Seasoned marketers understand that consumers don’t only choose to do business with you because of your services, products, or pricing. They decide to do business with you because they connect with your brand. Behind every successful brand is a well thought out strategy that was designed to make consumers find it irresistible. To keep up with trending strategies that do just that, creative marketers utilize analytics. The most successful strategies used today by sales and marketing professionals are a unique combination of innovation and calculation. As a matter of fact, data-driven tactics are prevailing over legacy systems. Bottom line, it's impossible to operate a successful business today if you don't keep track of what works and what doesn't.

What is Brand Analytics?

Brand analytics is the ability to measure all the thoughts, feelings, recognition, and interactions of a target audience. Successful brands do a great job of appealing to consumers on both an emotional and intellectual level. These businesses successfully use a combination of insightful creativity and brand strategy in order to determine what their audience wants. This gives them the opportunity to fulfill their audience's needs and more.

Google Analytics

One of the most highly effective tools you should have in your digital tool belt is data-rich Google Analytics. That said, Google Analytics is complex, and can only be useful if you can understand how to take advantage of everything it has to offer.  If you don’t have the time or inclination to take on the learning process and follow-through, hire a professional to analyze your Brand.

Determine How Many New or Returning Visitors You Have?

An essential, but frequently neglected, audience demographic is the amount of new and returning visitors to a website. The percentage of new visitors that return to a site is very telling as it demonstrates the effectiveness of an inbound digital marketing strategy across the web.

Community Traffic

If you set up your Google Analytics account appropriately, you'll be able to start measuring where your visitors are coming from based on their domain name link. By filtering out links that contain words like "community", "thread" or "forum, in their link you'll be able to measure the metric to find out how often a brand is being mentioned in general forums, etc.

Analyze the Results of Your Call to Actions

There are a number of types of call to actions (CTAs) to consider, including offering a compelling free download (a free report, etc.) that entices someone to fill out a form. Utilizing Google Ads and Facebook campaigns are highly effective ways to target your audience, encouraging them to interact with your CTA's in distinct ways. These strategies can help provide indicators of a Brand's value by measuring the combination of the Brand campaign and CTA data. 

There are several ways to analyze the results of a call to action including the following.

• Creating an A/B test

• Checking the number of views and clicks of the CTA

• The percentage of views that resulted in clicks

• The percentage of clicks that generated CTA form submissions

You vs. Your Competitors

Assess how you’re doing in comparison to your competitors. If they're doing better than you try to determine why. This can be achieved by measuring the volume rank of searches by your competition's websites, keyword volume, and the percentage of the website’s search traffic. All of this can be achieved using Google Analytics.

Traffic Differences vs. Your Competitors

Combine the search share with traffic created by your promotions, product launches, etc. Using this data, you'll be able to measure the comparative effects of the brand/promotional activities on your competition's traffic. This can also be accomplished using Google Analytics. It's really important to monitor new product launches, promotions, etc., in real-time if you want to quickly learn what works and what doesn't. This helps maximize potential profit, and at the same time minimizes the chance of experiencing problems that could have a negative effect on your efforts.

Creating a Brand Analytics Report

In the past, Brand analytics, metrics, and insights were difficult to pull together. That's not as difficult today. That said, you're going to need to take the time to learn how to expertly use and understand analytic tools or hire someone to do it for you. Studying and utilizing the behavioral data of your audience can provide priceless insight, indicating new opportunities that can provide value to your visitors.

Because the trends are constantly changing, there are always going to be new analytic tools to use and perspectives to consider. Because this is the case, you may want to consider hiring a professional to regularly analyze your Brand for you.