Building and promoting a “brand” has always been an important aspect of marketing. However, for as important as it has been it’s been a difficult metric to measure beyond simple surveys.

The Internet has changed how we can measure brand importance. Measuring branding need not be difficult. In fact, if you’re using Google Analytics, you have all the tools you need to measure branding trends online.

For those that don’t know what Google Analytics is, it’s an analytics package for your website that allows you to gather data about the people that visit your website, what they do on your site, and how they got their in the first place. Most people use the free software to track how many people visit their sites and to watch growth trends overtime.

But, Google Analytics offers a lot of detailed data and we can use filters to identify the trending we need. To track our branding, we’ll look at the search engine keyword data, specifically the keywords people searched to find your website.

Finding “Branding” Data in Google Analytics

The first thing we need to do is actually grab the data from Google Analytics. You’ll want to start by logging into the analytics site and choosing your site profile. Once you do that, you’ll see something similar to the screen below.

This is the original dashboard that highlights all the high level metrics. If you need a quick snapshot of your site, you could stop here. But for our technique, we’ll have to dig a bit deeper.

If you look at the date, you’ll see that Google defaults to one month. But, since we want to see the effects of branding over time. I’ve changed the time period to be five full months. This will give us a better understand of our brand’s growth over time.

Next, we’ll want to find the search engine data we need. Click on traffic sources in the left navigation bar to open a sub-menu that outlines all the potential traffic sources. Then, click on keywords, since we want to know exactly what people searched to find our website.

Once you click on keywords, you should see a screen like the one below.

This dashboard outlines exactly what people searched to find your site. It’s these keywords that we’ll use to show our brand trends. To do that, we’ll have to filter this list to only be brand terms.

If you scroll down the list to the bottom, you’ll see a filter keyword option. Enter the broadest brand term you can think of. For me, the term I filter by is “Samir”.

You can see all the keywords that included the brand name now. But since we want to see trending, I’m really focused on the graph. Problem is, the graph in its current form is much too choppy to really give us actionable data.

All we have to do is tell Google to smooth the graph out by plotting it with only monthly data points. Once that’s done, we can see the growth of our brand.

If we want to take this one step further, we can compare growth over time. Pull down the date menu and click the “compare to past” checkmark. Now we can have Google plot the last three months as on graph and the months before that as a separate graph.

I use this kind of data to measure the growth a brand and to justify certain digital branding spending. Having a metric that helps identify branding effects and growth is invaluable.

This data is great for measuring overall branding, product branding, the effects of specific campaigns, and much more. It just takes some filtering and ingenuity.

How do you measure branding? What are you doing with Google Analytics? Leave a comment and share your favorite analytics tips and tricks.