Learning how to measure brand awareness is a crucial skill in marketing. It is important to know how many consumers in your target demographic are aware of your brand. Additionally, you want to make sure that you understand and can properly analyze brand awareness metrics. This will help you determine what needs to be done to increase your brand awareness in the future. It will also assist you to craft your content marketing campaign to make sure your target audience is talking about your brand. This article will introduce you to eight different ways of measuring brand awareness, including using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Trends. We can also help you build a brand awareness strategy.
Table of Contents
Definition of Brand Awareness
Before we begin, let’s define brand awareness. Brand awareness refers to the extent to which consumers are familiar with a particular brand, its qualities, or its image.
Importance of Measuring Brand Awareness
If you want to increase brand awareness, then you first need to know how to measure brand awareness and the right brand awareness metrics to know. Brand awareness research is an important skill for professional marketers and business owners.
How to Measure Brand Awareness and Brand Awareness Metrics
1 – Utilize Google Search Console
When researching how to measure brand awareness, you will likely come across the Google Search Console. The Google Search Console is a useful tool when you are looking for the success of a branding campaign you have recently launched or if you are interested in brand awareness metrics. The Google Search Console can show you how many impressions your brand awareness campaigns received. Impressions represent the total number of consumers that saw your branding campaign.
This is really important if you are looking to analyze your click-through rate. Your click-through rate is the percentage of consumers that saw your branding campaign and consequently interacted with it. The click-through rate is an important brand awareness metric because it can give you some insight into the success of your branding campaign. Google Search Console can also recommend a cost-per-thousand impressions campaign based on the results you receive from your initial campaign. If you are interested in creating a campaign with Google, this is a great way to get a ballpark on what the cost will be.
2 – Study the Direct Growth of Your Website Receives
One of the most effective ways to measure brand awareness is to study the your website traffic and bounce rate. If you notice that after a campaign there is a significant increase in the traffic brought to your website, that likely means the campaign was successful in increasing your brand awareness. Or on the other hand, you may notice that there is considerably less traffic coming to your website. In this case, it will be worth looking into why this is. After all, it only stands to reason that the more consumers visit your website, the more likely you are to have strong brand awareness.
Be sure when you are checking the traffic your website receives that you look at long-term trends. Individual days can and will have ups and downs. A single day with a lot or very little traffic does not mean that your brand is losing awareness. This is particularly true depending on the type of content you offer. Looking at long-term trends in traffic will give you a much better understanding of how successful your brand awareness campaigns have been.
3 – Track Referral Traffic
One of the most commonly used brand awareness metrics is tracking the referral traffic your website receives. Referral traffic tracks how many consumers found your website outside of the search algorithm. This could mean that they visited your website from a social media link, from a link in an email, or from somewhere else altogether.
This is a really important metric to analyze especially if you are attempting to promote your website in places outside of search engines. For example, if you are promoting your brand on social media, this could give you a good idea of how successful your social media strategy has been.
To track your website’s referral traffic, you should look at both the total traffic and the effectiveness of that traffic for engagement in Google Analytics. You can find this by evaluating the number of pages per session or the average session duration section. Google Analytics is a great resource to track the referral traffic your website receives.
4 – Track How Often Your Brand is Mentioned
Tracking how often your brand is mentioned is a great way to measure brand recognition. This i soften referred to as social listening. Brand mentions can be anytime your brand is mentioned on any site that is not yours. This can include social shares on social media platforms and news articles. You can even track if the mention of your brand is positive or negative. This is great if you want to take another step up from simply tracking when your brand is mentioned and want to see the reception your brand is receiving.
Look over a time period and see when your brand receives the most mentions. Were you campaigning then or was there another reason for the increase in brand awareness? Looking at these metrics can help you determine what will be the best way to improve your brand awareness in the future. The reason you want to track this outside of your website is because your website will obviously mention your brand. You want to see what effect that had on consumers outside of what your team is releasing.
5 – Send Surveys to Consumers
Measuring brand awareness can even be as simple as sending out a survey. Asking consumers if they have heard of your brand and more importantly where they might have heard of it can be really effective. THis is referred to as a brand awareness survey. You can even go as far as to just show consumers logos in your survey and see if they recognize that aspect of your brand. Typically, companies send these customer surveys through their website, via email, or through telemarketing.
Brand awareness surveys are great because you can customize them to ask specific questions. However, there are some significant downsides to consider before using them. Surveys typically have low participation rates. It does not matter how great your survey is if you are struggling to get anyone to actually take the time to answer it.
One way marketers can get around this is by providing an incentive to complete the survey. An incentive could be anything from a coupon to a small free gift. However, this also may create a biased survey because only consumers who know about your brand will likely want a free incentive.
6 – Track Your Social Media Reach
Typically when marketers are first attempting to figure out how to measure brand recognition they may not first think to monitor social media. However, it is important that you are also monitoring how often your brand is talked about on all social media sites where a large number of people will be exposed to it.
Look at your brand’s social media platforms and social shares. How often are you able to engage with consumers outside of those directly following you? Are there consumers discussing your brand unprompted on social media? Looking for these types of indicators can give you a lot of insight when you are measuring brand awareness.
If you find that your brand could improve the amount of recognition it currently has, you should consider using social media to engage with the consumers more. This can be a great way to get more consumers to be aware of your brand. Especially considering a lot of times consumers that do not follow you will also see your social media content on their timeline. There are plenty of social listening tools you can utilize to track your reach on social platforms.
7 – Measure Share of Voice
Measuring your brand’s share of voice can be another great way to measure brand awareness. In marketing, the share of voice is how much your brand spends on advertising compared to how much is spent total in the entire industry. This is important because whenever a consumer thinks of a product in your industry, you want them to think of your brand’s name top of mind.
You may notice that consumers are able to more easily think of your competitors’ brands than yours. In this case, you might want to look at how much they are spending on advertising. If you notice that they have a much higher share of voice than you do, you might want to consider spending more on advertising.
8 – Look at How Many DA Links are Created
Another way of how to measure brand awareness is to look at how many domain authority (DA) links are created. A DA link predicts how likely a website is to rank on a search engine result page. This is important because the higher your brand is ranked in the search algorithm, the more likely consumers are to be aware of it. If a consumer is searching for a product or service and your website is one of the first ones to appear, your likelihood of improving your brand awareness will increase significantly.
You should also pay attention to the placement of your DA links. If they are in areas that consumers are not likely to click on, you may want to consider moving them. This will make them more likely to bring new consumers to your website. If you are unsure of the DA links your website currently has, you can go to the DA checkers website.
Create Brand Awareness Campaigns with SEO Design Chicago
If you are interested in professional brand awareness efforts or creating a marketing strategy, contact SEO Design Chicago today. We can help you build brand awareness and direct traffic to your website with our expert marketing campaigns. Our team can measure your important brand awareness metrics and create brand awareness strategies.
FAQ:
- What metrics are used to measure brand awareness?
- How does Google Search Console help measure brand awareness?
- How do you measure brand awareness?
- What is share of voice?
- How does social media measure brand awareness?
- How to measure brand recognition?
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