Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to measure brand awareness advertising
Branded search, direct traffic and share of search tell you whether more people know your name. Judge a brand campaign on cost per lead and it will always look like a failure.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Brand advertising is measured by whether more people know your name and think of you when the need arises. That shows up as searches for your brand, direct visits, and callers who already know what you sell. It does not show up as clicks in the week you ran it. If you judge a brand campaign on cost per lead inside a month, it will fail that test every single time, and so would every brand campaign that ever worked.
Why cost per lead is the wrong measure here
A performance campaign finds people who are ready now and converts them. A brand campaign works on people who are not ready, so they can choose you when they are.
The second one produces its response later and through another door. The buyer who heard your hospital's name on radio in March calls in July, having searched for it, and every dashboard credits organic search. Divide the March spend by the March leads and you get a terrible number, so the campaign is cut in April, just as it starts working.
This is the most expensive misreading in Indian marketing, and it runs in both directions: brand campaigns cut too early, and performance campaigns credited with demand somebody else created.
The fix is not a better dashboard. It is deciding, before the money is spent, which question this spending answers and which measure it will be judged on.
The five signals worth tracking
| Signal | Where it comes from | What it tells you | How reliable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Branded search volume | Search Console, plus a keyword tool for the category | More people are looking for you by name | Good, once volume is above a few hundred a month |
| Direct traffic | Analytics | People typing or returning without a search | Rough; app and messaging clicks land here too |
| Profile searches on Google Maps | Google Business Profile insights | Whether people found you by name or by category | Good, and the name-versus-category split is the useful part |
| Share of search | Your brand volume against the named competitors' | Whether your position in the category is moving | Directional only, over quarters |
| What callers already know | The person answering the phone | Whether conversations start further along | Best signal you have, and it needs discipline |
The last row is the one nobody sets up and the one that would change most owners' minds. Two months of a receptionist ticking a box for "already knew what we do" will show you the effect of a brand campaign more clearly than any tool.
Share of search, and what it is worth
Share of search is your brand's search volume expressed as a share of all the brands in your category. Say the three coaching institutes in your town are searched a thousand times a month between them, and two hundred of those are your name. Your share is a fifth, and the direction it moves over a year is the finding.
It has real uses. It updates monthly rather than annually and costs nothing beyond a keyword tool. For a category with a handful of named players, it is the closest thing a small business has to a market share indicator.
Now the limits, which are not small. The volume figures are estimates from tools that disagree with each other. Choosing which brands count as the category is a judgement, and changing it changes the answer. Misspellings, English and Kannada spellings and a name shared with a film or a person all distort it. A recall, a court case or a viral complaint raises your share while destroying your business.
So use the trend across quarters. Never put the decimal in a report as though it were a measurement.
Set the window and the baseline first
Write three things down before the campaign starts.
- The measurement window. Ninety days at minimum. Nothing gets judged before day sixty.
- The baseline. Six months of branded search, direct traffic, profile searches and enquiry volume, month by month. Include last year's same months, because a festive rise is not your campaign.
- What else is running. Every other campaign live in those weeks, so the report can say honestly what cannot be separated.
Then leave it alone. The temptation to change the creative in week three is what makes brand campaigns unreadable.
Things that move branded search and are not your campaign
Be sceptical of your own good news. Branded search rises when a competitor bids on your name and people check who you are. It rises when you post a job advertisement. It rises when a customer complains publicly, when your name appears in a news story for the wrong reason, and when a film or a cricketer shares your brand name.
It also rises when you run a discount, which is a demand effect rather than an awareness one and will fall back the moment the offer ends.
Check the search terms themselves, not only the total. "Brand name" is awareness. "Brand name complaint" is something else entirely.
A worked example
For example, a building materials brand in north Karnataka has sold through dealers for twenty years. The contractors and homeowners who specify the product barely know the name. The figures are illustrative.
It runs a year of brand activity: hoardings on two trade routes, a Kannada radio schedule in three towns, and site boards at projects. It records six months of baseline first, freezes nothing else, and agrees with the dealers that nobody will be judged on monthly leads.
Through the year, branded search doubles from a small base, dealer counter staff report more buyers asking for the brand by name, and direct traffic to the site rises steadily. Enquiries move less than the awareness numbers, which is the expected shape for a brand that sells through a channel. The decision it supports is not "keep advertising" but "the dealers are now getting pull, so the next spend goes on dealer support and site boards, not on more radio".
What to do next
Decide which of your campaigns are answering the awareness question and which are answering the demand question, and write the measure for each beside it. A campaign with no agreed measure gets judged by whoever is unhappiest at the review meeting.
If your current reporting judges everything on the same cost per lead line, the free audit will show you which spending is being punished for doing a different job.