Brand awareness spending is the first thing cut when budgets tighten, and the reason is almost always measurement. A podcast sponsorship, a billboard, a YouTube campaign, or an influencer push rarely produces clicks that attribution tools can follow, so in a click-based report it looks like money that bought nothing. Then the brand cuts it, and three months later wonders why paid search costs went up and direct traffic went down.
Awareness can be measured. It just cannot be measured the way you measure a retargeting campaign. You are looking for changes in how many people seek you out, not for a trail of clicks. These are the methods I use, roughly in order of cost and effort.
Branded search
The single best free signal. When awareness works, more people search your brand name. Google Search Console shows organic impressions and clicks on branded queries, Google Trends shows relative interest over time, and your Google Ads account shows branded search volume if you bid on your name. Record at least four weeks of baseline before a campaign starts, and compare the campaign period with the same period last year to account for seasonality. A podcast run that coincides with a clear lift in branded search, with nothing else changed, is doing its job.
Direct traffic and new customers
The second signal is direct and organic traffic from people who have never bought from you. Total direct traffic is noisy, but new-customer orders that arrive through direct, organic, or branded search are the footprint awareness leaves. If those rise during and after a campaign while paid-attributed new customers stay flat, the campaign is creating demand that shows up elsewhere. I looked at where those direct sales come from in where do direct traffic sales actually come from?.
Post-purchase surveys
Ask buyers how they first heard about you, and make sure the answer options include every awareness channel you are running: the podcast by name, the billboard city, the creator. Survey data is self-reported and imperfect, but it is the only method that connects an individual purchase to an awareness touch. Watch the share of answers naming the channel over time rather than any single week. More on doing this well in using post-purchase surveys as a real attribution signal.
Geo tests
For awareness channels you can run by region, like billboards, local radio, CTV, or regional YouTube targeting, a geo test is the strongest evidence you can get without a large budget. Run the campaign in some markets and not in comparable ones, then compare total sales growth, not attributed sales. If the test markets grow faster by more than the normal week-to-week noise, you have a causal answer. I described a cheap version in running a cheap geo holdout to sanity-check a channel.
Media mix modeling
Once awareness spending is a meaningful share of the budget and you have a couple of years of weekly data, a media mix model estimates each channel’s contribution from spend and sales patterns rather than clicks. Google’s open-source Meridian is free if you have the analytical skills, and vendors like Recast build and run models as a service. It is the right tool for allocating a large budget across awareness and performance channels, and overkill for a brand testing its first podcast. When each approach fits is covered in MTA, MMM, or incrementality, depending on what you spend.
What not to do
Do not judge awareness spend on its own attributed ROAS. It will always look bad, because the channel’s job is to make other channels work. Do not run an awareness campaign for two weeks and call it. Awareness compounds, and the effect on branded search and new customers often lags the spend by several weeks. And do not measure it alone. The most useful number is how your blended metrics, like MER and new-customer CAC across all channels, move while the campaign runs.
An attribution tool helps with the parts awareness touches. ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, tracks MER and new-customer metrics across channels and folds post-purchase survey answers into its attribution, so survey mentions of an awareness channel sit next to the click data.
The measurement plan
- Record a branded search and direct new-customer baseline before launch.
- Add the awareness channel by name to your post-purchase survey.
- Run regional channels as a geo test whenever possible.
- Judge the campaign on blended MER and new-customer CAC, not its own ROAS.
- Move to media mix modeling once awareness is a large share of spend.
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