Automobilhersteller: Brand-Awareness-Kampagne steigerte Kaufabsicht um 38 %
- +9.4%Estimated ad recall lift
- −8.5%Cost per estimated ad recall lift (per person)
- −68%Cost per landing page view
- 2.38BMonthly active users reachable on Meta
One of the original all-wheel-drive manufacturers — 65+ years building durable, high-performance SUVs — wanted to use Meta’s scale to stay in the mind of in-market car buyers across multiple model lines. The brief was awareness, but the CMO wanted it measured properly: not impressions and reach, but whether the ads actually changed what people remembered.
The brief — make brand measurable
With 2.38 billion monthly active users, Facebook and Instagram were the obvious scale play for an SUV launch. The harder question was how to prove the spend worked. We picked ad recall as the primary KPI — a brand-lift metric that measures how memorable an ad is to its audience — because it is the cleanest leading indicator that creative is doing its job in feed. Cost per landing page view sat alongside it as a sanity check on efficiency.
Ask the right questions, then test
The work started as a process, not a media plan. We wrote down the questions that actually mattered and then designed tests to answer them:
- What kind of content does this audience already engage with on Jaguar Land Rover’s organic Facebook and Instagram pages — comments, likes, shares?
- Which ad formats outperform — video, single image, carousel, dynamic ads?
- Which bidding option delivers the cheapest reliable ad recall lift?
- How do interest-based audiences compare to broader behavioural ones at scale?
A third-party data-driven testing platform ran the experiments. Every audience and format ran against a hold-out so the lift numbers were defensible, not directional.
The creative system
Jaguar Land Rover’s creative agency produced the video and photography. We translated it into a working ad library across Facebook feed, Instagram feed and Instagram Stories — built to perform in the placements where buyers actually scroll, not just look good in deck previews.
The campaigns targeted potential adult car buyers aged 25 and over, then we narrowed inside that as audiences proved themselves. Interest targeting was used to layer on people with adjacent passions — outdoor sports, premium automotive content, off-road communities — so the spend leaned toward people whose lives match the product, not just demographic proxies.
Automatic placements, deliberate split
We let Meta’s automatic placements do their job for efficiency, but the spend ended up roughly 60/40 in favour of Facebook — which matched where ad recall was cheapest to buy, not where the platform’s defaults wanted to push us. The Facebook and Instagram campaigns also slotted into Jaguar Land Rover’s wider integrated launch alongside TV, print, out-of-home and other digital — so the brand-lift study captured cross-channel halo rather than penalising us for it.
Results — April to November 2020
Eight months of always-on awareness and engagement campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, measured properly across the full window:
- +9.4% estimated ad recall lift
- −8.5% cost per estimated ad recall lift (per person)
- −68% cost per landing page view
The ad recall lift mattered most. It is the metric that proves a brand spend is doing brand work — not just buying reach that disappears the moment the campaign ends. For Jaguar Land Rover, ongoing awareness and engagement on Meta did exactly what it was supposed to: it kept the SUV line in the consideration set of buyers across multiple integrated launches, at a cost per impression that fell as the programme matured.
Brand on Meta only works when somebody is asking the right questions every week. The platform will happily spend a six-figure monthly budget on impressions that no one remembers. The work that lifts ad recall 9.4% is the work nobody sees: weekly format reads, audience cuts, bid-strategy tests, creative refreshes. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.