Brand awareness spend often gets cut first when budgets tighten, treated as a nice-to-have rather than a growth driver, but new research from Google puts a number on why that’s a mistake. The results make a powerful case for maintaining radio ad budgets.
Google and research partner Tracksuit are calling the work “Return on Awareness,” pairing Tracksuit’s brand tracking with Google’s search data to see how movement in brand awareness shows up in search behavior. The study covered 31 brands across 15 categories, tracking awareness, consideration, and preference alongside each brand’s share of search, which is a brand’s portion of total search volume within its category.
>For brands sitting around 30% brand awareness, the relationship was close to one-to-one: every five-point gain in awareness produced roughly a five-point gain in share of search. Researchers frame share of search as a leading indicator, meaning movement there tends to show up in market share later.
The report, analyzed by the Cumulus Media/Westwood One Audio Active Group, voices the stakes plainly: “Every point of awareness growth translates into meaningful, measurable behavioral change in search, and ultimately in market share. Growth-stage and disrupter brands have the most to gain. Brand investment at this stage isn’t a soft spend, it’s one of the most commercially efficient things a marketer can do.”
The timing lines up with real budget behavior.
The Spring 2026 CMO Survey, from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, found marketer optimism about the economy at its lowest point since the pandemic, with companies cutting business investment nearly four times more often than raising it. When profits miss expectations, more than half of executives respond by cutting costs rather than investing in growth, and marketing budgets take the hit more often than other expense lines. Traditional advertising has absorbed much of that pressure, falling to just 3.8% of total marketing budgets.
What Google and Tracksuit show is that now is not the time to pull that ad spend, especially from over-the-air radio.
In 2024, Radio Ink reported on a Peter Field study finding that radio lifts mental availability, the same top-of-mind quality Binet’s work treats as the driver of share of search, by 13%, alongside a 28% larger market share and a 17% improvement in pricing power for brands using the medium. A March 2025 follow-up added that radio advertisers see a 42% average profit increase and a 23% higher return on marketing investment.
Separately, a MARU/Matchbox and Claritas study from January 2025 found a two-month AM/FM campaign lifted brand awareness by roughly 10%, and Westwood One’s own review of 18 AM/FM campaigns found unaided brand recall running five times higher among radio advertisers than non-advertisers.
