Market Insight
Brand Search Ratings
As a leading search marketing specialist, it consistently amazes
us how some of the world's largest brands and even whole industry
sectors still either neglect their presence in the search channel
or simply haven't rolled out the right strategy. In order to
monitor how brands are behaving in this channel and be able to
compare different sectors adoption of search, we have put together
a comprehensive analysis of how the top 50 B2C and top 50 B2B UK
brands are performing in both Organic and Paid search.
Our starting point for identifying these top 100 brands seemed
logical; SuperBrands has been running since 1995 and are recognised
globally as a benchmark for brand success in the offline world but
how do these brands perform in search?
Rather than looking to create a competitive product to
SuperBrands, our aim is to offer a search specific insight into how
these brands are performing online. This then gives us a platform
for industry based comparisons and an insight into each brands
search based visibility, total traffic available month by month,
SuperBrand Rating and BrandSearchTM (our own search based metric)
Visibility Rating.
This data will be freely available, updated every month and we
already have more than a year's worth of traffic data for each
brand. This insight will allow us to monitor how the UKs largest
brands are progressing in search over time, which we can compare to
their SuperBrand ratings. We will also be producing monthly reports
into how these brands perform, how they compare to their
competitors and how different industries compare to each other.
Understanding our metrics
The Overall Visibility and Visibility Graphs:
Visibility is a function where each brand ranks in the UK's top 3 search engines. A scoring system allocates points based on where each of the top 10 keywords ranks in each search engine.
Points are initially allocated as follows, with more points being allocated for higher rankings:
| Position in Search Engine | Points Scored |
|---|---|
| 1 | 30 |
| 2 | 29 |
| 3 | 28 |
| 4 | 27 |
| 5 | 26 |
| 6 | 25 |
| 7 | 24 |
| 8 | 23 |
| 9 | 22 |
| 10 | 21 |
| 11 | 20 |
| 12 | 19 |
| 13 | 18 |
| 14 | 17 |
| 15 | 16 |
| 16 | 15 |
| 17 | 14 |
| 18 | 13 |
| 19 | 12 |
| 20 | 11 |
| 21 | 10 |
| 22 | 9 |
| 23 | 8 |
| 24 | 7 |
| 25 | 6 |
| 26 | 5 |
| 27 | 4 |
| 28 | 3 |
| 29 | 2 |
| 30 | 1 |
These points are then awarded for each individual search engine. However, we must take into account the different market shares and therefore volumes of traffic that each search engine has by weighting these points in relation to the current market share.
Based upon our internal traffic data, which spans over 100 accounts, the current market shares for each search engine are approximately: Google with 85%, Yahoo with 10% and Bing with 5%. Therefore, each score that a brand receives for a search engine is then multiplied by its market share. E.g. If Microsoft scores 200 points in Google this would then be multiplied by 85 to generate a total score for that search engine.
Once all three scores for each search engine have been calculated, they are then added together to get a total score and expressed as a percentage of the maximum possible score that any brand can receive.
This metric is performed for each brand in terms of Organic rankings, Paid rankings and then a total visibility score is generated by adding these two together – at the top of their profile.
BrandSearch Rating:
In order for our visibility metrics to facilitate a useful comparison between search performance and SuperBrand rating; and also to allow us to effectively compare brands to each other, we then take the overall visibility scores of each brand in the B2B and B2C categories and order them with the highest scoring brand being rated as 1st in its category and the lowest scoring brand as 50th.
SuperBrand Rating:
Simply the score received in the most recent SuperBrand results, which can be found here: www.superbrands.uk.com.
Traffic Availability Graph:
These are monthly search volumes as reported by Google’s keyword tool. It was decided that we would use Google based upon their dominance of the UK search market. The 'Overall Traffic Availability by Month’ graph illustrates the total search volumes for each of the brands ten most relevant keywords to their core products and services, which generate high volumes of search traffic.
Overall Search Visibility Graph:
This graph represents how this brands search listings in both Organic and Paid search engines are fluctuating on a monthly basis over the last 12 months.