Moz developers have created a “first-of-its-kind” metric that can measure brand strength and salience.

The company on Monday released the measurement platform at its annual conference, MozCon.

Brand Authority — the name of the platform now available in Moz Pro and via the Moz API — measures the total strength of a brand by analyzing the way people search for that brand, its sub-brands, and its associated products, according to Peter Meyers, marketing scientist at Moz.

“We know that Google results are built to reflect the real world, including the influence of brands, but measuring this influence has been a missing piece for search marketers focused on ranking and other purely online signals,” Meyers said.

Companies can use Brand Authority to better understand a company’s strengths and weaknesses, evaluate prospective customers and acquisitions, and assess the total value of public relations and outreach.

It measures the total brand strength of their domains in the market from a score of 1 to 100, and reflects the value of the brands that search engines  like Google associate with a domain.

It combines Moz’s datasets and the creative thinking of its search scientists to provide companies with actionable insights into their performance and opportunities for improvement.

Moz’s parent company, iContact Marketing — an email marketing company and subsidiary of J2 Global — acquired the search engine optimization (SEO) tool provider for a reported $67 million in June 2021, to add SEO tools to its product offerings. The move seems fruitful for both companies, as it gave Moz deeper pockets to develop tools like Brand Authority. 

“If someone is looking for a brand or even a well-known product such as Apple, iPad or iPhone 15, then we know they’ve already been influenced by that brand,” Meyers said. “In our research on search intent, Moz realized that certain kinds of search results strongly indicated brand signals, and we began to explore how our customers could benefit from that data.”

When asked how the metrics combine with other metrics that Moz products offer to provide an overall view, Meyers said that together with Domain Authority — which measures a website’s online strength and search ranking potential — Brand Authority provides a full picture of a site’s market strength.

This combination of the metrics allows marketers to evaluate the overall marketing strengths and weaknesses, and helps determine where to place their efforts for the best return on investment (ROI) and spot competitive opportunities.

The changes made to Moz’s Domain Overview tool now not only showcases Brand Authority, but also charts Brand Authority and Domain Authority as a 2X2 matrix that gives marketers a complete view of how the site and brand compares to competitors.

The Brand Authority metric is based on U.S. data, but the plan is to include data from additional regions by 2024.

Moz believes its developers have created a first-of-its-kind metric that can measure brand strength and salience. The company on Monday released the measurement platform at its annual conference.