How to Measure Brand Awareness - Tactics and KPIs to Track

According to recent studies, more than 90% of companies, regardless of niche, size, and age, invest in the growth of the company's acknowledgment and improvement of its position in the market. In a word, almost everyone collaborates with a creative branding agency and implements some sort of strategy to expand the cognizance of the company's philosophy, qualities, and products. However, how do you measure brand awareness and brand recognition to determine whether you are doing enough to keep them on top?

Tricky question, is not it? However, even though it seems that this kind of concept is impossible to measure because it is elusive, intangible, and ephemeral; nevertheless, even such an abstract term as awareness can be tracked, assessed, and even calculated.

So, how to measure branding? There is no one answer since it involves many factors to assess. For instance, you need to analyze the number of people who know your brand, the number of people who recommend your brand, social media presence, social media influence, website's position, organic traffic, engagement with the company, the loyalty of customers, and overall reputation, etc. It is undoubtedly a hard nut to crack, yet, still, it can be done.

Thanks to so-called measuring brand awareness tools and tactics, you may estimate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, do ROI calculations and most importantly, measure brand awareness KPI to understand your position in the market better, prove to stakeholders that you are on the right path to success and alter your plan of actions to reach your goals faster.

In this guide, we will get to the basics and clear things up to explain what brand awareness tracking is, how to measure brand recognition and what are the famous brand measurement techniques used to determine the effectiveness of brand awareness strategy these days.

Before moving to brand awareness measurement tactics, which, by the way, come in all shapes and sizes so that you can find the best option for your business model, it is essential to understand what brand awareness is.

Brand awareness is a complex marketing term that combines three significant aspects of a company's recognition:

• How popular is a brand name? It describes the extent to which the audience is familiar with the brand's overall image, ideology, and philosophy.
• How prevalent are the company's attributes? It indicates what features and traits leave a positive, long-lasting impression in the user's memory and make the company stand out from the competition.
• How popular are products or services? It describes the extent to which the target audience is familiar with the quality of the product or service and its value.

Similar to popularity, brand awareness describes the state or condition of being liked, admired, and supported by people in a region or worldwide. It encompasses numerous elements: loyalty, trustworthiness, credibility, retention and covers both business and competitor landscapes.

Therefore, it is no surprise why it isn't easy to measure brand equity; however, everything is possible with the right brand awareness tools.

As we have already pointed out, measuring brand awareness is crucial for any business. All companies that track brand awareness enjoy substantial benefits. For instance,

• It helps to reinforce brand equity.
• It helps to improve the current marketing strategy.
• It unlocks hidden potential.
• It opens up new possibilities.
• It shows ways to grow a company.
• It points out weak spots.
• It increases the effectiveness of marketing and social media campaigns.
• It helps to allocate the budget correctly.
• It helps to make suitable investments.
• It maximizes ROI and revenue.
• It helps to prolong the life of the product and company.

According to recent studies, a staggering 90% of customers say that they trust referrals from people they know. That means that the greater brand awareness you have, the more chances you have to generate new leads and turn prospects into loyal clients. Therefore, measuring your brand's recognition is crucial to stay afloat and capitalize on various channels of realization and distribution.

Whether you need to measure brand awareness offline or online, whether you need to track brand awareness channels or calculate the ROI of social media campaigns, there is a set of rules and actions that help analyze these crucial metrics and determine the level of awareness.

Let's consider them a bit closer.

Inspect Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic, and Branded Traffic

Let's get things straight. It only seems that an increase in traffic indicates growth in brand awareness; in fact, it is a misconception. Many reasons may cause a spike in traffic. For instance, it can be an interesting article, video, discount, or just a well-performed online ad. Moreover, no one guarantees that this traffic will stay and convert into warm leads or customers. People have a short attention span: they will forget about your brand when they leave.

Therefore, it is vital to analyze traffic and track users during their website journey to draw an overall picture of your website's awareness and find elements that generate engagement. For this, do these things:

• Analyze direct traffic to define your campaigns and strategy's impact on the audience.
• Analyze referral traffic to understand the website’s reputation and people's engagement with the brand.
• Analyze branded traffic to understand how many people know your brand or product.

Examine Social Media Engagement

Social media rules the roost these days – it is one of the best channels to increase brand recognition. Plus, it can drive up to 30% of your conversions thanks to word-of-mouth. Therefore, it is essential to track brand awareness in that category.

Indicators that help to understand how well your brand resonates with the audience are

• a number of social media followers,
• likes,
• comments,
• shares,
• retweets,
• video views.

Investigate Google Trends Data

Google Trends data is a reliable source of brand awareness measurement since the system surfs through the web and shows mentions of your company. You can examine your company's impact on the web, compare and contrast it against competitors, and even trace its fluctuation.

Track Backlink Success

There are two different types of backlinks: ones that are gained organically and ones that are accrued during SEO, marketing, and PR campaigns. These two provide you with insights into how well you perform.

For instance, organic backlinks indicate that you publish the correct type of content and your website looks like a reliable place. Whereas accrued backlinks mean that your campaigns are successful and SEO strategy works fine.

It is also important to note that you may avoid bad influence by analyzing backlinks since not all of them bring benefits. Some of them tarnish your reputation - it is better to remove them before no harm is done.

Analyze Marketing Funnels

Although conversions are accurate indicators of how well you are performing, still, to stay on your path towards success, it is vital to see beyond events when users respond to lead magnets or turn into clients.

Actually, examining marketing funnels and tracking users throughout their journey on your website brings rich, insightful data, including information on their behavior and preferences as well as factors that engage them. In other words, this data shows what increases brand awareness and hints on how to capitalize on that.

Conduct Surveys

Interviewing people and asking them whether they know your company or not is perhaps, one of the most hackneyed tactics in this category. However, surprisingly it still works and is even considered the central pillar of tracking brand awareness.

There are different ways to implement this approach. Some companies create focus groups from strangers; others interview customers and loyal clients. There are offline and online surveys. You can launch them on your website, social media, or just on the street next to your office.

On top of that, these surveys are designed to get insights into various aspects. You may obtain information on how well your brand resonates with the audience, the flaws of your products, whether your clients support your ideology, or how often they recommend your brand to their colleagues or friends.

To maximize the effect, these researches should be done in regular intervals and with the same target audience so that you can analyze the movement of brand awareness.

Make the Most out of Brand Tracking Software

Last but not least. Automatization is one of the leading trends in the marketing universe this year. Gone are days when you were doing everything manually, losing your precious time and effort. Businesses across the Globe are accelerated; so should the brand awareness analysis.

That is why you need brand tracking software that traces brand awareness, measures brand equity, defines the company's strengths and weaknesses finds new opportunities, and much more. In a word, it does all the heavy lifting and provides information almost without your participation in the shortest period, meeting current requirements and demands.

There are numerous of them in the wild; choose one that fits your budget and business most.

KPI metrics for brand awareness are quantitative assessments that reflect business goals. As a rule, they are used for assessing, comparing, and tracking the performance of the marketing and advertising campaigns.

Whether you have already defined the best strategy to increase brand awareness or you are in search of the best option for your business, whether you prefer traditional tactics in evaluating recognition or want to experiment with new tools, it is essential to know what are the most popular and reliable KPI metrics that professional marketers track and measure in their endeavors to achieve success.

They are:

• Impressions;
• Website traffic;
• Number of backlinks;
• Social media mentions;
• Conversions.

Impressions

Although it is considered the raw metrics, since it shows nothing more than just the number of times your ad or campaign has been shown to the user (important! not viewed, read, or perceived), still, it is a perfect starting point and a solid foundation to move in your brand awareness measurement routine.

Using this data, you may correlate with other metrics such as views, clicks, or website traffic to estimate the users' engagement. Also, the dynamics and fluctuations in this metric may indicate how well the campaign resonates with the audience or whether you go the right path.

Website Traffic

Much like Impressions, website traffic is also the raw metric unless you dig deeper using SEO tools and Google Analytics. In that case, it turns into a source of insightful information that gives hints on such critical quantitative assessments as

• How many users are interested in your brand?
• How much are they engaged?
• What exactly drives this engagement?
• What elements of your campaigns have been processed?
• How to break down the visitor pool by specific demographics, preferences, and behaviors to maximize the effect?

Website traffic also allows estimating the quality of visits. Analyzing such factors as session duration, bounce rate, and revenue generated by the person, you may define how well your brand or product performs among the target audience.

Number of Backlinks

Although we have already said that not every backlink is suitable for your reputation, still if you manage to measure those that bring positive impact on your platform (for example, by using SEO specialists and professional software), you may get some great insights on what is a website's reputation and how users and Google perceive the brand.

Social Media Mentions

Social media metrics provide more specific data about your brand recognition and well-being than traffic and backlinks. For instance, amount of your followers indicates how famous your company is. If this number grows, you do the right job; if it decreases, something is wrong with your social media campaigns or the brand itself.

Using various analytical tools available in social media platforms and other professional instruments, you may get insights on your reputation (whether it is positive or negative), understand better how campaigns perform, what article resonates the best, etc.

Work with such social media indicators of activities as views, likes, shares, and comments.

Conversions

Click-through rate, much like ROI, is a powerful metric that quantifies the campaign's performance; and it is easily translated into brand awareness assessment. For instance, if CTR is high, the audience is engaged with your brand; hence the brand awareness is positive and high. If it is low or goes down, it is a sign to examine your campaign and seek ways to improve it.

The best part is, it is easily calculated - follow the formula: clicks/impressions. Plus, all popular platforms for conducting and analyzing marketing campaigns offer it by default.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. Each metrics has its own merits and comes with its pros and cons. Depending on your objectives, budget, and target audience, you need to decide which ones provide you with the most information on the performance.

Alternatively, you may track all of them using automated platforms to draw an overall picture and analyze your business from various perspectives.

Measuring awareness of the company is crucial. It helps define the best strategy as well as open up new possibilities to grow, increase revenue and prolong its life.

The best thing is, whether you need to measure brand awareness b2b or find out if your startup is known in the particular region or group, there are some time-tested tactics to adopt. You can analyze traffic, examine Google Trend data, investigate social media presence, conduct traditional surveys, or inspect marketing funnels. Along with that, you can trace and gauge critical KPI metrics to measure brand awareness to define weaknesses and strengths of the campaigns to improve your strategy on time.