How to Measure Sales Lift and ROAS to Prove Advertising Effectiveness

By NCS Marketing

Advertisers have many ways to measure their campaigns, but the right choice depends an awful lot on your goal. If it’s brand awareness you’re after, impressions may make sense. If you’re looking for correlation or attribution, total sales is the way to go. But if you want to understand causality - to know for sure if your campaign is driving sales - then the most reliable way to measure advertising effectiveness is to use sales lift as a primary KPI. Even if you’re using marketing mix modeling, as many brands today are, incremental sales is an essential element.

Once upon an advertising golden age, understanding true performance wasn’t straightforward. A lot has changed in the advertising ecosystem since the start of the digital age. Marketers have more channels, more platforms, more tools, more ways to track, measure, and assess their performance. All this makes measuring campaigns more complicated today, and much harder to keep all the terms straight.

We get it. NCSolutions has been connecting the dots from ad exposure to sales for the last 15 years. In that time, we’ve developed an entire suite of measurement tools based on sales lift, along with in-depth knowledge of industry best practices. Now, we’d like to share our guide to sales lift measurement with you. Keep this handy - and if you have any questions, you can come to us for answers.

Jump to:

• What is Sales Lift Measurement?
• Why Use Sales Lift Measurement?
• Sales Lift Measurement Terms to Know
• How to Measure Advertising Effectiveness with Sales Lift
• How Sales Lift Measurement Works
• Sales Lift Measurement FAQs

What is Sales Lift Measurement?

Sales lift is the increase in sales attributable to households exposed to your ad. This measure shows you the actual effect of your advertising: the incremental sales delivered as a result of your campaign.

As for that word “incremental,” here’s another way to put it: What product sales were prompted by consumers seeing your ads vs. those purchases customers would have made anyway? Unlike total sales measurement, sales lift measurement shows causality—the sales that occurred due to the effect of the ad campaign.

Sales lift measurement matters to brand leaders. More than half (52%) of CPG marketers say incremental sales or sales lift is a significant KPI for measuring the success of their campaigns, according to a 2025 report on the state of data-driven decision making from Digiday and NCS. 

When consumers buy online, measuring the sales lift of a campaign is relatively straightforward using digital attribution methods, such as link tracking. However, measuring sales lift at brick-and-mortar stores, where 90% of CPG sales occur, is a different animal. It’s a complex undertaking and requires a trusted partner with deep experience in this type of measurement. 

And yet, not every campaign requires a sales lift study. For instance, if your goal is to generate clicks to a brand’s site rather than sales or to raise awareness then you probably don’t need one. But if you care about measuring incremental sales, a sales lift study from a trusted partner is a must. 

Why Use Sales Lift Measurement?

Sales lift measurement provides the insights you need to understand your campaign performance and make your advertising more effective. Consistently measuring the sales lift of your campaigns strengthens your business. You’ll learn how your campaign performed and why, and through applying these learnings reduce ad waste, garner bigger ad budgets, and build brand loyalty. 

Sales Lift Measurement Terms to Know

Before we dig into the “how,” let’s make sure we’re all talking the same language. Here’s your cheat sheet to the sales lift lingo every CPG marketer needs to know.

Essential Sales Lift Terms

Get fluent on the metrics that matter most.

• Baseline sales estimate what consumers would have spent without any influence from advertising. What sales would have typically occurred if the campaign had never run? That’s your baseline sales number.

• Sales lift or incremental sales lift is the number of additional sales generated by exposure to the campaign.

• Return on advertising spend (ROAS) represents the incremental sales (those sales that took place due to a campaign) per $1 spent on advertising. ROAS equals the total incremental sales lift divided by the cost of media.

Other Terms to Know

More oh-so-helpful definitions, right here!

• Exposed households are households that saw the ad during the campaign.
• Response index is the contribution to incremental sales, proportionate to the percentage of households exposed to the campaign.
• A previous or prior buyer is someone who purchased the brand or category within the 52 weeks leading up to the start of the campaign.
• A new, lapsed or never buyer is someone who didn’t purchase the brand or category in the 52 weeks before the start of the campaign.
• Dollars per thousand impressions (DPM) is the total incremental sales divided by paid impressions.
• Percentage of incremental sales from new buyers refers to the portion of incremental sales generated by people who hadn’t bought the brand or category in the 52 weeks before the campaign started.
• Sales contribution by sub-brand details the contribution of incremental sales for each brand underneath a larger brand (for instance for a face wash vs. moisturizer vs. body balm, all from the same skincare label).
• Norms comparison refers to how a campaign performed vs. similar campaigns in that channel or category.

How to Measure Advertising Effectiveness with Sales Lift

If the sound of cash registers jingling is a goal of your campaign, you’ll want to commission a sales lift study to prove you delivered on that objective. However, sales lift measurement reveals much more than just sales. Marketers and advertisers use sales lift studies to get a detailed view of campaign performance and chart a path forward, giving them a better understanding of how to measure advertising campaign effectiveness. 

Check out these common use cases.

What is the impact of certain campaign elements, such as creative, audience and flighting?

A comprehensive sales lift study can allow you to see in detail how each facet of your campaign performed. Sales lift reporting breaks down specific elements of a campaign including: 

• Creative concepts 
• Audience segments
• Ad unit format
• Video length
• Optimal flighting
• Platform
• Channel
• Attention
• Creator/Influencer 
• Income
• Demo
• Frequency

For example, one recent household cleaning product campaign measured by NCS revealed that competitive buyers drove almost a third of incremental sales, even though the campaign only reached 6% of households. That’s a reliable indication that it’d be smart to retarget this segments in the future. Another finding? Shorter creative spots outperformed longer creative. (Note to the brand’s creative agency: sometimes less is more!) When you understand what’s hitting and what’s not, you can adjust your creative and audiences accordingly, pulling on the levers that are working. 

Measuring sales lift for a giant snack food brand, NCS found that households exposed to the brand’s ads 20+ times drove the largest portion of incremental sales. For this particular brand and campaign, the finding makes the case for increased frequency.

What’s the impact of our cross-media strategy?

To make smarter decisions for your brand while advertising on TV along with digital media or connected TV (CTV), you need to know which aspects of your campaigns are performing and which are lagging. Sales lift studies specifically designed for this use case, such as NCS Cross-Media Sales Effect, gives you a total view of TV and digital or CTV campaigns by delivering comparable metrics that enable you to easily see across channels. 

How can we get a holistic picture of the impact of our retail media network’s campaign across the market?

If you run campaigns on a retail media network, you probably want to understand how your ad investment drove sales in other stores and online, but you may lack that visibility. A dedicated sales lift measurement study, like NCS’s Rest of Market Sales Effect, can reveal the comprehensive sales impact of your retail media campaign. 

I’m a publisher or DSP. Can sales lift measurement help us prove the value of our platform?

Publishers and platform-people, listen up. Once you’ve conducted several sales lift studies of your campaigns, you can commission a meta-study to reveal broader performance trends. It helps you prove your ability to stoke sales for brands, enhances your pitches, and helps you make data-driven recommendations to clients on what ad unit formats, messaging, imagery and more your audiences respond to.

How Sales Lift Measurement Works

Sales lift is calculated by comparing the actual sales made by households that saw your ads to a modeled baseline number. This isolates the ad’s effect so you can be confident it drove the sales increase. Some common methods for measuring sales lift include: 

Test and Control Groups

This traditional method of campaign measurement uses simple statistical models and applies them uniformly across the board to simulate test and control groups, thereby estimating what happened to households exposed to an ad vs. those not exposed.

Machine Learning

Sales lift measurement is evolving with new, faster technologies. Machine learning evaluates complex datasets and uses sophisticated models to estimate the true effect (a counterfactual) for what would have happened to the same group of households if they weren’t exposed to an ad. By factoring in diverse variables—like seasonal purchasing patterns—machine learning offers deeper insights than test and control groups might miss, ensuring robust and reliable results that translate to larger audiences. Machine learning also eliminates extraneous variables, isolating the impact of ad exposure and determining whether it caused an increase in sales. As showcased in a recent NCS-Roku collaboration, machine learning stands as a robust tool for brands aiming to optimize advertising effectiveness and ROI.

Sales Lift Measurement FAQs

What’s the Difference Between a Sales Lift Study and a Brand Lift Study?

A sales lift study measures the direct increase in sales attributed to an advertising campaign, while a brand lift study assesses how a campaign impacts broader brand perception and awareness, usually through surveys, rather than purchase data.

How Can We Ensure the Accuracy of Our Sales Lift Measurement?

You’ll want to make sure you work with a trusted partner with a lengthy track record in sales lift measurement. At NCS, we’ve specialized in sales lift measurement for CPG brands for more than 15 years, and use machine learning–considered to be the most accurate—for our models. 

How Does Brand Equity Influence Sales Lift?

Brand equity refers to the relationship you’ve built over time with your customers—your share of the market, penetration of the market, and the loyalty of your buyers. Strong brand equity positively influences sales lift. In 2023, brand factors contributed 21% towards incremental sales, up from 15% in 2017, according to an NCS study, The 5 Keys to Advertising Effectiveness.

What Role Does Marketing Mix Modeling Play in Measuring Sales Lift?

Companies use marketing mix modeling (MMM), to measure which of their advertising and marketing channels are driving business results, and how they all work together. MMM can help brand leaders refine their approach and make smarter decisions about their ad spend. By running marketing mix modeling in conjunction with sales lift reporting, brand leaders can better understand the sales impact of specific publishers or channels in their overall marketing mix.

Are There Any Advanced Analytics Techniques We Should Consider?

One to look at: attention metrics. Attention scores are a key indicator in driving incremental sales, according to a joint study NCS did with Integral Ad Science. Additionally, sales lift and return on ad spend (ROAS) were higher for ad placements that boasted better attention scores.

What is NCS Sales Effect?

NCS offers a suite of measurement solutions - all powered by our flagship measurement solution, Sales Effect. Like the CPG ecosystem, Sales Effect has evolved over the last 15 years as we’ve continued our relentless pursuit of better ways to measure advertising outcomes. Machine learning has helped us deliver studies with greater accuracy and precision. Our amazing team ensures every study provides actionable insights.  

Here’s how our flagship product works. To calculate sales lift, Sales Effect compares the actual sales made by households that saw your ads to a modeled baseline number (the number of sales we estimate would have taken place had they not viewed your ad). Then, we use machine learning to estimate purchases made as a result of the campaign across all stores, both online and offline. This helps us isolate the ad’s effect so we’re confident it drove the sales increase. 

For advertisers who need to understand the impact of a national campaign, small campaign, retail media, cross-media, or long-term trend, the rest of the measurement solutions in our suite - Concise^SE, Cross Media^SE, Rest of Market^SE and Meta^SE – are multiplied by the power of SE.

NCS can access online and offline sales data and measure sales across all retailers, providing a representative view of all U.S. sales. And, we deliver a level of detail on campaign drivers that you can’t get anywhere else, like video length, optimal flighting, attention, and creator/influencer. Advertisers can also see how sales lift changes over the course of a campaign. It’s the kind of intelligence that helps you improve the next campaign and deliver better advertising outcomes. 

What Does an NCS Sales Effect Study Include?

An NCS Sales Effect delivers the insights and data you need to understand how key elements of your campaign - such as creative, audience, flighting and frequency - drove sales, so you can make your next campaign even more effective. 

This includes: 

• Incremental Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
• Incremental Sales Lift
• Incremental Dollars per Thousand Impressions  (DPM)
• New vs. Existing Buyer contribution
• Brand & Sub-brand contribution
• Detailed performance by Audience, Creative, Frequency, and more
• Norms comparison
• Trend Chart
• Updated demographic campaign distribution (NEW)
• Brand health metrics:
  • Consideration Set (NEW)
  • Competitive Repertoire (NEW)
• Results available via .csv file (NEW)

What if We Have a Smaller Brand, Smaller Campaign or New Product Launch But Still Want to Determine Whether Our Campaign Was Effective?

Not to worry. NCS has designed a Sales Effect tailored precisely for these instances called Concise. While it doesn’t offer the same level of detail as our flagship Sales Effect, it does provide the key aggregated performance insights like return on ad spend (ROAS) and sales lift that are critical for evaluating the effectiveness of any ad campaign.

How Long After a Campaign Should We Expect a Sales Lift Study?

At NCS, we typically deliver a sales lift report within 5 weeks of a flight’s end, so you can begin applying the learnings.

Learn More

If you’d like to see how sales lift measurement can help you understand the real-world impact of your campaigns and inform your future business strategy, let's connect. NCS offers a suite of sales lift measurement solutions to support your business needs and improve advertising outcomes across the board.