Huge drop in reported demand for brand terms in Analytics

[FranticFish]

On one site, I track interest in searches including a brand name (reasonably well known UK household brand). Just impressions via a regex filter in Analytics with the data imported from WMT.

This brand has not done any advertising of any sort for a long time. The reports showed around the 9.5K mark as far back as I could see when I started tracking. I have data back to Jan/Feb so not very far.

Interested jumped by about 3.5K in the same reporting period that we ran a reasonably large Display Ad campaign for a competition, which was March/April. The next reporting period, April/May, it had died away again. However in the most recent reporting period, May/Jun, there is a huge drop to 2K.

This happened on 26/27th May - an average of 300 or more reported impressions a day has dropped to 15.

The traffic before was a mix of all devices and both web and image searches, so no explanation there.

Has anyone else doing similar tracking noticed anything around 26/27th May?

[goodroi]

I haven't tried this specific method of tracking so I can't share my experience. Have you checked to see if there was any change in your site traffic or if Google autosuggest has changed?

[FranticFish]

Thanks for the reply and sorry for my slow response (I've been away for a week).

The actual traffic on the term was always far lower (low hundreds). That has also dropped by about a third in the last 'reporting period'.

I wasn't tracking suggested searches so I don't know for sure if anything's changed. The brand name is a two word term and if I type the first word then the brand name is not suggested. It is suggested when I type the first letter of the second word.

If the full two word term was being suggested before when the first word only was typed AND it was the top suggestion, that would count as an impression, correct?