Measuring Brand Awareness Online 01/31/12

Learn how to monitor awareness of your brand in context of competitors in the marketplace in order to gauge the performance of strategic decisions and identify new opportunities (potential takeover candidates, marketing ideas, etc.)

You can achieve this through:

1. Monitoring Share of Search (aka Share of voice.) Organic search traffic for industry keywords and brand keywords. (you.com vs. competitor.com etc.) – shows if you own the keywords in your industry and if your brand is becoming more or less of a force in the marketplace.
2. Traffic Differentials vs. competitors (specific to local markets) – shows impact of strategic decisions in context of competitors. Viewed together with Share of Search data described above, you could for instance, get a good idea of whether a competitor’s recent ad campaign was a success or not. I cover this more in point 6.
3. Facebook and Twitter mentions / chatter (talking about this) and follower growth. Looks at sentiment and comparative growth vs. competitors in a defined period. In the end, how many new email subscribers, registrations and sales you’re getting is what counts. Especially with sales, it’s important to measure with latency in order to avoid the temptation of discounting the value of social from just a week or two of data.
4. Google Alerts to monitor competitor activity on the wider web. This is a legacy system that should be in play already. With competition on the web getting tougher across all categories, it’s important to have the intel. on hand to be make both tactical and strategic changes.
5. Monitoring of specific community websites in country. Eg. Whirlpool in Australia is not well crawled by Google Alerts, so having a monitoring system here can be a useful early warning system. Ultimately Facebook and Twitter will serve as the litmus test for the most significant issues.
6. Understand Brand Recall through measuring user search intent: Ie. When people think of buying electric cars, are they thinking about you? We can understand what brands people associate with key industry search terms. For example: ‘buy electric car’, in the past 90 days. We could identify what brands/terms are searched for when looking for just about anything and also which search terms / brands have risen by the most significant amounts – This can be a gauge of eg: How well a competitors TV campaign or other recent marketing activity has performed. Try searching for ‘your brand name.’ on Google Insights. Do you own your brand online? Or is a competitor poaching it? Also, what keywords do people associate with your brand? Does this properly reflect who you are or who you want to be?
7. Understand customer propensity to recommend your site to others: A Netperformer survey after checkout offers a measure of consumer sentiment that should be looked at alongside LTV analyses (Active customers etc.)

I hope this information will help you implement a system that gives you a monthly competitive brand metrics report and help you make more data-driven, rather than assumption-driven decisions.