What is a brand?
A brand is not just a logo and text. It is not just running paid ads all over about your company or product. A brand is about the story you tell to all.
It actually consists of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships. We can call these four elements the building block of a brand.
When a proper blend of these four elements influences a consumer’s decision to choose one product over another, then that blend is called Brand.
Measuring brand awareness
Measuring brand awareness and exposure depends mostly on the context of your business. In general, there are a few important metrics you can check regularly to measure your online brand awareness success. I will discuss here the metrics you can check from time to time to get an idea about your brand strength.
Google Trends
Google trends is a very useful free tool to know the popular trends of your brand. It is very easy to use. Just go to trends.google.com and search for your brand name and products.
Here is an example – I am searching here to find out the popularity of Jeff Bullas.
Below is a report on the past 12 months:
To get a more clear picture, search trends over a few years. The longer the time, the more visible the trend line.
Look at this trend, there was a spike in the popularity of my searched brand name from April 2014 to October 2015.
All the data is meaningless if you can not ask the right question. You have to take insights from the data. Google’s evangelist Avinash Kaushik often says that it’s not the ink, it’s the think. I love this line.
Here, looking at this trend graph, I have to ask why there was a spike in that period? I would want to find that out and get insights to implement in my strategy.
From Google Trends, you can also compare your brand search popularity to your competitors. Here is an example, I picked the name Darren Rowse to compare with the brand name Jeff Bullas:
Google alerts
You can add your brand name and related keywords to Google alerts. Google will notify you by email when the search engine indexes a page that matches your set brand name or related terms.
To set Google alerts, visit google.com/alerts in your browser.
Enter a search term – it could be your brand name, product name, etc – for the topic you want to get noticed.
You can narrow the alert to how often you want to get it, by specific source, language, and/or region. Click on ‘Show options’ to specify your choice. Google will send you alerts accordingly.
Select ‘Create Alert’.
You will receive alerts in your email, like this:
You can unsubscribe or edit the alert keyword anytime you want.
Direct traffic in Google Analytics
Generally, direct traffic in Google Analytics is when a user enters a URL into their browser or comes to a website directly from a saved bookmark. When Google Analytics cannot determine the referring source or channel of that session, they call it direct traffic.
Direct traffic is a good metric to measure to understand your brand marketing success and brand strength.
For example, here is the direct traffic of my personal Bengali language blog:
Organic search
To find organic search keywords, you can go Acquisition > Overview > Organic Search in Google Analytics. It will show you how organic keywords are contributing to your total web traffic. You can also find how branded keywords are performing.
Paid search traffic
In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All channels > Paid search for a breakdown of paid search traffic.
Also, you can get data on branded traffic from the search console section of your Google Analytics.
Paid marketing works to raise brand awareness, from a brand marketing perspective it is called aided brand awareness. You can measure your aided brand marketing success from the paid search traffic metric.
For a more detailed analysis of paid search traffic, you can use the free tool Finteza. Here is an example of the Finteza paid search data:
Branded keywords from Google Keyword Planner
You can use the free tool, Google keyword planner, to find the search volume of your branded keywords. It is very easy to use.
Steps:
- Go to Google Ads.
- Select tools. After that, keyword planner.
- Click on find new keywords.
- You can search your keywords to find the search volume data, also you can find search volume data for any other keywords and compare your competitor’s keywords with your keywords. An example, I searched here for Jeff Bullas and weDevs:
Using social listening to measure brand awareness
Social media is a great place to know which people are talking about your brand. On Twitter, you can simply search using your brand’s hashtag to see how many recent tweets are there about you. There is no one simple way to measure social listening, but we can use a few very useful tools to measure social media brand strength.
Social Mention
Social Mention is real-time social media research and analysis tool. Using this tool you can get an idea of your social media brand strength, also of your competitors.
Search with your brand name. You will get a detail report on strength, sentiment, passion and reach.
SharedCount
Using this tool you can analyze your social media like and share count for any particular URL. You can search your company’s homepage and compare it with your competitor’s homepage to get a comparative picture of your social media strength.
Analyze Words
This is a lingo-psychological tweet analysis tool. This tool is very different from others. It can show your brand’s psychological presence on Twitter using the words in your tweets. This tool analyzes your tweets in three sections: Emotional style, Social style, and thinking style. An analysis of @Jeffbullas,
Foller.me
Use this tool for a detailed analysis of any twitter profile. In my opinion, it is very useful for analyzing your competitors twitter profiles. You can get a lot of useful data using this tool.
An example:
Checking your backlink profile
You can check the quality of your backlinks, link influence score, industry wise backlinks, etc using the free tool openlinkprofiler. 
Guest Author: Muradul Islam is the VP of growth at weDevs, where he manages growth teams and growth strategies. He loves data analysis, and finding out insights from them. He is the editor of Home My Heaven. If you need any help regarding digital marketing, you can find him on twitter: @Muradt20