How to Build a Brand Awareness Dashboard in Looker Studio

In 2025, building a strong brand is more important than ever. We’ve been working on our brand for many years, and now is a great time to do even more. After sharing 11 ways to measure brand awareness, we thought it would be helpful to clearly see where we stand now. This way, we can track progress as we grow.

We wanted a simple and reliable way to check how well our brand is performing. Thankfully, we already use a Looker Studio template that connects to all our main tools. This made it easy to build a live dashboard that updates on its own and shows the brand data that matters most to us.

Here’s how we built our brand awareness dashboard so you can do the same for your brand.

What the Brand Awareness Dashboard Shows

We set up a clear view of how often the brand appears in search results.

We started by testing some of the data already available in Looker Studio templates. This helped us learn how to set things up and pick the data points that gave us the best insight into our brand performance.

Here’s the main data we included:

• How branded traffic has changed over time, and our share of voice (SoV) for branded keywords
• Our top-performing pages and how much branded traffic they bring
• Branded keyword performance, includingsearch volume, cost per click (CPC), and rankings
• Where our branded backlinks come from and how good they are
• New and lost branded backlinks
• How often we appear in branded search result features

This dashboard helps us stay updated and better understand how our brand is doing in search.

How to Track Brand Awareness in Looker Studio

Here are 7 easy steps to help measure brand performance using Looker Studio.

1. Start with a Looker Studio Template

The fastest way to build your dashboard is to use templates.

• Site Explorer is great for tracking total organic traffic, paid traffic, keywords, and backlinks.
• Rank Tracker helps check key stats and compare your brand’s share of voice (SoV) with competitors. It also shows your search results positions.
• Site Audit is helpful if you want to look into technical SEO details like page health and site speed.

Since we wanted to track brand-related data, we started with the Site Explorer template and added data from Rank Tracker to focus on important keywords.

To use a template, click the three dots and choose “Make a copy.” Then, under “New data source,” click “Create data source” and find the connector.

Choose your project. You can leave other settings empty for now—they can be changed later. If using Rank Tracker, you’ll need to select a “Device type” before you connect.

2. Add More Data Sources

You can now add other tools like Rank Tracker or Site Audit to include more useful details.

Click “Add data,” search for the brand, pick your connector, and set it up the same way.

3. Use Filterable Fields

To focus only on brand data, filters are needed. But not every chart or field allows filtering. So we only used data that lets us filter.

On each page, we separated brand info by using input boxes and filters like “contains” or “regex” to focus on our brand name and similar words.

Make sure the filters are allowed. Some won’t work unless enabled. To check, go to “Data Sources” on the right, click the pencil icon, and scroll to “Parameters.” If any are greyed out, click the three dots next to them and choose “Show.”

For example, we used the “Keyword contains” filter to only view brand keyword data from Rank Tracker. It took some testing to find the right data, but playing around helped us get what we needed.

4. Track Key Brand Keywords

Using the Rank Tracker source, pick a group of important brand keywords.

You can track an existing project with a mix of brand and non-brand terms. Then use tags or filters to show only brand terms. Or, make a new project just for brand keywords.

Once filtered, pick the “scorecard with compact numbers” option. It gives a quick view of important numbers at the top of the report.

Use “competitors’ history” fields when setting these up. This helps you see brand ranking, traffic, search features, and changes over time with small line charts (sparklines).

Also, add an “Is your website” filter so you only see your site’s data and remove competitors.

5. Track Your Top Brand Pages

Once your brand keywords are tracked, it’s time to look at which pages are getting the most traffic from those keywords.

You can use the “Top pages” data through the Site Explorer template. Just like with Rank Tracker, add scorecards at the top of your report. These will show how your brand is doing overall, month by month.

These numbers give you a starting point. Then, go deeper to see which pages are helping your brand grow. To do this, create a table using “Top page” fields to break down the performance of each page.

6. Monitor All Brand Keywords

Now that your main keywords and top brand pages are tracked, it’s time to look at all brand keywords.

Use the Organic Keywords report. It shows every keyword your brand is ranking for, not just the ones you picked. This is useful for spotting new and rising terms.

Set up quick stats for things like traffic, keyword cost (CPC), positions, and how often people search (volume), using “Organic keywords” fields.

To better understand how your brand appears in search, build a pie chart with these settings:

1. Use the “Keyword URL feature” as the dimension
2. Use “Keyword” as the metric
3. Sort by “Keyword” in descending order
4. Add a filter: Exclude → Keyword URL feature → Is Null

Now, create a simple table to track keyword performance. Include info like:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty (KD)
• Positions
• Traffic
• Traffic growth

This helps you see what’s helping your brand go up or down in search.

7. Monitor Your Brand Backlinks

How other websites talk about your brand is very important, especially with AI and search tools getting smarter.

Use the Backlinks report in Site Explorer to see how third-party sites are linking to your brand.

Start with the main numbers:

• Total number of brand links
• New vs. lost branded links
• Net gain over time (New links – Lost links)

Next, check link quality. Use pie charts to break down brand links by Domain Rating (DR). Also, keep an eye on in-content links to focus on useful ones, not just image or HTML links. Check link languages to see if your brand is being mentioned in your target regions. Finally, look at links one by one in a table. Include:

• Referring domains
• Anchor text used
• Actual backlinks

Sort the table by traffic to quickly find which links are giving your brand the most visibility.

5 Ways to Use This Dashboard

Once the dashboard is ready, there are many simple ways to start using the data. A good first step is to check how your brand performed over the past year. Use that as your starting point.

After that, track your brand performance each month. Compare it with the past stats. If you see any changes—good or bad—share them with your team.

Here are five more ways this dashboard can help:

1. Benchmark Brand Performance

See how your brand is doing in terms of traffic, links, and visibility in search results.

Compare your brand numbers with your total results to find out how much your brand is helping your overall success. To do this, use the “keyword contains” and “regex” filters for brand data, and leave them blank for total data.

For example, we found that branded link growth in Q1 was 160% higher than the total link growth. This shows that the brand is doing well and bringing in more links than usual.

2. Monitor Brand Trends Over Time

Keep an eye on how your brand changes each month. For example, our brand keyword traffic grew by 28% this quarter.

By checking the data often, you can find patterns. Maybe more high-quality links are leading to more traffic. This can help you decide if you need to invest more in branding or spot a problem if numbers drop.

3. Track Brand Positioning Shifts

If you’re changing the way people see your brand, track how your keywords and content are performing. This helps you know if your message is working or not.

Check your “Top pages” and “Branded backlinks & anchors” to see how well your brand is linked with certain topics. This tells you if people see your brand the way you want them to.

4. Measure Campaign Impact

Use the dashboard to see if your campaigns, PR, or partnerships are helping your brand. For example, after we updated our Academy, those pages became some of the biggest traffic drivers. This kind of data shows if your brand efforts are making a difference.

5. Test Brand Content Optimizations

If you are adding your brand name more often in titles, descriptions, or page text, the dashboard can show if this helps with keyword rankings.
It helps you see if these small changes are boosting your brand’s search results.

Wrapping Up

Today, brand is more important than ever. It brings new visitors and also helps turn them into customers. Without brand awareness, it’s hard to be found in search, AI tools, or buyer conversations. You can’t improve what you don’t track. With AI changing everything, now is the time to watch your brand performance. Try making your own brand awareness report using the Looker Studio template.