Increase your conversion rate by increasing your brand awareness.

July 14, 2011

Is brand awareness really important, or is it just hype? After reading a case study on ‘how catalogues drive online sales’, I did my own research with a focus on brand awareness, and analysed brand awareness on 2 small ecommerce sites, one of them with a catalogue, another without.

The result? Overall conversion rate on the site with a catalogue was 5.95%, while on the site with no catalogue, only 0.52%, a difference of 1,044%.

In order to calculate the impact of catalogues sent out to clients (offline marketing), we have to firstly establish where or how we find these people in your analytics tool.  As these visitors receive your catalogue, we can therefore expect several ways how they get back to your site:

  1. type directly your specifically created vanity url for your catalogue (e.g. www.mysite.com/10off)
  2. or type your site url without the campaigned parameter
  3. or search for your company name using a search engine
  4. or dial your number on the catalogue and place a phone order. To be able to track this, you will need a call tracking solution which links with your Google analytics. Highly recommended, as it will allow you to assign your marketing to a relevant channel.

After we establish catalogue user behaviour, we need to find them in our web analytics. In Google analytics go to ‘traffic sources’ and get data for you ‘direct traffic’ and ‘search engine – paid and non paid brand keywords’. The data we need are: traffic amount and revenue generated.  Let’s define what brand and direct traffic is first.

What is brand traffic? – These are the keywords people use to find your brand. For example, for Datadial.net, brand keywords could be ‘data’, ‘datadial’, ‘data dial’ and any misspellings of the brand name.

What is direct traffic? – These are visitors who type your domain name into their browser. NOTE: make sure your own company traffic is excluded by using filters in Google Analytics.

By combining brand traffic and the direct traffic you get ‘brand awareness index’ as a percentage of your overall traffic. So you will end up with number like xx% of visitors who visited my site used either my brand keyword or typed my url directly (direct traffic).

Exact calculation would be:

, Increase your conversion rate by increasing your brand awareness

In terms of benchmarking, the higher the ‘brand awareness index’, the better. If your brand awareness index is 20-30% or less, that means people don’ t remember your company, site, product or service.

If your ‘brand index awareness’ is around 60+% then give yourself a high five, as everybody in the universe knows you!  Well, not quite, as you would also like to find out what your market share is. Then give yourself high five if you also discovered that your market share is sound too.

Let’s jump now to some real examples.

In the example below, site A (no catalogue), with a ‘brand awareness’ of 20.92%, converted at 0.52%. Site B (with catalogue), with a ‘brand awareness’ of 65%, converted at 5.95%.

, Increase your conversion rate by increasing your brand awareness

Notice one thing, site B received significantly less traffic, but the site revenue on both sites was almost identical.  Also notice, that these visitors brought in both cases approx. 80% of site revenue.

So that leaves us with a question. What if I increased my site brand awareness from 20% to 60%? Is it going to have any impact on my revenue? And the answer is YES, because as we already know, direct and brand traffic conversion rate is higher, as you can see in this table below.

, Increase your conversion rate by increasing your brand awareness

I hope you will find this useful and apply it to you next marketing strategy.

If you found this idea intriguing and would like to test it, call Jan at 0208 6000 500 and we will help you with calculating, planning and testing.