Did you know you can measure brand awareness in Google’s GA4?
Understanding what value your brand brings to your business is an important part of your marketing mix, and may determine how you can invest in a long term and powerful strategy.
Brand value is the financial gauge of your brand’s worth, brand equity, however, is to do with customer perceptions and how positive (or negative) they are. Customers who prefer your brand to others and show loyalty to your brand over time contribute to your brand equity.
Since in building your brand equity, you’re contributing to the qualities that will make it valuable, brand equity could be seen as influencing brand value – things like brand recognition, positive associations with quality and service, or aspirational value. All these factors promote revenue by driving customer spend and loyalty.
You can run brand awareness campaigns and invest in brand awareness strategies on a range of marketing channels, such as:
- Display advertising and retargeting
- Email marketing
- Local business listings
- Print advertising
- Search advertising
- Social media marketing and advertising
And you can engage in brand awareness strategies that aren’t channel-specific, such as building a brand community, creating a strong brand identity, and crafting an impactful mission for your business. Basically, any channel that can help you get in front of potential customers and any way that you’re creating a cohesive and memorable brand is an option to build brand awareness.
Every marketing goal needs a plan, and every plan must be measured to determine:
- Whether the marketing campaigns are working
- How well they are working, and
- How to fix what’s not working
Brand awareness should be included within these measurements.
Measuring brand awareness
You can use the GA4 engagement dimensions and metrics to measure your users’ general level of awareness of and engagement with your content. For example, you could use the following metrics to monitor and optimise how users respond to changes and updates to your website:
- Engaged sessions per user
- New users
- User engagement
- User stickiness
- Views per user
If you have assets designed to raise awareness on specific points, you can measure interactions with these assets as conversions. To measure conversions for these interactions, create new conversion events via the user interface.
Examples of conversion actions could include:
- View a page about company policy
- 75% scroll on press page announcing a new product
- Download a PDF about your recruitment program
- Click through to a purpose-specific promotional subsite
- Watch 50% of the company intro video
Add brand reports to GA4
GA4 have an option to include brand awareness in a standard report, however it is not turned on automatically, but something you have to do as an analyst.
Firstly, login to GA4 and navigate to “Reports”, and then scroll down until you see “Library” and click.
Then you will see a list of “collections” some say “published, and others “unpublished. You are looking for the “business objectives” collection, which includes “Raise brand awareness”.
If yours still shows “unpublished” then you will need to take steps to get this to show in your dashboard. You will see 3 dots in a vertical column, and if you click there, this will open to enable you to “publish” the collection. 
You should now see this within your standard reports in GA4.
If you need extra support with your brand campaigns, or even your company rebrand, please do not hesitate to make contact with chris@m3sm.co.uk.
