Entrepreneurs are always looking for an edge or a new strategy to assess progress. One area that is important to track for certain startups is brand recognition online. The Internet, unlike most marketing mediums, provides fairly straightforward methods for tracking brand recognition through several avenues like the following:
- Track the number of times monthly that someone searches for your company or product name in a search engine and then clicks the link to go to your site (this is measured via the referring keywords in standard web analytics tools like Google Analytics)
- Measure the number of direct visitors to your site that didn’t come from clicking a link on a site to get to your site as this implies they had your site bookmarked or typed in the URL directly, and thus remembered your brand
- Calculate the number of mentions of your brand on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube using a social media monitoring tool like Looxii
As you probably guessed, the goal is to see the data show growth of the your brand recognition on a monthly basis.
What else? What are other ways to measure your brand recognition online?
David Cummings on Startups 