The Metrics That Measure Brand Success

A surprising amount of businesses are still perplexed with how to quantify the success of their brand awareness. This is understandable; measuring the effectiveness of your brand awareness can be difficult as there are several varying channels that can be incorporated into your campaigns that go beyond tracking organic search and pay-per-click (PPC). With this in mind, here are the key metrics for measuring the efficiency of your brand awareness:

Web traffic

When monitoring website traffic, it is important you’re checking correct metrics. The following are essential for brand awareness:

Direct traffic

Direct traffic refers to traffic you receive to your website that doesn’t derive from another channel. For example – typing www._____.co.uk into a search bar and hitting ‘Enter’ would mean someone is accessing a specific website via direct traffic.

An increase in direct traffic would mean people are visiting your website repeatedly, are bookmarking your website or memorising the URL. Ultimately, direct traffic measures how aware people are of your brand. You can segment ‘direct traffic’ in Google Analytics under the ‘Audience’ tab.

Returning visitors

It is generally assumed attracting new customers is more valuable than obtaining existing ones. However, according to Our Social Times, 70% of existing businesses believe it’s cheaper to retain a customer than trying to attract new ones.

While you’re running branded campaigns, remarketing, and increasing your social media activity, be sure to monitor returning visitors to see if your audience repeatedly engages with your brand. Returning visitors can be compared with new visitors on Google Analytics under ‘Audience’ and ‘Behaviour’.

Social listening

Social listening allows you to analyse online, organic conversations about your brand across social media and the web.

If your business uses Facebook as a social media platform, one metric to track is how your page likes have fluctuated before and after a launching a social specific campaigns, such as a sponsored Facebook ad. An increase in page likes would represent the success rate of the campaign and therefore a rise in brand awareness and stronger brand engagement.

A steady increase in page likes over-time would mean you’re successfully connecting with the right audience and maintaining their interest. Facebook brand page Insights allows you to gather metrics on how many people are seeing your Facebook posts and how many organic and paid likes you have received within a specified date range.

‘Reach’ indicates how effectively your product or businesses name is appearing on people’s newsfeed; whereas engagement metrics represents clicks, comments, likes and shares.

It’s important to remember that high reach doesn’t equate to high engagement. Just because someone viewed your ad on their newsfeed, it doesn’t indicate brand awareness, purchase intent or a customer relationship.

Another statistic used for brand awareness is direct mentions; these are used on Twitter when users actively tag a brand’s social profile in posts using ‘@’. It is easy to assume a rise in mentions would result in increased positive brand awareness; however, failing to monitor these mentions could result in any negative tags affecting the appearance of your brand. It is also important to monitor indirect mentions; only 9% of tweets mentioning companies start with ‘@’; meaning although people aren’t directly talking to you, they are certainly talking about you.

You can monitor your mentions using Twitter advanced search by typing keywords related to your business, for example Apple might type in their company name and iPhone, iPad, Mac.

Close the online and offline gap

Despite the popularity of internet browsing, 70% of mobile searchers have called a business directly from search results; meaning you must measure the impact of phone calls within brand awareness. Call tracking software can identify whether a call was generated from a branded Pay-Per-Click Ad or an organic search; this data can be measured annually to determine whether there has been any growth in these calls and therefore knowledge of your brand.

Call tracking can also be used to monitor conversions for branded and non-branded search terms that originated from click-to-call ad campaigns. If someone called your business from your click-to-call extensions on a mobile, call tracking would be able to attribute the branded or non-branded search query. An increase in brand related search conversions would indicate an increase in brand awareness.

Inbound links and referrals

A backlink, or inbound link is a link coming from another site to your own website. If someone posts a backlink to your website on their website or bog, a member of their audience might click it; meaning you will benefit from the referral traffic – landing on a website via another website. Getting backlinks from high quality, high authority sites will help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Use Majestic to monitor the quality of your backlinks through their Backlink Checker; which allows you to check all of your website’s backlinks and receive reports for root domains, subdomains or individual URLS.

Reviews

In order to evaluate their experience with a particular business, positive or negative, people leave reviews; these are a great way to measure and increase brand awareness, with word-of-mouth advertising generated from these reviews. For example – if someone left a positive review on Facebook, their friends might locate the review and therefore become aware of the brand. An increase in the amount of reviews your business receives is a metric that can be used to determine whether the number of people being made aware of your brand is rising.

Online review community TrustPilot receives 600,000+ new reviews each month. It allows customers to share their experiences with a particular company and also provides potential buyers with advice before purchase. From a business perspective, you can analyse the rating distribution and how many reviews you are receiving within specific time frames; meaning you can not only measure brand awareness through number of reviews, but distinguish between the positives and negatives.