Search Lift Studies in DV360: A Practical Guide to Measuring Upper-Funnel Impact

What Is a Search Lift Study in DV360?

A search lift study measures whether your upper-funnel advertising — display, video, or connected TV (CTV) — causes a measurable increase in branded and category search activity. Instead of relying on last-click attribution, which usually credits the search ad that captured demand, a search lift study asks a more honest question: did the impression actually create that demand in the first place?

Inside Display & Video 360 (DV360), search lift is one of the platform's incrementality-focused measurement products. It uses a controlled experiment — an exposed group and a randomised control group — to compare search behaviour between users who saw your ads and users who didn't. The difference is your lift.

This matters because branded search is one of the clearest downstream signals that awareness campaigns are working. If your CTV or programmatic display spend is genuinely building interest, you should see more people searching for your brand and products.

Why Search Lift Matters for Upper-Funnel Campaigns

Most marketers can prove the value of lower-funnel activity easily — conversions are trackable and attributable. The challenge is justifying budget for awareness and consideration media, where the impact is indirect and often delayed.

Search lift studies help close that gap by:

• Proving incrementality rather than correlation. A rise in search volume during a campaign could be seasonal; a controlled study isolates the media's true contribution.
• Connecting brand media to demand. Search is a behaviour, not just a metric — it signals real intent generated by your campaign.
• Informing budget decisions. If a video line item drives significant search lift, that's a strong argument to scale it, even if it shows few direct conversions.
• Complementing brand lift. While a brand lift study measures shifts in awareness or favourability via surveys, search lift measures a concrete action.

For teams building a full-funnel measurement stack, search lift sits neatly between brand lift (attitudinal) and conversion measurement (transactional).

How Search Lift Studies Work

The methodology relies on randomisation. When your campaign becomes eligible, DV360 splits the addressable audience into two groups:

Group	What Happens	Purpose
Exposed	Users are served your ads	Measures search behaviour with exposure
Control	Users are withheld from your ads	Establishes the baseline search behaviour

Both groups are otherwise comparable, so any difference in search activity can be attributed to the ads. The platform then reports the incremental lift in searches for the keywords and topics you've associated with the study.

Key Concepts to Understand

• Incremental searches: The additional searches driven by exposure, above what the control group produced.
• Lift percentage: The relative increase in search activity among the exposed group.
• Cost per incremental search: How efficiently your media generated additional demand.
• Statistical significance: Whether the observed lift is reliable or within the margin of noise.

Because these studies depend on sufficient scale to reach significance, they work best on campaigns with meaningful reach and budget behind them.

When You Should Run a Search Lift Study

A search lift study isn't right for every campaign. It delivers the most value when:

• You're running awareness or consideration objectives, not pure performance.
• Your campaign has enough reach and budget to produce statistically valid results.
• You want to defend or grow upper-funnel investment with hard evidence.
• You're testing a new channel or format, such as CTV or YouTube, and need to prove it moves demand.
• You're launching a new product or brand where branded search is expected to grow.

It's less useful for small, tightly targeted retargeting campaigns, where reach is limited and demand already exists.

Setting Up a Search Lift Study in DV360

While eligibility and setup details can vary, the practical steps generally follow this pattern:

1. Confirm Eligibility

Search lift studies have minimum spend and reach thresholds. Your campaign needs enough scale to generate a control group large enough to produce reliable results. Speak to your account team or a DV360 managed services partner if you're unsure whether your campaign qualifies.

2. Define Your Study Parameters

Decide what you're measuring:

• The brand and category search terms relevant to the campaign.
• The date range, aligned to your flight dates.
• The line items or campaigns included in the study.

3. Structure Media for Clean Measurement

To get trustworthy results, avoid overlapping campaigns that could contaminate the control group. If the same users are being reached by other active campaigns targeting the same brand terms, your lift reading becomes muddier. Coordinate flights across your media plan.

4. Run for the Full Duration

Resist the urge to end early or make major mid-flight changes. Studies need time to accumulate data and reach significance. Pausing, restructuring, or heavily editing targeting can invalidate results.

5. Analyse and Act

Once the study reaches significance, review the lift, incremental searches, and efficiency metrics — then feed those insights back into your planning.

Interpreting Your Results

Strong results tell a story, but context is everything. When reviewing a search lift report, consider:

• Was the lift statistically significant? A high headline number with low confidence isn't actionable.
• How does efficiency compare across channels? Cost per incremental search lets you compare formats — for example, CTV versus in-stream YouTube versus display.
• Does search lift align with other signals? Cross-reference with brand lift, site traffic, and conversion trends for a complete picture.
• Which audiences drove the lift? Segment-level insight can sharpen future targeting.

A campaign that shows modest direct conversions but strong search lift may be doing exactly what upper-funnel media should do: creating demand that gets captured elsewhere in the funnel.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

• Insufficient scale: Underfunded studies rarely reach significance, wasting the opportunity.
• Campaign overlap: Multiple campaigns hitting the same audience distort the control group.
• Reading results too early: Preliminary numbers can swing dramatically before significance is reached.
• Ignoring the control group: Any activity that reaches the withheld group undermines the experiment.
• Treating lift as a vanity metric: The point is to change decisions, not just to report a number.

Fitting Search Lift Into a Full Measurement Strategy

Search lift is one instrument in a broader measurement toolkit. Used alongside brand lift, conversion lift, and media mix modelling, it helps you build a full-funnel view of performance that doesn't over-reward last-click channels.

The most effective teams treat these studies as an ongoing learning programme rather than a one-off exercise — running them across channels, creative approaches, and audiences to continually refine where budget should go. If you want help designing that programme or interpreting the outputs, our DV360 measurement and strategy services and co-managed services are built for exactly this kind of work.

For teams still building in-platform expertise, working with a DV360 partner account can smooth the path to eligibility, clean study design, and confident interpretation.

Get Expert Help With Your Search Lift Study

Measuring the true impact of upper-funnel media is one of the hardest — and most valuable — things you can do in programmatic. If you'd like help scoping, running, or interpreting a search lift study in DV360, talk to our team and we'll help you turn measurement into better budget decisions.