As I’ve discussed before, examining search term data across all engines, while providing excellent tactical insight for search programs, also can provide invaluable insight for brand marketers. We’re now able to provide a new search metric beyond volume (search volume for a specific term over all term volume) and breadth (# of search term variations over all search term variations), our new metric which I’ll call breadth volume, sums the volume for all variations on a root term.
Here’s a table for the top brand searches (U.S. for week ending 3/27/2010) by breadth volume:

So in this example we see that when we combine the volume of searches for all queries that contained the root “Facebook” over the last week (there were 10,673 unique terms), those searches accounted for 2.8% of all U.S. searches.
Exporting our data into Excel, we can chart the changes in a brands “breadth volume” over time, and in this case compared to a competitive brand.

Stay tuned for some other exciting ways we can leverage our new breadth volume metric.