Moroccanoil was this year’s ESC Presenting Partner.
What if you worked in their sponsorship team and would like to analyse the impact on brand awareness of this massive investment?
You could hire a market research institute, sure.
But there’s a free and fast proxy to that.
You can measure branded queries in Google Search Console. Below is my step by step a tutorial. Make sure to scroll until the end to see my bonus tip on leveraging AI for this.
- You need to have set-up Google Search Console for this.
Login to your Google Search Console property - On the left-hand menu, click on Performance.
- Click on Add filter and then select Query.
- Add your brand name.
We’ll use the example of the ESC presenting partner Moroccanoil since this is top of mind this week. Say you work there. Under Queries containing, you will add moroccanoil. It doesn’t matter whether you capitalize the words or not.
- See the result
As a result, you will see the impressions for queries containing the brand name. This is how often your brand was looked-up on Google. It’s not the clicks.
If you see an upward trend in branded queries during a certain period, that’s an indicator that your branding campaign worked.
The screenshot is for illustrative purposes only. This is not real data from moroccainoil.
Bonus tip: Include variants of your brand names with regular expression
There’s a bonus tip. Users may mistype your brand name. Think of examples like:
- Different order: Oil Marroc
- Typos: Marrocanoil, Moroccan oil
You can create a regular expression to include those variants in the filter. I used to do this manually, but AI came to the rescue! Here’s how I do it now within 10 minutes:
-
- Head over to the AI tool of your choice. I use ChatGPT.
- Add a prompt like:
“I need a Regular Expression to include variants of the brand name Moroccanoil. It’s for the queries containing filter on Google Search Console. The regex should include typos and different word orders such as Oil Marroc, Morrocanoil, Maroccan oil.
Please create the regex and explain which words are included and which not.“
- ChatGPT delivers the query
- Add Regex as a query filter to Google Search Console
You can now copy the regular expression and insert it into the filter in your Google Search Console. Choose Custom (regex) and Matches regex.
- Head over to the AI tool of your choice. I use ChatGPT.
Conclusion: How to Track Brand Awareness with Google Search Console
Tracking branded queries is a simple, free way to assess brand awareness immedeately. Try it next time you run a brand campaign.
This post uses Moroccanoil as a hypothetical example to demonstrate how to track branded queries in Google Search Console. The author is not affiliated with Moroccanoil, and the data shown is illustrative and does not reflect real search data or insights from the brand.
