Customers are more likely to learn about and make a purchase decision about a brand on a third-party website. How do you measure not the website, but a brand’s performance in search?

Visably, a marketing-technology search startup that supports companies nationally, but not in Wyoming though the company is based in Jackson, developed what its founder categories as a “new” approach to measure brand distribution in search-engine results (SERP).

Chris Dickey, Visably founder and CEO, believes the insights reveal the customers’ true journey as they learn about, research, and consume products. But it’s important to avoid confusing the data with trying to solve problems in search engine optimization (SEO), he says. He is looking to solve an entirely different problem — how to measure and improve brand visibility in search. 

“I was frustrated with not being able to measure brands in search, audience reach and brand distribution,” he says. “We’re trying to map a brand’s entire footprint whether SERPs or keywords, along with audience reach and click share. We’re not measuring a website’s performance, but rather a brand’s performance.”

The data provides a snapshot of brands as they exist in Google Search — anywhere a customer has a statistical likelihood to click. The data includes third-party content analysis in ecommerce, affiliate marketing, earned media, SERP features, video, and more.

Visably’s technology analyzes the content of the entire search-engine results page (SERP), and also each page result — including tracking what customers see, he says. It also models the click-through-rate of each result to get an idea of how many customers click, and where they click.

Click-mapping and content analysis are two metrics that provide Visably with a good sense of a brand’s true customer reach and distribution within search, far beyond their own website, he says.

This allows the company analysts to examine the customer journey by measuring brand impact at the top of the funnel to include such elements as blogs and product reviews, and at the bottom of the funnel to include Amazon and product detail pages.

The report Dickey shared with Inside Performance analyzed 4,558 non-branded keywords and more than 67,000 first-page results. Of the top 20 most frequently occurring domains, only three were brand-owned.

There’s so much information in the several pages he sent me about the electronic industry that I suggest you reach out and speak with him. For example, earned media sites show up in highest frequency across all results, but big box ecommerce received the most clicks.

More than 94% of all clicks in the results surveyed went to non-brand-owned websites, which means that brand marketers should actively manage their brands across third-party websites if they want to reach customers in organic search.

Share of Voice and Share of Click are also important. Marketers need to focus on audience reach rather than ranking. Ranking for many keywords does not equal reaching more customers, he writes in the report.

Brand-owned sites accounted for 3% of the click volume in the top-20 websites in the analysis. The top five sites in click volume were Best Buy (ecommerce) at 7,667,504; Amazon (ecommerce) at 4,960,541; PC Magazine (earned media) at 2,752,409; Walmart (ecommerce) at 1,241,297; and Tech Radar (earned media) at 1, 156,972 rounded out the top five.

What type of sites won the most clicks during this test? Big box ecommerce took 15,270,907; earned media at 7,264,063; brand owned at 706,720; and Wikipedia at 286,035.

In search across television when it comes to brand visibility across all types of media, LG with 88% of the clicks owns the market. Samsung follows with 75%, VIZIO came in third with 72%, Sony with 71%, TCL with 68%, Hisense with 40%, Insignia with 27%, Toshiba with 27%, Sceptre with 13%, and SuperSonic with 3%.

The report breaks down the data into segments such as wireless headsets, laptop computers, cameras and more.

Customers are more likely to learn about a brand and make a purchase decision on a third-party website. Visably found a new way to measure a brand’s performance in search, not the website.