Brewdog

International brand accesses global insights

Originating from Scotland in 2007, Brewdog is now a global, household brand best known for its craft beers, breweries and bars.

The Challenge

With global recognition achieved, Brewdog’s marketing team wanted to dig into the detail of their international visibility across major search engines.

Specifically, they wanted to know:

How search visibility differed between international markets
How users in different countries searched for the brand, products and bars while taking into account language variations

This information would allow them to:

Plan their marketing strategies and country-level focus
Better understand their audience
Report back to key stakeholders on visibility growth and opportunities

Brewdog enlisted the help of Impression’s specialist SEO and Analytics teams to help them uncover global search trends data in a manner that would be easy to understand, manipulate and communicate.

The Strategy

Data points – We understood our client’s goal to be about better understanding search visibility and trends, so we started by gathering a full list of their target markets – these included:

🇬🇧 UK

🇺🇸 USA

🇫🇷 France

🇪🇸 Spain

🇮🇹 Italy

🇸🇪 Sweden

🇩🇪 Germany

🇨🇭 Switzerland

🇳🇱 Netherlands

🇳🇴 Norway

🇯🇵 Japan

🇷🇺 Russia

🇨🇳 China

Search Engines

We also gathered from them their seed keywords, which included branded terms, drinks terms and bar terms.

Of course, Google and Bing might be the most common search engines in the UK and other parts of the world, but search behaviours differ across countries so our analysis also covered:

Data gathering

Our next step was to utilise the search volume tools available at our disposal.

Armed with a range of tools – including Google and Bing’s own tools as well as third-party solutions – we were able to pull comprehensive search volume data which we then aggregated to get the best-estimated search volumes using averages from the tools available. This way, we were able to get the most accurate data possible.

We knew that search volume data could only give us a picture of what was happening today. To help our client better understand the changing search landscape, we also pulled in data from Google Trends as well as other third-party tools, allowing us to surface historical information where possible that would incorporate seasonality and other influences affecting visibility throughout the year.

Data communication

Because this project was all about helping our client to take insights from the data

And not simply about gathering the data itself – we knew that the way we communicated the data would be important.

Knowing that the information would be utilised by marketers but also shared with key stakeholders in Brewdog’s wider team, we decided to make use of bespoke Google Data Studio dashboards to pull the data together in a way that could easily be manipulated using filters to show appropriate data, as well as separate report tabs to extract the data at a country level.

The final report was customised from the ground up, including:

Custom design for the cover page, making this a visually appealing document to share throughout the Brewdog management team
Bespoke dashboards pulling data direct from Google Sheets on a country-specific level
Filters and manipulation capabilities in each data point to allow our client to visualise the data in various ways
Custom and off-the-shelf visualisations within Google Data Studio including geomapping to show the global reach of the brand