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4 Ways to Measure Brand Lift in Google Search

Learn what free tools can tell you about your brand's Google Search presence and how to put those insights to use.

It’s become clear that a siloed approach to online marketing does not work. After all, we’re all competing to attract new eyes and keep loyal customers.

However, unless you are selling products online or generating leads, it can be difficult to demonstrate the value of digital marketing and advertising as a whole.

It may also take some time to demonstrate the worth of your efforts.

Measuring your online brand lift over time is a great way to demonstrate that your efforts are worthwhile.

This can also be a useful exercise in a rebranding exercise because it can help you understand how well the online public has understood and accepted your transition through web searches and brand mentions.

There are numerous tools and methods available to assist you in determining how well your brand is resonating and what potential lift you may be experiencing.

This column will provide you with helpful hints on four elements you should include in your brand lift measurement.

Best of all, each of these only necessitates the use of completely free tools that you may already be utilizing as a part of your digital marketing strategy.

1.What is your company’s brand?

What do people refer to you as? I ask because what you call yourself as an organization may not be what your customers are looking for.

This is common when the public abbreviates your brand for convenience. For example, your official name is Central Tennessee State University Health System, but the general public refers to you as “Tenn-Med.”

Even though this is a fictitious example, it does occur.

We’ll use Google’s Keyword Planner to get a sense of how the public perceives your brand and competitor brands.

We use our organization’s name here. This tool will then return popular search results for our company’s name.

This is a great way to see online searches for name variations as well as “brand + keyword” searches.

This enables you to determine which topics the online public associates with your brand.

This will provide you with an idea of the search volume for your brand, variations, and sub-topics.

More importantly, we learn about three-month and year-over-year percentage search trends.

You can set a date range of multiple years and perform a spreadsheet export to get a more in-depth view of historic search trends.

This type of analysis can be useful for understanding the transition of search volume for rebrands as well as any seasonality that may be present.

2. Trend Analysis

Now that you’ve determined how the general public searches for your brand, you can enter this brand keyword and brand variations into Google Trends to see how popular trends change over time.

Read A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing.

The benefits of seeing a graphical history of search trends related to your brand are apparent here. Google will also provide comparable brand names.

One distinctive feature of visiting Google Trends is the ability to estimate brand search volume by state or region.

While Google Analytics can provide this information, you may not know whether the traffic is coming from the Direct channel or the Organic Search channel.

3. SERP Behavioral Patterns

We have been able to determine how web users search for your brand and how frequently they seek you out up to this point.

The next stop should be Google Search Console.

Within the Search Results section, we can see the brand-related searches that web users conduct, but we can also see how frequently our listing is clicked on.

Users may also click on a Google local listing based on their proximity to an applicable brick-and-mortar location.

While looking at brand and brand variation term click-through rates, you can also compare keyword phrase ranking and ‘within time’ comparison.

4. Share of Paid Search Brand Impression

We examined organic search brand exposure, where you appear, and when users choose to click on your organic listing.

In competitive industries, however, it is not uncommon for the competition to bid on your brand name and name variations in an attempt to entice website click-throughs for traffic that was originally destined for your site.

To stay ahead of the game, set aside a portion of your paid search budget to only bid on your brand name and similar variations and misspellings.

After a few months, you’ll have a good idea of how frequently you dominate the top of the page for your brand terms.

This will also reveal what other competitors are looking for when it comes to your brand traffic.

Impression share is important in this case, but so is the top of the page and the absolute top of page impression share. These latter two rates demonstrate not only that your ad was displayed, but also that you were able to rank in the number one position at the top of the page, or the very least, that your ad was displayed in the upper portion of the page.

Competitor brand bidding can be a slippery slope because they may want to steal your traffic while also paying to handle your customer service inquiries.

The key here is to devote enough budget with a large enough cost-per-click to appear for the majority of brand-related searches and command a top-of-page placement.

Make an Investment in Your Brand

Unbranded search exposure is something that many of us become obsessed with search marketing. Our thoughts wander to endless lists of keyword research and optimized bidding structures to attract product and service-relevant searchers.

Your brand in search marketing is unquestionably an area that should be prioritized.

It is or should be an “owned” space in your marketing strategy; a clear path for those searchers you’ve worked hard to acquire throughout your entire marketing strategy and who are likely to return to you via multiple channels.

Learn more from Marketing Analytics and read How SEO tools can help to rank your website in 2022?

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