The Upper Funnel Advantage: Why Brand Building Drives Performance

Consumers are evolving, platforms are multiplying, and traditional direct response tactics alone can’t keep up. New research from Yahoo DSP based on surveys of over 1,000 U.S. consumers and 400 marketing professionals, shows brand building isn’t optional; it’s essential. All statistics cited in this article are from Yahoo Research, Building Your Brand in 2025: Why It Still Matters (Yahoo Inc., 2025).

In an endless scroll of options, 42% of consumers say they “just want to buy and be done with it.”¹ Overwhelmed by choice and noise, they crave emotional clarity, not just click-throughs.

That’s where brand-building steps in, not as a soft metric, but as a strategic driver of business outcomes. Consumers want stories that resonate, values they can believe in, and brands that stand for something more. Performance marketing can’t carry the weight alone. That’s why the upper funnel is making a comeback. While marketers are under undeniable pressure to prove performance, with 84% of advertisers saying there is an increased importance of demonstrating campaign ROI over the past two years, they are not solely betting on the bottom funnel.² Our findings show a clear strategic pivot: 83% expect an increase in upper-funnel investment in the next year. Full-funnel strategies with renewed brand focus are proving essential for building lasting value.³

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So what works?

Full-funnel strategies, with strong upper-funnel focus, are delivering up to 4x higher lift in purchase intent.⁵ The reason? They meet consumers where they are with a clear value exchange and consistent brand presence. 

Consumers are seeking the impact of upper funnel campaigns

In today’s rapidly changing landscape, where consumer preferences shift quickly and loyalty is earned in seconds, the upper funnel is more important than ever. Below are three key themes:

1. Trust is vital for consumer decision-making: 47% of consumers are open to purchasing from unfamiliar brands.⁶ However, a staggering 70% will stop buying from brands due to trust issues.⁷ This highlights just how fragile consumer trust is in today’s market.

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2. The need for personalized, integrated marketing efforts: For marketers to build trust and loyalty with today’s consumers, they can no longer rely on one-size-fits-all performance tactics. Consumers expect value, consistency, and personalized experiences across every touchpoint.

• 65% appreciate ads relevant to their interests⁸ 

Also, today’s consumers are increasingly savvy, seamlessly moving across multiple digital channels:

• 73% use more than one channel to shop⁹
• 53% use online destinations (marketplaces, brand websites, etc.) as their primary channel¹⁰
• 47% prefer shopping in physical stores, but 50% still research online before making in-store purchases¹¹

This journey clearly shows the need for integrated marketing efforts and cohesive storytelling across channels.

3. Emotional Connection Takes the Lead in Consumer Loyalty: While price is the number one factor impacting consumer loyalty, newer factors like emotional connection and brand recognition are increasingly influencing consumer loyalty, especially for routine purchases.

Marketers see an opportunity for upper-funnel campaigns, but it’s hard to prove their impact

With 65% of budgets directed to digital, marketers aim to meet consumers where they are.¹² However, while 83% expect increased upper-funnel investment, they face challenges in measuring its impact,¹³ including:

• 70% struggle with tracking long-term impact.¹⁴
• 54% find it hard to attribute long-term effects to specific campaigns.¹⁵
• Only 33% have a unified measurement framework.¹⁶

From Brand Story to Impact: How Yahoo DSP Powers Full-Funnel Performance

Yahoo DSP can help you connect meaningfully with your consumers across the journey with unified omnichannel buying across display, video, audio, and CTV, ensuring your brand shows up consistently and contextually throughout the journey. Additionally, with multi-touch attribution and brand lift studies, you can connect upper-funnel investment to lower-funnel impact, and finally close the measurement loop.

With format and targeting shown to be the primary drivers of brand building, contributing to a 65% lift across key KPIs like awareness, association, and intent, according to the Kantar x Yahoo DSP Cross-Media Meta Campaign Analysis (2022–2024), it's essential to lead with a thoughtful media strategy that capitalizes on these findings.

• Strategic targeting: At Yahoo DSP, we can help you plan and implement strategic targeting based on Yahoo proprietary data and focus on developing Behavioral, Conquesting, and Demographic audiences to drive the greatest impact
• Creative is the connective tissue: Yahoo Creative helps brands deliver campaigns that blend design, emotion, and data, backed by testing insights and platform-specific best practices
• Omnichannel strategy: We can help you execute an omnichannel strategy. Lead with video: Pair video with display to deepen the association. 85% of campaigns perform best when video comes first¹⁷, while managing frequency and control across channels.
• Full funnel measurement: Yahoo DSP can help you measure the impact of your campaign across channels with strong measurement solutions, from lift studies to real-time optimization based on the metrics that matter the most to you (Yahoo In-Flight outcomes), powered by AI-optimization

Based on analysis across +5.7B impressions from Kantar & Yahoo DSP brand lift surveys (2022-2024), campaigns that ran on Yahoo DSP  achieved, on average, 4.4x awareness lift and 2x intent lift compared to those running on other DSP.

As attention fragments and performance expectations grow, marketers can’t afford to guess at what works. The path forward is full-funnel, omnichannel, and measurable from impression to impact. 

Ready to grow your brand and drive results? Explore how Yahoo DSP and Yahoo Creative can elevate your full-funnel strategy. 

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^{1-4,  6-17}All statistics cited in this article are from Yahoo research, Building Your Brand in 2025: Why It Still Matters. (Yahoo Inc., 2025).

⁵ Yahoo DSP & Kantar meta-analysis of 5.7B+ ad impressions across six categories, based on Kantar Brand Lift studies fielded 2022–2024.

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