so short term dashboards undercount it.
- Good measurement is affordable. Share of search and owned audience metrics cost nothing. Brand lift studies cost little.
- Use a stack, not a single number. Attention, audience, brand and business, each measured with the right tool.
What marketers are really searching for
Keyword research usually tells you what to write about. This time it also told us what is keeping marketing leaders up at night. We seeded Google with more than 50 marketing topics, from "brand awareness" and "creator marketing" to "marketing budget" and "tv advertising", expanded each one letter by letter, and grouped the questions people ask.
Question searches Google suggests, by marketing theme
Creator and influencer marketing produced the most questions, followed by AI and then measurement. But the questions inside those themes point the same way. The top creator questions are "is influencer marketing worth it", "is influencer marketing effective" and even "is influencer marketing dead". The top TV questions are "is TV advertising still effective" and "is TV advertising worth it". Everyone is asking the same thing in different words: does this work, and how would I know?
The measurement questions are the most practical of all. Google suggests "how to measure brand awareness" followed by "on social media", "in digital marketing", "campaigns", "KPI", "metrics", "B2B" and "online". Close behind are "what is a good marketing ROI", "how to calculate social media ROI" and "how to measure influencer marketing success".
Why proving value has never mattered more
Gartner's latest CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets sit at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, effectively flat for three years and well below the roughly 11% brands spent before the pandemic. 56% of CMOs say they do not have enough budget to deliver their strategy.
Marketing budgets as a share of company revenue
At the same time the scrutiny has intensified. In The CMO Survey, run by Duke University with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, 63% of marketing leaders said they feel more pressure from their CFO to prove value, up from 52% a year earlier. Pressure from boards jumped from 33% to 50%. Marketers named "demonstrating impact on financial outcomes" as their single biggest challenge.
CMOs reporting more pressure to prove marketing value
The consequences are personal. Spencer Stuart's 2026 study puts average CMO tenure at 4.1 years across the S&P 500, against 5.0 years for the C suite overall, and just 3.5 years at consumer companies. Nearly a third of S&P 500 companies now have no CMO at all. When marketing cannot prove its value in the language of finance, the role itself is at risk.
The measurement trap: easy to measure is not the same as effective
Here is the paradox. In Marketing Week's 2026 Language of Effectiveness survey, 77.7% of marketers said social media is easy to measure, far more than any other channel. Yet only 22% of senior marketers strongly believe they can justify their spend to the CFO with the data they have, according to research by Advertiser Perceptions.
The reason is that the easy numbers are the wrong numbers. The World Federation of Advertisers found that 99% of its member brands use influencers, but they judge them mostly on reach and engagement. Only 23% use conversions or sales.
What multinational brands use to judge influencer marketing
The IAB found the same mismatch in the US creator market: brand awareness is the most common goal for creator campaigns, yet ROI is the most common top KPI, and only 34% of buyers use brand lift studies to measure creator work. Most rely on the reporting that ad platforms give them. And popular shortcuts such as earned media value put a pound figure on likes and impressions without showing any effect on the business.
Last click attribution makes it worse. Analysis by Analytic Partners, cited by WARC and System1, found that last click models can overstate the impact of paid search by 190% and understate TV by 90%. The channels that capture demand look brilliant. The channels that create it look like a cost.
If you only measure the last click, you will always cut the thing that made people want to click.
Brand building pays back slowly, and that is the point
The largest study of advertising payback in the UK, Thinkbox's Profit Ability 2, analysed £1.8bn of spend across 141 brands. On average each £1 of advertising returned £1.87 in profit in the first 13 weeks, and £4.11 over two years. 58% of the profit arrived after the period most dashboards look at.
Profit returned per £1 of advertising, UK
Google and WARC found the same pattern from a different angle: returns in the first four months of media roughly equal the returns across the following 20 months, and a 1% rise in brand awareness is associated with a 0.4% short term and 0.6% long term increase in sales.
Cutting brand to fund performance feels safe but costs money. WARC's Multiplier Effect report, built with System1, Prophet, Bera.ai and Analytic Partners, found that moving from performance only to a mix of brand and performance lifted total revenue ROI by 90% on average, while going performance only cut ROI by 40%. The IPA's long running work by Les Binet and Peter Field points to roughly 60% brand and 40% activation as the optimum for most consumer brands, and its 2025 study "Go Big or Go Home" found that budget matters eight times more than ROI in driving profit.
How to measure brand awareness: six methods that work
There is no single number for brand awareness. The brands that measure it well use a few methods together, each covering the weakness of the others.
| Method | What it tells you | Cost | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand tracking survey | Prompted and unprompted awareness, consideration, perception over time | Medium | Monthly or quarterly |
| Brand lift study | Whether a specific campaign moved recall, awareness or consideration against a control group | Low to medium | About two weeks |
| Share of search | Your share of branded searches in the category, a leading indicator of market share | Free | Monthly |
| Marketing mix modelling | How much each channel contributed to sales, short and long term | High | Quarterly or twice a year |
| Attention metrics | Whether people actually looked at your content, not just whether it loaded | Low to medium | Live |
| Owned audience metrics | Subscribers, returning viewers, watch time and branded search growth | Free | Weekly |
How the main brand measurement methods compare. Cost and speed are Advertain's typical guidance for a UK brand, not fixed prices.
1. Brand tracking surveys
The traditional backbone. A regular survey of your category asks people which brands they know unprompted, which they recognise when prompted, and which they would consider. Run it monthly or quarterly with the same questions and you have a trend line for awareness, consideration and perception.
2. Brand lift studies
Google, YouTube, Meta and TikTok all offer lift studies that split an audience into people who saw your content and a control group who did not, then survey both. Google's Brand Lift measures ad recall, awareness, consideration and brand association. It is the quickest way to show a specific campaign moved people, and it is used by only a third of buyers on creator work.
3. Share of search
The cheapest leading indicator in marketing. Divide searches for your brand by searches for all brands in your category using free tools such as Google Trends. Les Binet's work for the IPA found share of search tracked market share in every category tested and could lead it by up to a year for cars. A later IPA study across 30 cases found it closely tracks market share. If your share of search is rising, your share of market usually follows.
4. Marketing mix modelling
Econometric models that estimate how much each channel contributed to sales, including long term effects. Once affordable only for the biggest advertisers, it has become far more accessible: Google made its open source model, Meridian, available to all advertisers in January 2025, and 46.9% of US marketers surveyed by EMARKETER and TransUnion plan to invest in MMM in the next year.
5. Attention metrics
A viewable impression is not a viewed one. Lumen Research found that only around 30% of viewable ads are actually seen. Attention measurement, from companies such as Lumen, Adelaide and Amplified Intelligence, estimates how much of your content people genuinely looked at. Amplified Intelligence found the average YouTube ad earns about 14 seconds of active attention.
6. Owned audience metrics
The most overlooked measure of all. If you own a YouTube channel, you can see every week how many people chose to subscribe, how long they watched, how many came back and how much branded search you generated. These numbers are free, immediate and hard to fake, and they compound in a way campaign reach never does.
Measuring YouTube and creator content properly
Creator marketing is growing fast. The IAB puts US creator ad spend at $37bn in 2025, growing four times faster than media overall. Linqia's 2026 report found 81% of enterprise marketers say creator content outperforms brand made assets, yet 79% name ROI as their top challenge. The answer is not to stop investing but to measure it like any other media.
The evidence for YouTube is encouraging, with caveats. Analytic Partners data presented by Google found YouTube delivered a higher ROI than linear TV or broadcaster video on demand for 82% of Australian brands. Google and Nielsen analysis found that creative following Google's ABCD principles produced a 30% higher sales lift. These are Google's own figures, so the right response is to test them on your own brand with a lift study or a regional test, not to take them on trust.
At Advertain we report every YouTube and creator programme through four layers.
| Layer | Question it answers | Metrics we report |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Attention | Did people choose to watch? | Click through rate, average view duration, share of video watched, returning viewers |
| 2. Audience | Are we building something we own? | Subscribers gained, watch time, share of views from subscribers, comments and saves |
| 3. Brand | Did people remember and think better of us? | Brand lift, share of search, branded search volume, sentiment |
| 4. Business | Did it make money? | Sales lift in test and control regions, contribution in the marketing mix model, cost per engaged view against paid media |
The Advertain measurement stack for YouTube and creator content. Each layer is only trusted if the one below it is healthy.
A 90 day measurement plan for CMOs
- Weeks 1 to 2: set the baseline. Pull 24 months of share of search for your brand and top five competitors, your current brand tracking figures, and owned channel data.
- Weeks 3 to 4: agree the language with finance. Pick three business outcomes your CFO already cares about and map each marketing metric to one of them.
- Weeks 5 to 8: run a lift test. Put your next YouTube or creator campaign behind a brand lift study, or a regional test and control split.
- Weeks 9 to 12: build the stack. Report attention, audience, brand and business together every month, and add a marketing mix model when budgets justify it.
- Every quarter: protect the long term. Show the two year view alongside the 13 week view so brand building is judged on the timescale it actually works.
Frequently asked questions
How do you measure brand awareness?
Use several methods together: a brand tracking survey for prompted and unprompted awareness, brand lift studies for individual campaigns, share of search as a free monthly indicator, and marketing mix modelling for the contribution to sales. For social and YouTube, add owned audience metrics such as subscribers, returning viewers and branded search.
How do you measure brand awareness on social media?
Reach and impressions show exposure, not awareness. Pair them with a platform brand lift study, growth in branded search and share of search, and owned audience signals like subscribers and returning viewers.
What is a good marketing ROI?
It depends on the timescale. In the UK, Thinkbox's Profit Ability 2 found advertising returned an average of £1.87 in profit per £1 in the first 13 weeks and £4.11 over two years. Judge brand building on the longer window.
Is influencer marketing worth it?
It can be, if it is measured properly. 99% of the world's biggest advertisers use influencers, but only 23% judge them on sales. Use lift studies or test and control regions rather than likes or earned media value.
What is share of search?
Share of search is the percentage of all branded searches in a category that are for your brand. Research by Les Binet for the IPA found it tracks, and often leads, share of market, which makes it a cheap early warning system.
