Platform attribution tells you which conversions followed an ad; a lift study tells you how many conversions happened because of it. People are randomly split into a test group and a control group. Conversion lift compares their purchase or lead rates, while brand lift uses short polls to compare ad recall, awareness, or consideration.
Meta and Google both offer lift studies, which typically require enough budget and conversions to reach statistical significance. They're the gold standard for hard questions — whether retargeting is truly incremental, whether an awareness campaign moves the needle, or how much credit a channel really deserves.
Example
A conversion lift study shows that a Meta prospecting campaign increased purchases by 18% among people who could see it, compared with the holdout group.
How Sloss Digital uses it
For clients with sufficient scale, we run lift studies to measure true incrementality and use the results to set budget allocation across channels.