The brand health signal you should watch
Most teams spend a lot of time and money trying to measure brand health. Surveys, brand lift studies, attribution platforms, MMM. All of those have a place at certain scale, but there is a free, quick way you can get the same directional data.
Pull your branded search trend in Google Trends.
If you've never looked at this, the chart might surprise you.
What branded search actually tells you
Branded search is the volume of people typing your brand name (or a close variant of it) into Google. Don't include category terms or generic keywords, just your name. It's a great measure of brand awareness and intent.
At Groove, branded search tracks top line pretty closely. The search curve moves first and revenue follows, usually within a few weeks. It's been a reliable barometer for what holiday and peak season will look like in years past.
See below for an example of what healthy branded search growth looks like:
[Example chart image]
Side note: the same pattern shows up in Amazon if you sell there.
Why this matters
Most of your marketing activity is trying to do two things at once: drive a sale today and build brand for tomorrow. Attribution platforms measure the first one pretty well, but it's harder to track the building brand metric.
Branded search is the cleanest way I've found to see whether your marketing is actually building brand. If you ran a big TV push, podcast reads, an influencer campaign, or just shifted more budget to top of funnel, branded search will tell you whether any of it created any real demand.
This matters most for brands paying for top of funnel attention, where brand lift is hard to measure directly. Branded search is the closest proxy you can pull for free.
When it doesn't work
Two cases where branded search isn't as useful.
Small brands. If you don't have enough search volume, Google Trends won't return reliable data. You'll see flat lines with no movement and won't be able to read anything from them.
Generic brand names. Brands named after common words get noisy data because the searches include people looking for other things entirely. You can sometimes use brand + product modifier to clean it up, but the signal is harder to read.
The bigger lesson
A lot of operators spend a significant amount of money trying to measure things they could read for free if they knew where to look. Branded search is one of those things. It won't tell you everything, but it tells you whether your brand is growing or stalling in a way that platform metrics can't.
If you haven't looked at yours in a while, pull it this week.
P.S. Quick exercise:
Open Google Trends. Type your brand name. Set the time range to past 5 years and the region to wherever your customers are. Compare to a competitor or two if you want a benchmark.