Following up from last week’s article on what to measure, today we’ll tackle how to measure brand awareness. In order to do this effectively, you need to take a look at your web analytics.

First, take a look at your traffic from search engines, specifically the branded keywords. Do most of your visitors type in your brand name or a version of it? You probably will even notice that some people type your entire URL into the search engines (which may be caused by the SEFILS syndrome (a term coined by my friend Andres Galdames, http://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/03/01/sefils/). The more brand awareness your brand has, obviously the higher percentage of traffic that will be searching on your name. One thing that you will want to make sure to do, if you are running any PPC campaigns for your brand keywords is to separate or segment out the paid traffic from the organic.

Another metric for brand awareness is your direct traffic. These are the visitors who either type your URL directly in the browser or have your site book marked. To find this metric you can look at the percentage of visitors that have no referrer (although some web analytics packages display a metric called ‘Direct Traffic’).

Once you segment out these groups of traffic, we’ll call them the brand-aware visitors (branded keywords – organic traffic, branded keywords – paid traffic and direct traffic), you can establish some baselines. First what you will want to see is how long those visitors stayed on your site. You can do that by looking at the Time on Site or Average Time on Site metric. You can also do that by looking at page views. However if your site is built with AJAX, using tabbed browsing or contains lots of videos, time on site is probably a much better metric to use. I’ll bet if you compare the time on site from brand-aware visitors to your overall traffic, the time on site is much higher for the brand-aware visitors.

The next thing you’ll want to look at is the brand-aware visitors’ paths through site. If you have a web site, you likely have several business goals for the site, specific paths that you want visitors to take. Follow the paths that the brand-aware visitors take through your site. This can be incredibly helpful as they are likely your most qualified traffic and if you see a big drop off or high percentage of exits from key pages in your ideal paths, it should be simple to find what is causing the trouble and fix it.

Bringing it all together – What to do with this information

Once you have established baselines for the key metrics:
What percentage of your traffic do the brand-aware visitors make up?
How is it broken down (e.g. branded keywords – organic traffic, branded keywords – paid traffic and direct traffic)?
How does the average time on site of the brand-aware visitors compare with the overall traffic?
What are the most popular paths of the brand-aware visitors?
What is the conversion rate of the brand-aware visitors compared to the overall traffic?

If the number of your brand-aware visitors is low or if most of your brand-aware visitors are getting to your site because of your brand-PPC campaigns, then you have some work to do. First, establish your goal. Perhaps you would want 50% of all traffic to be brand-aware visitors to start. Come up with an achievable breakdown – for example, if you recently launched a new site, you will likely have to focus more on PPC to drive more brand aware traffic to your site. So the breakdown may be 25% branded keywords – PPC traffic, 10% branded keywords – organic traffic and 15% direct traffic.

To increase the branded keywords PPC traffic focus on campaigns that combine your branded keywords with more generic terms. For the direct traffic and the brand-aware organic traffic, you’ll need to rely on basic marketing practices like writing a blog, speaking at conferences, writing white papers and other articles mixed with PR, advertising and online marketing.

The good news is that you can use lots of different tactics to increase your brand awareness once you establish some baseline information and set some goals. Even better you can measure how each tactic is working to increase brand awareness and shift your money and attention to what is working best!

Filed under: Analytics on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 by Joy Brazelle |
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