Brand Awareness KPI: What Should be Measured in PPC Advertising?

Bewildered on the quest to achieving brand recognition?

To go from a small, unknown business to a widely-recognized brand that people love and trust takes time, effort, and smart thinking. Moreover, it takes some solid strategy for continuous growth.

Traditional marketing methods like billboard advertising are still in use today, but the advantages of the digital age mean that marketers now have much more control over their growth strategy.

How?

By using metrics to measure brand awareness.

We’re going to show you how it works, but first, let’s learn a little more about brand awareness in Google Ads.

In simple terms, brand awareness is the extent of consumer knowledge or familiarity with your brand, its images, products, and services.

• Brand recognition – the ability of consumers to recognize a brand. This could be from the name, logo, or trademark slogans.
• Brand recall – this is the pinnacle of brand awareness. If someone is looking for a new pair of headphones and they instantly remember your brand, then you’ve hit the mark.

So, how can marketers build brand awareness in Google Ads?

Google defines an ad campaign with the goal of achieving branding recognition as a ‘Branding Campaign’. As such, the objective of this campaign will be to raise the visibility and awareness of your business, cause, product, or service.

With that in mind, Google Ads will allow you to access an infinite audience with your ads, providing an excessive amount of filters and metrics to tailor your campaign as you see fit.

Knowing the best metrics for branding campaigns is imperative.

Some marketers view measuring brand awareness as a pointless exercise in vanity.

While that may hold some truth in terms of social media followers, or post likes, there are some metrics that really do paint a picture of success.

In paid advertising, tracking your metrics is crucial. Only by doing this are you able to gauge the performance and make the necessary tweaks to your campaign.

Here are the metrics to keep tabs on to see how your ads are helping you with brand awareness.

It’s important to be tracking your impressions in any ad campaign, regardless of your goals. In a branding campaign, impressions may be more important as this metric tells you just how many people saw your ad.

They may never buy a thing from your website, but if they remember you catchy slogan or cool new logo, then that’s a step towards achieving brand recall.

The impressions share is calculated by dividing the number of total impressions by the estimated total your ad was eligible to get.

As your ad will compete in auctions with rival ads, it’s unrealistic to expect to win all the time. However, earning a decent impression share is a good sign that you are building brand recognition.

The Lost IS metric isn’t one you want to score high on. It is the percentage of time your ad never appeared because of budget restrictions.

So, if you have a Lost IS value of 50% or higher, you might want to invest more money in your campaign if achieving brand awareness is important to you.

While it is a common misconception that it’s always best to have an average position of #1, it is most certainly desirable to at least appear on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

Your ad doesn’t need to be in the top spot, as it may earn a great return on advertising spend (ROAS) lower down, but you should look to rank well against competing ads. If you don’t you will be wasting money without building a bigger audience.

In branding campaigns, marketers can use the click-through rate (CTR) to determine how engaged consumers are with their ads.

This is helpful when you display your ads on the search network, but you should keep in mind that a successful CTR is anything above 1%.

In addition to the major metrics above, you can look at these values to see how your brand campaign is performing over time:

• Reach and Frequency – This is the number of people that saw your ads, and how often the same viewers were shown the ads in a certain time period.
• Traffic – Consider organic, referral, and paid traffic.
• Quality of Visits – See how long visitors are staying, and how many pages they visit in a session.
• Display Impression Share – This value is calculated by dividing the impressions received on the Google Ads Display Network by the estimated total your ad was eligible to receive.
• Display Lost IS (budget) – Similar to Lost IS on the search network, this is when you lose out on being displayed on the display network due to a limited budget. This data can only be viewed at the campaign level.
• Display Lost IS (rank) – This value is the percentage of time your ads were not shown on the Google Ads display network because of a poor Ad Rank.

For novice marketers or amateur analysts, it’s easy to be put off by the sheer amount of metrics for branding campaigns offered by Google Ads.

However, when you narrow your focus to the key metrics to measure brand awareness, the task is much more manageable.

Keeping an eye on your impressions, impression share, and customer engagement is the very least you should be doing, as well as carefully considering the relationship between your average position and ROI.

With these metrics, you can determine if your ads are helping you build the brand awareness you need.