Measuring the Success of Your Online Branding Campaigns

School of Branding: Measuring the Success of Your Online Branding Campaigns

On 03.09.10, In Marketing, by Connor Young

Branding is important — no news there. But how do you measure the results of your online branding campaigns? Now there’s a question. Although it’s often tricky to measure the effectiveness of branding, there are a few stats in your analytics data that should not be ignored when trying to determine if your brand is making headway with online consumers.

Branding is hardly an obscure concept; if you don’t know what branding is, ask any high school kid with an Internet page. The largest companies in the United States clearly believe in the value of branding. Usually when Coke runs a commercial, for example, the goal is branding, rather than immediate and direct sales. Bank of America is also big on branding – almost every advertisement that company runs is designed to make you feel more familiar and more comfortable with the Bank of America brand. When you see a company’s advertisement focusing in intangibles, it’s a good bet that company is trying to build up its brand.

Think about it. You’re driving across I-10 on your way to Florida, and you stop for food at one of those exits made for travelers. There’s a McDonalds and a Denny’s restaurant, and also a third diner named “Abbie’s Place.” If you said “Abbie’s” then congratulations on your adventurousness, but you’re also in the minority. The vast majority of interstate travelers are going to pick McDonalds or Denny’s simply because they are familiar with those brands – and believe that they know what to expect. The branded restaurants could be run by managers who don’t ask their employees to wash up before work, or after using the bathroom, where Abbie’s could be run by the cleanest people in America – but when the traveler makes that split-second decision on where to eat, “Abbie’s” will seem like the biggest risk.

Online, smaller companies tend to focus on sales or conversions – branding seems like a luxury. This, I think, is a mistake. The delivery mechanism for branding campaigns doesn’t matter – television, magazines, the Internet – regardless of your platform, branding is important. If your website converts 1 sale from every 500 visitors, does that mean 499 out of 500 are worthless? Hardly.

It may take a while for the more timid online consumers to grow comfortable with your brand. Face it, the Internet is full of scam artists. We’re reminded of that every day when we open our inbox and get the latest phishing scams or clever attempts to infect our machines with a tojan. When a consumer first encounters your brand, he or she will probably have a trust deficit – and rightly so. If you can’t close a sale on first contact, then it’s your job to at least help those consumers grow more comfortable with your brand in order to close that sale some other day.

We know branding, in that general sense, works. If it didn’t work, why do we routinely pick Coke and Pepsi over other colas? Why would anyone drink Budweiser beer? Why did Microsoft feel compelled to answer Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads with an “I’m a PC” campaign of their own? The problem isn’t whether branding works, the problem is how do you measure the success of your branding efforts.

This can be especially problematic when you market online, and in many ways branding is an exercise in faith. That doesn’t mean though that you can completely ignore any measurements from your branding efforts. Don’t despair, there are some effective methods that you can use when trying to get a feel for the success of your branding campaigns.

Page views per visit. Take a close look at your traffic and try to get a feel for how many pages your website’s visitors are viewing per session. If you have a one-page website, this is irrelevant of course, but for most websites a larger number of average page views means the audience is interested. If you have engaged your audience, there’s a much better chance that your branding efforts are having an impact.

Average time spent on site. One visitor arrives on your site and loads four pages, while another visitor only loads three. The second visitor, however, spent ten minutes on your website where the first only spent two minutes. Which visit was more valuable? Likely the answer is the second – assuming he wasn’t just pausing to answer the phone or go to the bathroom between page loads. If you are buying traffic from two different sources, one way to measure the quality of that traffic is by how long visitors from each source spend on your website. If source A sends visitors that spend an average of 4 minutes on your site, while visitors from source B spend only 2 minutes on average, then source A is probably sending you traffic that’s a better match for your website – and the longer people spend looking through your site, the better for your branding efforts.

Return visitors. How many times does a person come back to your website over a certain period of time? The more a visitor interacts with your brand, the more familiar she or he will become with your brand. If visitors are returning, there’s a good chance something caught their attention, and you’ll have multiple opportunities to build brand confidence with those repeat viewers.

Ultimately, every branding campaign needs to result in revenue. If you’ve been branding your website for many months but haven’t seen any increase in traffic or conversions that might be attributable to better brand awareness, then something is wrong. That doesn’t mean you should abandon branding. If you know you have a solid product but you choose to reject branding, your long-term business prospects aren’t very bright. If your branding campaigns aren’t yielding results after a reasonable period of time, at least six months of consistent branding, then it might be time to ask why that’s the case – perhaps it’s a problem with the product or the presentation – and start making some changes.

Note: If you don’t have a more powerful analytics solution, you can always use Google Analytics for free. Just note that Google Analytics tends to under-report traffic. It should still give you a good idea of the behavior of your visitors, but keep in mind the real number of visitors is probably higher than what Google Analytics is reporting.