Branded Search Volume & Paid Media

I track branded search volume trends for all of my clients, and bake those reports into my paid media dashboards.

Despite this data commonly living in the SEO world (coming from Google Search Console), I’ve found the insights from these trends to be incredibly helpful when analyzing paid media performance. There are two common use cases I have for total branded search volume data.

The first is using this data to set benchmarks and track the impact resulting from branded paid search incrementality tests. Having quick access to this data allows me to easily see if organic traffic is picking up the slack after pausing paid.

The second use case is centered around evaluating the downstream impact of paid campaigns that aren’t intended to drive direct response results. Ideally, after a new LinkedIn or Reddit campaign is launched, that client should see an increase in branded search volume. If we continue to invest in these areas and scale our efforts, branded search volume should continue to climb each month. Branded search volume is a great leading indicator for interest in the brand and future lead volume (as long as the upstream marketing positioning is done correctly).

The set up and process is fairly simple, but this isn’t something I see a lot of people working in paid media talk about or execute on. Google Search Console integrates directly with Looker Studio (which can even be embedded into a HubSpot dashboard), so this is a low lift task which can provide some value to everyone on a given marketing team!

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.