The global cookie market size was valued at USD 30.62 billion in 2018. Oreo was one of the top brands in its category, always looking to increase its market share around the world.
They have partnered with celebrities such as Wiz Khalifa, built a great presence on social media with 42 million likes (engagement could improve), and brought to life creative marketing ideas and contests to build exposure. Where they haven’t done so well is with Search — not yet.
In this article, we are going to look at their organic traffic. We will calculate the current brand traffic using SEMrush filtering capabilities, and we will calculate the Brand Addressable Market Size (BAMS) and Industry Addressable Market Size (IAMS).
Let’s do it!
Oreo currently has 115K visitors arriving at the website from the US (as of the writing of this article).
I know they haven’t put much attention into SEO so far, which means they don’t likely own all the Brand Addressable Market Size (BAMS).
BAMS is the size of all the branded search traffic that could arrive at the brand’s website.
The reason why BAMS is important for a brand is that receiving this traffic allows the brand to deliver the message they want instead of allowing third parties (such as other websites or companies) to shape it.
It empowers the brand because they can control the message they want to convey, even if it is not a “purchase search intent” type of traffic.
OK, so let’s figure out how much-branded traffic Oreo receives.
Calculating The Branded Traffic for Oreo
The first thing I do is use the Exclude Branded Traffic filter. The reason I approach branded traffic this way is because it is easier to find out if the branded keywords are being filtered appropriately.
I go to "Organic Search > Positions" and then apply the filter.
After that, I scroll down to make sure no “Oreo”, “Oreos”, or similar keywords show up on the results.
Another alternative way of doing this would be by adding an extra condition to this filter with the words I DON’T want to appear. This way, I make sure everything that is showing up has nothing to do with the brand.
However, I like to look into the results without much filtering because sometimes I will get cool ideas based on the data I am looking at (See one interesting/funny? Idea in the P.S. at the end of the article.)
In this case, I can see some searches that contain the word “Oreo,” so I move to the next filtering option.
Second Brand Filtering Option
Based on some research, I know some of the words associated with the brand I want to filter are:
To be precise and eliminate keyword duplication, I created a filter, including the keyword I want to see results for and excluding the rest. SEMrush is really good at allowing you to do advanced filtering like this.
For the word “Oreo”, this would be:
This filters the searches that combine multiple words, plurals, etc., and it focuses exactly on what I want.
After I click “Apply” and gather the data, I change the first “Include” for “Exclude” and the first “Exclude” for “Include”. Then, I apply the filters, write down the numbers, and continue…
After applying the three filter modifications, this is what we have:
- Oreo → 104.9k
- Oreos → 6.6k
- Nabisco → 1.6k
That is 113.1K branded visits arriving at the website.
Taking into consideration that the total traffic arriving at the website is 115K, we can conclude that most of the traffic is branded. We already had a strong inclination to think this was the case based on the fact they haven’t focus on SEO, but this step eliminates “assumptions” from our process.
What does this data mean, though? Is this good, bad, normal?
Oreo hasn’t done much SEO, so it makes sense that most of their traffic is coming from branded searches.
However, we don’t have any other point of reference to determine if the data we have is good, bad, or neutral.
That is why the Brand Addressable Market Size (BAMS) is important and why we are going to use it as the first point of reference to asses our current data.
We will evaluate the “size” of what they have and compare it to the size of what “there is.”
The second point of reference we will be looking into will be the Industry Addressable Market Size (IAMS).
IAMS is the size of all the industry-related search traffic that could arrive at the website.
We could break down IAMS into ToFu, MoFu, or BoFu, and categorize the traffic to build strategies around them, but it will take some time, so for the sake of this article, we will omit it.
Calculating the Brand Addressable Market Size (BAMS).
I will be focusing only on the word “Oreo” and leave “Nabisco” and any other variations out.
The first step is to type the word “Oreo” into SEMrush’s main search bar and click search. Then look at the total search volume. In our case, this includes searches with the word “oreo” in it.
That is a total search volume of 2,369,150, and this is the number we will use to calculate BAMS.
Taking into consideration that all these searches are related to the brand, it makes sense to assume that if there were an Oreo.com search result, most people would click on it.
If we keep it conservative and establish that only 50% of the total volume would land on the oreo.com website, we have these figures:
BAMS = 2,369 million * 50% = 1.185 million.
They have the potential of increasing traffic by 947% from branded traffic alone (from 113K to 1.185M); this is a major opportunity to increase exposure and control their brand message. Based on this first point of comparison, we can see how the brand traffic they currently receive is only a small portion of what they could have. Let’s now focus on IAMS.
Calculating The Industry Addressable Market Size (IAMS)
As mentioned before, we are not going to divide the traffic into ToFu, MoFu, or BoFu, or do any traffic categorization. Instead, we are going to do a general query and see what we get back; this is simply to take an eagle’s view estimation of a portion of the search landscape.
When you think about Oreos, what industry vertical comes to mind?
Food industry > Cookies, right? (In addition to cookies being dunked into milk) — that is what comes to my mind when I think about Oreos anyways.
So, let’s see the search volume related to cookies, which I think they should be focusing on dominating:
OK, that is a total search volume of 24,541,680.
Let’s now calculate the IAMS for the word “cookies” taking into consideration three scenarios.
- 20% of all that search volume arrives at the website.
- 10% of all that search volume arrives at the website.
- 5% of all that search volume arrives at the website.
I have assumed a broad consideration of the potential traffic without looking into more detailed aspects of the search, such as:
Zero-click searches/traffic.
Featured snippets.
Knowledge panel results.
Search intent.
Purchasing Stage (ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu).
Etc.
Each of these elements has different click-through rates, intent, etc., but we are not going that deep into the analysis. For example, let’s consider the landscape for the search “cookies”, using an incognito Google search.
Google is attributing the search intent for this term mostly to cookie recipes — with chocolate chip cookies winning the contest at the top. There is a lot going on with this specific search, so the click-through rate for the first organic result will be lower than a “normal” search result.
Another example is what could happen when you get a featured snippet, like when it happened to this client last year for a high volume keyword.
The graph shows an almost 2x spike increase in daily traffic in five days.
Conclusion
The two points of reference (BAMS and IAMS) were used to confirm that they are not doing very good in terms of SEO, so from the good, bad, or normal initial question, we will give it a bad result.
We can see that Oreo could increase traffic by an estimated 1.185 million if they focus on their brand searches and up to 6 million combining brand and “cookie” traffic.
And last but not least, BAMS is a great metric for brands to analyze if they own all of their search traffic, and if not, create the right information to capitalize on it; this is even more important for brands that haven’t yet put much attention into SEO.
P.S. The word “Oreo” has 90K searches per month, and there are 33K searches per month for “are Oreos vegan”. Based on all the empirical data collected, it clearly means vegans are taking over the world ;).
