Measuring Brand Lift With Google Analytics

Measuring your brand lift is a great way to validate your marketing job, or your value as a vendor to your clients. It's also just a great way for small to medium businesses to see if they are growing in their market.

Brand lift is best measured one tactic at a time. So for example:

• One ad campaign with a vendor.
• One new marketing person.
• One PPC campaign.
• One TV campaign. 

A marketing person can run multiple programs and use brand lift to validate their efforts. OR you can try adding PPC (and nothing else) to your media mix and measure the impact of that tactic. Just as long as you don't launch a new TV campaign and PPC in the same month and expect to be able to measure each piece. You will be able to measure the campaign as a whole, but not TV vs PPC.

Basically what we will measure is whether people have top of mind awareness of your business name when they are online looking for a product or service. Are they searching for auto repair and happened upon your site OR did they search specifically for your business name or type in your site name directly?

When they type your name directly, you have brand lift. Your brand is becoming more recognizable in your market.

It's also an interesting way to use digital metrics to measure non-digital campaigns. Brand lift can happen and be measured when you add a TV campaign, for example, by analyzing the time period that the campaign ran. 

How do you measure brand lift? Let's go to your Analytics. 

You will want to choose "Acquisition" from the left side, then "all traffic", then "channels".
There are two things to measure here. First is direct. These are people who directly type your website URL into their browsers. 

Click on "direct" and you will see this traffic. You want to look at number one which is (usually) just a /. That forward slash represents your home page.

Now go up to the date in upper right corner and choose your comparison ranges. Give some thought to what you are comparing. If there is some seasonality in your business, you may want to compare year over year. If you are judging a marketing campaign, then compare to the month before you started that campaign. 

The comparison will show you what the direct traffic to your site was, and what it is now since you either .... added a campaign, opened for business, hired a marketing person... what ever is being measured.

Now go to Acquisition, All traffic, Channels again and choose organic. Once you click on organic you will get the top keywords used to get to your website. These keywords were used in a search to get to you. Most likely because the person wasn't positive of your web address so it's easy enough to just Google your business name and get there.

The results default to the top 10 keywords. You can go to the lower right side of this page and increase the numbers. 

So what you are seeing is a list of keywords used to get to your site. Having the date comparison option selected shows you growth (or decline) of each.
Over all, you want to continue to see a growth in your business name being used as keywords period over period. 
There will be many industry and generic keywords for your industry in the list. For Brand Lift, you are looking for an increasing percentage of your actual business name being used.
Make sense? Let us know if you have any questions. 

Getting Different Keyword Results Than You May Be Used to from Your Onsite Search Bar and Google Analytics

This week I am starting a keyword list for a client interested in adding more marketing to their mix.

I accessed their Analytics and found the keywords most frequently used to get to their site through organic and direct traffic. 
This, and brainstorming with the client/sales team/ marketing teams, is one of the best ways to nurture a brand new keyword list. 

Let's, how-ever, look at a way to go a bit deeper.

What about the keywords that people search for once they are already on your site? If they typed words into your search bar, this tells you a few things.

1. They came to you thinking you'd have this information. (why do they think this?)
2. They couldn't find it right away, so they searched and found it. (maybe think about the results of this and making navigation to the subject better if you get enough searches).
3. They couldn't find it. You don't have it. Maybe you should (maybe)?

So how do we tap into this often over looked list of keywords?

First, do a search while on your site in your search bar. Look at the URL of the result that you get and choose a unique identifier that you can use to identify this in Google Analytics.
For example, a site search in the search bar of one of my clients returned a result that had this sequence in the URL. www.CLIENTSITE.com/search?searchTerm=camels.

(I searched for camels. It's my favorite random word).

Open your Google Analytics. Click on Behavior, Site Content, All Pages.

Paste the unique identifier from the search result returned from your search bar query on your own site. Not the whole URL, just the unique-to-your-search-results-page identifier.

For example, I tried the whole part after the / which was search?searchTerm and came up with no results in Analytics.

****Be very careful that the UI (unique identifier) that you use can not appear anywhere else on the site.

So I used just used ?searchTerm and BINGO. There were my results. 

Click on image for larger view

The actual keyword phrases returned in the example above were removed to protect client info.

I will be optimizing their site to these words, making navigation to top searches more obvious on his site, and we're pontificating over whether to add 3 of the items that people assumed they had which is why they went to that site and then searched for those things.

Of course, it's the public, so they searched for things that we have deemed not necessary to address.

This is a great way to get access to some different information and customer insights.

Let us know what you find. We're all better when we share.