Marketing

6 Alternative Methods for Measuring Brand Awareness

March 5, 2012

As I mentioned in my previous post on the 5 business benefits of brand awareness research, a brand awareness survey requires time to plan and can be expensive to implement. Therefore, it is often times not an option for measuring the impact of awareness marketing initiatives. There are, however, several web analytic techniques that your team can deploy as alternatives methods of gathering data on how your marketing initiatives are affecting your position in the market.

6 Alternative Website Analytic Techniques for Measuring Brand Awareness

1. Branded Keyword Tracking

This is the process of regularly tracking branded keyword traffic to measure the impact of a marketing awareness initiative. To do this effectively, you will first need to understand the meaning of a branded keyword. A branded keyword is a word or phrase associated with a brand. For example, Nike Air and “Just do it” are branded keywords for Nike. There are several different ways to track branded keyword traffic. Some companies will track branded keyword clouds, so that they can track all of the relevant traffic in or around their brand and others will track the brand as an exact keyword. It is also important to track other unbranded keywords like key terminology from the industry, so that you can adjust for overall traffic shifts in a given search area. Data for this analysis can be attained for free on Google Analytics.

This is a quick, inexpensive and painless analytical exercise that can be added to your marketing dashboard to gain some insight on the effectiveness of various marketing initiatives.

The main problem with this measurement is that you are not able to effectively identify what percentage of the keyword traffic is coming from your target customer population or even validate that the visitors are relevant. Both of these data tools do contain some qualifier characteristics that can be used to drill down the traffic, but they are focused on generic qualifiers like geography.

2. Direct Traffic Tracking

This is a measure of the number of visitors that come to your website through direct navigation via a browser or through a bookmark. This is a good indicator of the number of people that are aware of your brand and choosing to spend their time visiting your website. The change in this number from week to week shows the change in brand awareness.

One caveat to this measurement is that direct traffic often encompasses traffic from email marketing and social media. Be sure to use tracking parameters in your marketing efforts to properly classify what traffic you can. Another way of getting more accurate data using this method is to focus on direct traffic to key pages only: homepage; contact us page; pricing pages. Avoid counting direct traffic to deep site links such as old blog posts, as that is likely a ref

3. Branded Tweet Tracking

This is the process of monitoring the trends of branded tweets on Twitter. A branded tweet is an at (@) tweet that references a company’s or brand’s Twitter Handle. The reason this is a good measure of brand awareness is referencing the company’s Twitter Handle demonstrates that the Tweeter can recall your company or brand name while in the midst of sending out a message on Twitter. This is similar to an unaided recall brand awareness survey question if the user is not one of your followers and an aided recall if they do follow your company or brand account on Twitter. Alternatively, if your company is being mentioned in lots of hashtag (#) tweets, then your messaging is reaching your audience and is effectively creating awareness, but to a lesser degree. It is important to track both of these types of tweets, as they both tell a lot about the effectiveness of your online marketing awareness initiatives.

You can use Topsy or Klout to help you measure your Twitter mentions.

Tweets can be tracked in aggregate volume in comparison to competitors or as market shares among all competitors in a marketplace. To calculate Twitter Branded Tweet Market Shares, you would use the following formulae:

  • Twitter Branded Tweet Market Shares = Branded Tweets / (Branded Tweets + Competitors Branded Tweets)
  • Twitter Company Tweet Market Shares = (Branded + Hash Tagged Tweets) / (Branded Tweets + Hash Tagged Tweets + Competitors Branded Tweets + Competitor Hash Tagged Tweets)

By tracking these measurements over time, you will see the aggregate affect of your team’s online awareness marketing initiatives.

This is another quick and inexpensive way to analyze the effectiveness of your branding initiatives. However, this measurement is restricted to Twitter users, so you are sampling a subset of the relevant population and this must be remembered when interpreting the results of this analysis. However, you can drill down into the user information of each company or individual that is tweeting at (@) your Twitter Handle or mentioning your company in hash tagged tweets to get a sense of the demographics of the people that are aware of your company and actively interested in interacting with you.

4. Website Traffic Differential Tracking

This is the process of tracking your website traffic relative to competitor websites. This allows you to measure the impact of your branding initiatives on your inbound website traffic. To do this all you need to do is track the traffic of your own website relative to your competitors and then drill down the traffic to the segment of visitors that you care about using the traffic data tool. You can use www.hitwise.com, www.comscore.com and trends.google.com to collect this data.

Below is an example of how Travelocity would use Google trends to track its traffic relative to some of its closest competitors: Orbitz, Kayak and Priceline.

Travel Website Traffic Trends

This trend shows the impact of your marketing initiatives relative to your peers. This is useful because it shows you the overall flow of traffic in a given area.

The main problem with this measurement is that you are not able to effectively drill down the website traffic to just your target customer population, since the qualifier options are limited to qualifiers like geography.

5. Inbound Lead Tracking

Similarly, you can also measure inbound website visitors, phone calls and emails as well by using specific tracker landing pages, email addresses or tracker phone numbers for each specific marketing campaign. Doing so will enable you to measure the aggregate impact of a single marketing awareness initiative and enable you to remove any outside impacts on traffic, call or email volume.

6. New Versus Returning Visitor Tracking

This is a measurement of first-time visitors coming to your website that can be divided by total visits to calculate the share of website visitors that are new as opposed to returning visitors. You can use the Google Analytics drill-down tools to see which sources are driving the majority of traffic and this is a great way to measure the reach of a marketing initiative.

Below is an example of the aggregate measurement for our website:

OpenView Blog New vs Returning Visitor Traffic

This is a quick analysis that you can do to see how a marketing initiative has impacted the percentage of new visitors coming to your webpage and identify the inbound marketing program that is driving the most traffic to your website.

These are 6 of the many ways that website analytics can be used for measuring brand awareness. There are many other ways to do so. My hope is that by exposing you to some of these other techniques, you will be able to properly evaluate the various means to measure your awareness marketing initiatives and properly determine whether or not implementing a brand awareness survey makes sense for your company or if it makes more sense to use website analytics to track the impact of your branding campaigns.

Regardless of whether or not you decide to start a branding awareness initiative, it is smart to track other brand awareness data points since this data will be collected more regularly and it will enable you to track your marketing team’s progress at a smaller interval and ensure that you are getting the maximum return out of your marketing initiative investments.

Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy

<strong>Brandon Hickie</strong> is Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy at <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>. He previously worked at OpenView as Marketing Insights Manager. Prior to OpenView Brandon was an Associate in the competition practice at Charles River Associates where he focused on merger strategy, merger regulatory review, and antitrust litigation.