# What is the Impact Score and How to Analyze It?
### Introduction
The Impact Score is a unique performance metric designed to provide a holistic view of your advertising campaign's effectiveness. Rather than analyzing individual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in isolation, this score combines all performance indicators of a brand lift into a single, standardized measurement that ranges from 0 to 100. This unified approach enables you to quickly assess campaign performance vs a benchmark and make meaningful comparisons across different campaigns and media channels.
### Objectives of the Impact Score
The Impact Score serves several objectives in campaign analysis:
**Campaign Summarization:** It consolidates the performance of your entire advertising campaign into one comprehensible metric, giving you a holistic view of your advertising campaign's effectiveness.
**Comparative Analysis:** The score facilitates easy comparison between different campaigns, regardless of their media mix or campaign objectives, by providing a standardized measurement framework.
**Benchmark Positioning:** It positions your campaign performance relative to benchmarks based on media types, industries and/or geographic zones, giving you clear context about where your campaign stands in the competitive landscape.
**Strategic Decision-Making:** By providing a single performance indicator, it simplifies the decision-making process for campaign optimization and future planning.
**Multi-Campaign Analysis:** Average Impact Scores enable comprehensive analysis across multiple campaigns, allowing for deeper insights through various analytical dimensions such as industry or media types performance, geographical effectiveness, and so on.\
\
## **For Brand lifts launched after April 16th 2026**
### Impact Score: a clearer and more accurate performance metric
#### What’s new?
We’ve improved the Impact Score to make it more **precise, transparent, and consistent**. The goal is to help you understand your results at a glance and make more confident decisions.
This new version is now:
* Fully aligned with KPI performance
* Based on a stronger and more reliable benchmark logic
* Designed to better reflect your campaign’s real performance
### How does the new Impact Score work?
The Impact Score is now the average of KPI performance ranking. Here’s how it works:
1. Each KPI is compared to its benchmark
2. A ranking is calculated (your position vs similar campaigns)
3. The Impact Score is the average of these ranking
#### Which ranking is used?
The raking depends on the KPI type, this ensures each KPI is evaluated using the most relevant metric.
| KPI category | Raking used |
| -------------------- | ------------------------------------------ |
| Creative Diagnosis | Ad Recall Respondent's performance ranking |
| Delivery Performance | Ad Recall Respondent's performance ranking |
| Ad Recall Impact | Uplift performance ranking |
### Benchmark rules
To improve reliability and consistency, benchmark rules are unified across the product. A benchmark is available only if it has **at least 20 measurements**.
This applies everywhere and what you see is exactly what is used in the calculation:
* KPI vs benchmark visualizations
* Benchmark tab
* Reports
* Impact Score calculation
### Impact Score calculation rules
#### KPI eligibility
A KPI is included in the Impact Score only if its benchmark has **≥ 20 measurements**.
#### Campaign-level rule
The Impact Score is calculated only if there are enough eligible KPIs at least (total KPIs − 1) must be eligible.
Example:
* Campaign with 5 KPIs
* Impact Score is calculated if at least 4 KPIs have valid benchmarks
If not, the Impact Score is not calculated or displayed
### Why is this more accurate?
Previously, the Impact Score relied on normalized scores based on top and bottom benchmark values. As a result, a score that is easier to understand and closer to reality.
* The score is based on real KPI distribution (ranking)
* It avoids distortions from extreme values
* It better reflects true market positioning
{% hint style="success" %}
**Important to know**
There is no break in analysis: historical data remains fully usable.
* This update applies only to future campaigns
* Past Impact Scores remain unchanged
* You can still compare campaigns over time
{% endhint %}
### What this means for you
With this new version, you benefit from:
* A more reliable and transparent score
* Better alignment with KPI results
* A simpler way to analyze and compare performance
## **For Brand lifts launched before April 16th 2026**
### Calculation Methodology
The Impact Score employs a sophisticated calculation that accounts for performance variability across different media channels. The formula is:
Where:
* xᵢ = Uplift vs benchmark for KPI (i) in the campaign
* xᵢ₋flop = Average uplift vs benchmark for KPI (i) in the worst benchmark measurements
* xᵢ₋top = Average uplift vs benchmark for KPI (i) in the top benchmark measurements
* n = Number of KPIs in the campaign
**Important Note:** The number of top and flop measurements varies based on media type:
* Most Media Types: Use top 25 and flop 10 measurements
* Specific Media Types (TV, In-game, Social media, Radio, and Influencer): Use top 5 and flop 5 measurements due to limited available data for these channels
The calculation process involves three key steps:
1. Individual KPI Assessment: For each KPI, the campaign's performance is measured against the benchmark and positioned relative to the best and worst historical performances for that media type.
2. Normalization: Each KPI score is normalized using variable performance thresholds based on historical data, ensuring realistic and contextual scoring.
3. Averaging and Scaling: All normalized KPI scores are averaged and scaled to a 100-point system for easy interpretation.
### Conditions to Calculate Impact Scores
Several conditions must be met to ensure accurate and reliable Impact Score calculations:
**Sufficient Benchmark Data:** The system requires adequate historical performance data to establish meaningful top and bottom performance thresholds for each media type, industry, geographic zone, or any other criteria selected in the benchmark. We require a minimum of 15 data points in the benchmark for each KPI to be included in the Impact Score calculation.
**New Media types:** Require at least 15 measurements before an Impact Score can be calculated.
**KPI Coverage:** An Impact Score can be calculated with as few as one KPI that has sufficient benchmarks (15 data points). However, you should be aware that in such cases, the Impact Score will reflect only a small portion of your campaign's overall performance and may be highly volatile. We recommend relying on an Impact Score only when you have sufficient benchmarks for all your KPIs, or at most when you're missing benchmarks for just one KPI.
### How to Read and Interpret Impact Scores
Understanding your Impact Score is straightforward once you know the scale:
**Score Range: 0 to 100**
* 0-25: Significantly below average performance
* 25-45: Below average performance
* 45 - 55: Average performance (campaign ranks within the overall average of its benchmark)
* 55-75: Above average performance
* 75-100: Exceptional performance
**Key Interpretation Points:**
* A score of 50 indicates your campaign performed at the median level compared to similar campaigns in your media mix
* Higher scores indicate stronger performance across multiple KPIs
* Lower scores suggest areas for campaign optimization
* The score reflects relative performance within a specific benchmark. If you change the benchmark dimensions (media types, format, targeting strategy, platforms, industries, zones, countries…), the impact score will also change.
### Warnings and Considerations
While the Impact Score is a powerful analytical tool, several important considerations should guide its use:
**Data Dependency:** The accuracy of your Impact Score is directly tied to the quantity of benchmark data available. Insufficient data may lead to more extreme scores.
**Evolving Benchmarks:** As more campaign data becomes available, benchmark thresholds may shift, potentially affecting historical score comparisons.
**Complementary Analysis:** While the Impact Score provides an excellent overview, it should complement, not replace, detailed KPI analysis for strategic decision-making.
**Benchmark Selection Dependency:** Impact Scores are relative to the specific benchmark selection used for calculation. Any changes to the benchmark selection criteria will directly affect the resulting Impact Score.
The Impact Score represents a significant advancement in campaign performance measurement, providing marketers with a clear, standardized metric that simplifies complex multi-KPI analysis while maintaining the nuanced understanding necessary for strategic decision-making.
👋 If you don't find your answer, feel free to reach out to [support@happydemics.com ](mailto:undefined)for further consideration !
🚀 Related articles
* [How is my KPI calculated?](/analysis/brand-lift-results/how-is-my-kpi-calculated.md)
* [How to read benchmark results?](/analysis/brand-lift-results/how-to-read-benchmark-results.md)
* [How to understand the Cost per lifted user?](/analysis/brand-lift-results/what-is-the-cplu-and-how-to-analyze-it.md)
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