Semalt Advice On How To Measure Your Brand Lift In Google Search

Understanding your brands' presence on Google can help you scale your business. In this article, we will show you free tools you can use to measure your brand's authority on Google and how you can use this insight to improve your brand's position on Google.

When it comes to SEO, we are all chasing the same thing. We need new eyes to visit our websites while maintaining the current viewers we already have. Measuring this can be not easy at times, especially when you aren't generating leads or selling products. What other way can we measure the impact digital marketing and advertising have on SEO. We simply can't say for sure what this marketing effort brings to the table. Many times, we have to convince our clients to trust us before we can prove the value of our efforts.

This is where measuring brand lift comes in.

Brand lift is a free tool we use to measure the ads impact on how your ads are perceived on Google. Measuring your brand lift over time is a great way to show that your efforts are influencing your target audience positively.

Staying aware of your brand lift can help you align your campaigns with your marketing goals as you will gain insight into other meaningful metrics such as brand awareness, considerations, and ad recall.

This can also be a valuable insight to use when rebranding. It helps SEO experts understand how well your online target audience understands and accepts your brand and the transition your currently making. Your brand lift calculates this by analyzing your web searches and mentions on Google's search engine.

There are many tools and methods that can help you gauge where your brand ranks in the minds of your target audience and what chances you have to improve.

In the next section, we will be showing you some helpful tips and elements you should include in your brand lift measurement strategy to achieve a better result.

Here, it would be best if you considered what people generally call your brand. It is possible that your customers refer to your brand using a different name or term to what you call yourself as an organization. This is usually the case when the public abbreviates your brand's name so they can easily call your brand.

To help get an idea of the image your brand and your competition's brands have in the minds of your audiences, we use Google's Keyword Planner. In this tool, we apply the organization's name, and the tool returns popular search results surrounding that organization's name.

This is a great way to see online searches for the name variation of a brand as well as the keywords that are frequently used alongside the brand's name. Insights like these allow us to understand which topics the public associates with your brand.

We get a sense of the search volume around a brand, variations of your brand name, and sub-topic ideas for brand content.

Finally, we gain insight into the three-month and a year-over-year percentage of your search trends. For deeper analysis, we can also set a data range of multiple years and generate a spreadsheet export. Analysis at this level helps us understand the search volume transition for rebrands and any seasonality that may be occurring.

After learning how the public searches for your brand, we take the brand keyword and its variations into Google Trends to see insight on the popularity of these keywords over a period.

The benefit of doing this is that we can see a graphical history of search trends related to your brand. Google also provides similar brand names, which is an added advantage. Google Trends has the ability to filter brand search volume based on geographical location.

It is possible that you already got this insight from Google Analytics, but it wouldn't show you whether the traffic flowing into your site enters through the Direct Channel or through the organic search channel.

Up until this step, we've learned how to measure how Google search engine users search for your brand and how frequently they search for your brand. The next place to focus your attention is Google Search Console.

In its Search Result section, we are able to see the brand-related searches users see once more. The difference here, however, is that we can also see how often our listing gains click-through.

It would be best if you kept in mind that this tool also lets us study a keyword phrase ranking and its comparison.

Now, we have critically evaluated organic search brand exposure; we've seen where you show up most frequently and when users choose to click on your organic listing. However, in industries that are highly competitive, it is common for your competition to bid on your brand name and its name variations. They do this to entice website click-throughs that were originally headed to your site.

Your options here are limited, but one way you can stay ahead of your competitors is by creating a dedicated portion of your paid search budget that only bids on your brand name and other variations or misspellings.

Once you run this campaign for a few months, you get an idea of how often you dominate the top of the page with terms related to your brand. Doing this also reveals what areas of your brand are most threatening to your competition.

Here, impression share is important, but you should also keep an eye out for the top of the page impression share. Your top of the page and absolute top of the page impression shows if your ad was shown and if you were able to rank in the number one position at the top of the page or if you fell in the upper part of the page.

The problem with competitor bidding is how easily it can become a slippery slope because their primary objective is to steal traffic from you, but they may end up paying to field your customer service inquiries. To ensure you come out on top, you need to devote a large enough cost-per-click to show for the majority of brand-related searches and earn a top-of-page placement.

As marketers, it is likely that we become consumed with unbranded search exposure. What we mean here is that our minds run endless lists of keywords to research, and then we obsess on optimizing bidding structure, so we lure product and service-relevant searches.

Your brand in search marketing is definitely the core or an important aspect to focus on. It is or should be a dedicated space in your marketing strategy. There should be a clear path leading to it for those searchers you've worked so hard to attract and carry along throughout the entire marketing strategy that is likely to return to you from a multi-channel standpoint.

If you need to learn more about the subject of SEO and website promotion, we invite you to visit our Semalt blog.