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For years, brand marketing has posed a measurement challenge. While performance channels like paid search and email offer clear metrics such as clicks, conversions, and ROI, branding efforts have often relied on indirect indicators like impressions, sentiment, or surveys.
But things are changing.
With better access to multi-touch data and more flexible attribution models, marketing teams are now beginning to identify and measure the influence of brand exposure on buyer behavior, even when there's no immediate click involved. This post outlines a practical, repeatable approach to uncover the real effect of branding across digital journeys, based on work we've seen in the field.
The Challenge: “Direct” Traffic Isn’t Really Direct
In most B2B marketing reports, “Direct” traffic is one of the largest and most misunderstood categories. It includes visitors who arrive by typing in a URL, clicking a bookmark, or bypassing traditional tracking methods.
But here’s the catch: many of these visitors did engage with your brand earlier, through ads, videos, thought leadership, or content, just not in a way that left a trail in your CRM.
These "invisible" touches often come from:
- LinkedIn or YouTube impressions
- Google Display banners
- Partner shout-outs or event mentions
- Non-click-based paid media like thought leadership ads
If you only look at click-through conversions, you’ll miss most of these. And if you attribute them to "direct," branding gets zero credit.
The Shift: Flip Your Attribution Perspective
Most teams try to answer this question:
“Who saw our ad, and did they eventually convert?”
That’s valid, but to capture the brand’s impact more accurately, try asking:
“Of the people who converted, how many engaged with brand content earlier in their journey?”
This shift in framing helps uncover correlation-based influence rather than just click-based causation. It’s especially useful for long buying cycles and complex customer journeys. Here’s a simplified approach to doing this:
Step-by-Step: How to Measure Brand Influence
1. Start With a Known Outcome
Pull a segment of leads that converted, for example, leads that progressed from first touch to a sales meeting.
2. Review Their Full Journey
Use any-touch attribution to see if those leads engaged with branding content at any stage. (This might include ad impressions, video views, or branded posts.)
3. Compare Conversion Rates
Split them into two groups:
- Those who engaged with brand content
- Those who didn’t
Then compare their progression or conversion rates.
4. Control for Channel Types
Repeat the analysis for specific channels (e.g., LinkedIn, YouTube, Display) to isolate which ones are lifting performance.
The Insight: Brand Touches Lift Performance
When marketers take this approach, they often discover something surprising:
Leads who engaged with brand content earlier in their journey convert at significantly higher rates—sometimes 5x to 10x more.
This isn't just theoretical. In a 2023 Nielsen report, brand equity was shown to drive up to 60% of future purchase decisions, even when clicks were not involved. By tracking these previously hidden interactions, marketing teams can now quantify the value of branding and defend the investment.
Common Applications
- Validating LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads: View-based formats like sponsored updates or influencer posts rarely get clicks, but they prime the audience. This method shows the downstream impact.
- Evaluating Display Campaigns: Google Display and programmatic banners often serve impressions that lead to direct traffic. Now you can prove their assist value.
- Defending Brand Budget in the Next Planning Cycle: If you're getting pushback on brand spend, use this model to show how it improves performance across paid search, direct, or even referrals.
Advice for Getting Started
Even if you don’t have a sophisticated attribution tool, you can begin with simple CRM and marketing automation system segments.
Here’s what we recommend:
- Use "any-touch" models instead of relying solely on first- or last-touch
- Group outcomes like meeting set, opportunity created, or pipeline influenced
- Look for correlations—don't worry about perfect causality (branding is rarely linear)
- Present findings with confidence, but note assumptions and limitations
Closing Thoughts: The New Role of Brand
Brand isn’t just about awareness anymore; it’s about influence. By flipping the attribution perspective and leveraging available data, marketers can finally give branding the credit it deserves. Not based on hope or reputation, but on actual buyer behavior.
This doesn't just justify spend, it helps integrate brand into your overall growth strategy. And in a world where buyers see your brand long before they click, that might be the most important metric of all. Let's talk if you have any thoughts.
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