How Direct Traffic can be used as a proxy for Brand Awareness

It’s frustrating isn’t it? Relying on 3rd party surveys to tell you whether or not if ‘the purchase intent’ or ‘recall of a tv ad’ went up a few points. Trust me, you are not alone. In my experience as a media analyst, that is one of the major questions I receive over and over – how did our TV campaign impact brand awareness?

Typically media agencies are not responsible for providing metrics on brand awareness. That doesn’t mean that they should have a pass to go ahead and spend whatever budget they want and not be accountable. A 3rd party firm is typically assigned the task to evaluate media performance results, but as we know, these services are fairly expensive. If you want a quick, quantitative way to measure brand awareness, I suggest you look at Direct Traffic.

What is direct traffic? Direct traffic, also referred to as ‘no referral’ traffic, is a great proxy for brand awareness impact since these are visitors coming to your site solely by typing in the name of your website URL in their web browser. These visitors are NOT relying on a search link (paid nor organic), and are not linking to your site from an online display banner or via another site. Isn’t this lovely? Quantitative evidence to show if your TV campaign is affecting consumers without relying on qualitative survey data or other assumptions about how TV urges consumers to other channels.

There are a few other reasons why you want to track No Referral data:

• Can be a good indication of commercial wear out
• Can help determine the ‘lag time’ of when consumers no longer recall the TV ad after the TV campaign has ended
• Compare one TV campaign against another
• Assess what kind of lift is expected depending on the number of TV GRPs in the marketplace
• Also look to determine if traffic spikes when other offline channels like Radio, Newspaper, Magazine are On-Air

Even when you are not running a TV campaign or other offline media, it is a good way to see if there is any seasonality for your business.

Great, so now you have an easy quantitative way to measure the impact of your TV campaign. Lastly, No Referral traffic may also include visitors coming to your site from your email campaign or any redirect pages which point to your site, where the redirect strips off the referrer. Usually these are very minimal, but still you should clarify with your website administrator what exactly comprises No Referral traffic.