Using Google trends and adwords as a proxy for brand awareness

I was recently tasked to measure brand awareness for various sub-brands and decide which ones were small enough to be included in our umbrella brand.

Without hard data on hand (and very little time to perform primary or secondary research), I discovered I could use Google trends and adwords to calculate the number of Google searches for one or more keywords.

This will ultimately give me a rough idea of how a brand is searched by customers. One could argue it is a simplistic digital view of measuring to what extent a brand is known by customers. Clearly the example below is for directional use.

Let's begin with Google trends.
















Google trends compared the relative number of searches between various keywords. In the example here, I used two luxury car brands: 'lexus' and 'infiniti'. Google trends ranked the keywords and it clearly show a 'higher' brand awareness for lexus.

However Google trends only gives a relative scale ( 2 to 4). To actually get the number of exact searches, I had to use Google adwords. Google adwords gives us the number of searches per month over the last 12 months. This is an average and with a bit of maths and using the relative scale above, I was able to create a graph showing the number of searches for both Infiniti and Lexus over the last five years.

This is a rough estimation but with the data I collected, I was able to have a conversation with our regional brand managers. And decide whether to keep the sub-brands independent. It turned out there is a lot more to brand awareness than the number of online searches. But again, the proxy was a good starting point.