4 tips for measuring brand lift in Google search

Obviously, an isolated method cannot win the online marketing game. After all, we are all seeking to attract new eyes and retain loyal customers.

However, unless you sell products online or generate potential customers, it is difficult to show the impact of the entire digital marketing and advertising.

It may also take a long time to prove the value of your efforts.

Measuring your online brand improvement over time is a great way to show that your efforts are worth keeping up with.

This can also be a valuable exercise In rebranding, Because it can help you understand the online public’s understanding and acceptance of your transformation by searching and mentioning your brand online.

There are many tools and methods that can help you measure the level of brand resonance and the potential lift you may be experiencing.

In this column, you will find useful tips on the four elements that should be included in the measurement of brand lift.

Most importantly, each one only needs to be completely Free tools You may already use it for other parts of your digital marketing strategy.

1. What is your brand?

What people do Actually call you? The reason I ask is that your so-called organization may not be what your client is looking for.

This usually happens when your brand is abbreviated by the public for convenience. For example, you are the Central Tennessee State University Health System, but the public refers to you as “Tenn-Med.”

This is a fictitious example, but even so, it will happen.

To help understand what your brand and competitors’ brands think of the public, we turned to Google Keyword Planner.

Here, we apply our organization name. This tool will then return popular search results around the name of our organization.

This is a great way to see online searches for name variations and the “brand + keyword” searches that are happening.

This allows you to learn about topics related to your brand from the online public.

This will give you an idea of ​​the volume of searches surrounding your brand, variants, and subtopics.

More importantly, we have an in-depth understanding of the three-month and year-over-year percentage search trends.

To gain a deeper understanding of historical search trends, you can set a multi-year date range and perform a spreadsheet export.

Screenshot of Microsoft Excel, November 2021

This type of analysis helps to understand changes in search volume for rebranding and any seasonality that may occur.

2. Assess trends

Since you are sure How the public searches For your brand, you can incorporate this brand keywords and brand variants into Google Trends to understand popular trends over a period of time.

Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2021

Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2021

Here, the benefit is to view a graphical history of search trends related to your brand. Google will also provide a similar brand name.

A unique quality Google Trends It is the ability to measure brand search volume by state or region.

Although people may rely on Google Analytics to gain this insight, you may not know whether traffic usually comes in through direct channels or through organic search channels.

3. SERP behavior

So far, we have been able to measure how web users search for your brand and how often they find you.

Your next stop is Google Search Console.

Screenshot from Google Search Console, November 2021

In the search results section, we can once again see brand-related searches performed by web users, but now we can see how often our list gets clicks.

Remember, users can also click Google Local List Depends on the proximity to the applicable physical location.

While viewing the click-through rate of brand and brand variant terms, you can also view keyword phrase rankings and comparisons of “over a period of time”.

4. Paid search brand impression share

We carefully studied the exposure of the organic search brand, where you appear, and when users choose to click on your organic listing.

However, this situation is not uncommon in a highly competitive industry. Competition to bid for your brand name And name variations in an attempt to attract website clicks to get the traffic that was originally sent to your website.

One way to stay one step ahead is to use a portion of your paid search budget to bid only on your brand name and similar variations and spelling errors.

Screenshot from Google Ads, November 2021

Once this campaign has been running for a few months, you will understand how often you dominate the top of the brand term page.

This will also clarify other competitors’ concerns about your brand’s traffic.

Impression share is important here, but top of page and absolute top of page impression share are also important. The latter two ratios not only show that your ad has been displayed, but also show that you can rank first at the top or lowest position of the page, and also show on the upper part of the page.

Competitors’ brand bidding may become slippery because they may want to get traffic from you, but may pay to resolve your customer service queries.

The key here is to provide a sufficient budget and a large enough cost-per-click to display most brand-related searches and order placement at the top of the page.

Invest in your brand

If many of us are obsessed with one thing in search marketing, it’s Unbranded search exposure. Endless keyword research lists and optimized bidding structures pop up in our minds to attract searchers related to products and services.

Your brand in search marketing is definitely an area to watch.

It is or should be the “own” space in your marketing strategy; it provides a clear path for those searchers you strive to acquire in your entire marketing strategy, and may return to you from a multi-channel perspective.

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Featured image: Shutterstock/Griboedov