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How I Built a Brand Awareness Dashboard in Looker Studio

How I Built a Brand Awareness Dashboard in Looker Studio

2025 is all about brand building. At Ahrefs, we’ve already been doing that for over a decade, but there’s never been a better time for us to ramp things up. 

After writing an article on 11 ways to measure brand awareness, I figured now’s also the perfect time for us to get a clearer picture of where we stand today, so we have something solid to measure against when those brand wins come rolling in 😉

I needed a reliable way to track Ahrefs’ brand performance—regularly and over time.

Luckily for me, we already have a Looker Studio Template hooked up to all our main tools via the API, which made it easy to create a live, auto-updating dashboard of the key organic brand metrics I cared about.

Below, I show you exactly how to replicate this for your own brand.

Site Explorer is best for keeping tabs on total organic traffic, paid traffic, organic keywords, and backlinks.

A screenshot of Ahrefs Site Explorer dashboard, showing scorecard stats, and organic traffic trended over time

Rank Tracker is useful for overview stats and project-level analysis. It helps you track SoV against competitors, SERP Feature ownership, and positions across a specific set of keywords.

A screenshot of Ahrefs Rank Tracker dashboard, showing 4 trend charts, tracking share of voice, average position, traffic, and SERP features for March 17th - Apr 15th 2025

Site Audit is useful when you want to go deep into the technical SEO side of things. It gives you indexability insights, on-page content issues, and core web vitals status updates.

A screenshot of Ahrefs Site Audit Looker Studio dashboard template

I mostly wanted to monitor broad brand metrics, so I started off with the Site Explorer template, and then fed in Rank Tracker data to home-in on some of our most important keywords.

To adapt a template, just click on the three dots on the right and click “Make a copy”.

A screenshot of Ahrefs Site Explorer dashboard, with an arrow pointing out the "make a copy" button

Then under “New data source” click “Create data source”…

A screenshot showing a dropdown of data sources, highlighting the button "Create data source"

…and search for your chosen Ahrefs data connector.

A search bar containing the word "Ahrefs", with three Ahrefs data sources returning below
Choose your project, and leave all other fields blank—you can adjust them later on in the actual report. A screenshot of Ahref Site Explorer configuration, showing Ahrefs' project selected

The exception to this rule is if you’re adding “Rank Tracker” as a data source. In this case, you’ll need to select a “Device type” before you can “Connect”.

A screenshot of Ahref Rank Tracker configuration, with arrow highlighting Device Type filled with "Mobile"

On the next screen, hit “Add to report”.

A pop-up institial over Ahrefs' Looker Studio report, saying "You are able to add data to this report", with a button saying "Add to report"

competitors history fields.

A screenshot of Ahrefs brand awareness dashboard, with the right hand data panel open and scorecard "Competitors history" fields highlighted with an arrow

This way you can quickly spot-check your brand positions, SERP features, share of voice, and traffic, and monitor any growth or decline with “sparkline” visuals.

Ahrefs brand awareness dashboard highlighting top-line brand traffic & SoV numbers, based on an input containing the word "ahref". Stats show 4.6m traffic, and 90% avg SoV for Jan 2025

Finally, set up an “Is your website filter” to monitor only your site, and sift out any competitors you track in your project.

A closeup of a "Is your website filter"

“Top page” fields.

A screenshot of a table in Ahrefs Looker Studio dashboard, with data configuration open on the right, and an arrow highlight "Top pages" fields

“Organic keywords” fields as your metrics.

A screenshot of "scorecard" chart highlighted for the "positions" metric, with data configuration open on the right, and an arrow highlighting the "Organic keywords" fields

Then create a pie chart to visualize your SERP Feature ownership.

1. Add “Keyword URL feature” as the dimension
2. Add “Keyword” as the metric
3. Add “Keyword” as the sort feature (by descending)

A screenshot of "pie chart highlighted, showing the SERP Feature breakdown, with data configuration open on the right, and 3 steps for configuring the chart

4. Add a filter “Keyword URL remove blanks” (Exclude → Keyword URL feature → Is Null)

A screenshot showing the setup of “Keyword URL remove blanks” filter

Then build a simple table of keyword performance data, including metrics like volume, keyword difficulty (KD), positions, traffic, and traffic growth, so you can see the data behind performance peaks and troughs.

A screenshot of a table in Ahrefs Looker Studio dashboard, showing a list of brand keywords and metrics like volume, KD, CPC, and traffic

Ahrefs Academy last month, we can see related Academy pages have been some of our top traffic drivers this month.

5. Test brand content optimizations

If you’re experimenting with including your brand name more frequently alongside relevant phrases, ideas, and features—like in titles, meta descriptions, or on-page copy—you can use the dashboard to see whether it’s improving your branded keyword performance.

Wrapping up

We’re living in a brand-first era. Brand is increasingly a top funnel and bottom funnel play—it drives both discovery and conversions.

Without brand awareness, you will be invisible in search, LLMs, and buyer discussions.

You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. With AI reshaping the landscape, it’s critical to monitor your brand presence now.

Have a go at creating your own brand awareness report with Ahrefs Looker Studio template, and let me know how you get on.

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