Branded Search Traffic

What is Branded Search Traffic?

Branded Search Traffic is the volume of traffic that comes to your website via branded keywords on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu.

How to calculate Branded Search Traffic:

Branded Search Traffic is calculated as the volume of visits to your website that arrived via a branded keyword on a search engine over a given period of time e.g. month or quarter. It is generally looked at as a trend over time, to give an indication of how you are growing brand awareness. You can use Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools to measure Branded Search Traffic from Google, which is the major search engine in most of the world.

Pros:

Branded Search Traffic is a great measure of high-intent brand awareness. Not only are these people aware of your brand, as measured by Brand Recall, but they are also interested in finding out more about it. This could be seen as an indication of brand awareness driving purchase intent.

Cons:

Often seasonality can cause fluctuations in Branded Search Search Traffic. This makes it hard to understand if you are actually making progress with your brand awareness efforts. For example, if you sell software for automating annual tax returns you’re likely to see spikes in branded search traffic as the annual deadline approaches for submitting tax returns. In this scenario you may be better off comparing branded search traffic to the same period the previous year to understand if you’re making progress.