How to Measure Brand Awareness? 10 Metrics & KPIs

9 min readMar 8, 2023

Brand awareness is probably the most widely known marketing term of all time, don’t you agree? After all, it’s the first step to great marketing.

Adidas, McDonald’s, and Mastercard are some fine examples that rule the game of brand awareness. Everybody knows their logos, their products, and what they represent.

These brands have taken brand awareness and brand recognition to the next level. Their brand colors and logo shape are so recognizable that they don’t even need to add their brand name to their billboard ads. How cool is that, huh?

Source: Dan Freebairn

Although brand awareness is the holy grail of marketing, we shall admit that the real challenge starts when you have to search for the right brand awareness metrics to measure the impact of your campaigns.

But you can quit your investigation, Sherlock! Here you’ll find how to measure brand awareness, with all the key — and not vanity — metrics and reliable methods.

Let’s go!

Why do We Measure Brand Awareness?

Brand awareness is essential for people to get to know your brand, be familiar with it, and ultimately purchase YOUR products or services when they have to choose between you and your competitors.

The main reason why measuring brand awareness is so important for your marketing is that it can show you if and how it increases over time and whether your awareness campaigns and even sponsorships are paying off.

Furthermore, awareness is at the top of every marketing funnel. That means if you know the brand awareness rate of your company, product, or service in the market, you can accurately calculate your conversion rates during the buyer’s journey down the funnel. Thus, you can identify the weaknesses in your marketing plan.

For example, if you score great at the metrics for brand awareness but your sales remain low, maybe the problem isn’t that many people don’t know your brand. But it means that they don’t trust it, so you and your team have to work on the middle stages of the funnel.

To measure brand awareness correctly and have valid results, you should pick highly relevant and trustworthy KPIs. Let’s explain the 10 most critical ones.

10 Metrics to Measure Brand Awareness Effectively

Here’s the juicy part, a.k.a. how to measure brand awareness with reliable methods, to avoid chasing vanity metrics and false KPIs.

Remember though, every business is different, so keep in mind that perhaps you don’t need all the metrics below. You can choose wisely based on your company’s size and your industry.

Shall we dive in?

1- Social Listening

Social listening is an excellent method for brand awareness tracking and brand monitoring in general. Simply put, it’s the process of monitoring social media and the web for gathering information, especially mentions, on a specific topic or brand.

By conducting social listening you can keep track of the volume of your Total Online Brand Mentions.

This KPI indicates how many people, accounts, and media outlets are talking about you in the digital world.

The more your mentions are, the higher your brand awareness is.

Also, you can keep track of your Unique Social Reach. This metric shows roughly how many users have seen the social media mentions of your brand.

Social listening tools can automate this process and provide you with valid data you can rely upon when planning actions for increasing brand awareness on social media.

For example, Mentionlytics monitors the entire web and social media for your brand mentions, reviews, and your branded hashtags and analyzes them in a handy platform that generates actionable data.

2- Website Traffic

Website traffic is the answer to how to measure a brand awareness campaign effectively.

For instance, if you’re running an awareness campaign for your E-commerce website online, one of the success indicators is an increase in the number of visitors checking out your website. That means your campaign is literally paying off.

High traffic is a solid indication that more people are discovering you through your digital marketing campaigns.

On the other hand, direct traffic is a clear metric that shows people are already familiar with your brand. So, this one is perfect to measure your current brand awareness status.

Google Analytics is one of the essential brand awareness measurement tools that you have to leverage whenever you run campaigns. It offers a variety of trusted metrics for them and provides actionable data for retargeting ads.

3- Customer Surveys

Also, you can carry out customer surveys to help you with brand awareness measurement.

An online brand awareness survey is easy to conduct. It can be carried out via various social media platforms and can also be sent via email. Alternatively, you can run it as a targeted ad to users that fit your ideal buyer persona.

Usually, such surveys are a questionnaire that is targeted randomly. That way you can get an insight into how many people are aware of your brand.

4- Search Volume Data

Another key metric of brand awareness is branded search volume. If your brand is getting a lot of searches it means that more and more people are becoming interested in it. Checking out the search volume data over a long period gives better indicators. To find these metrics you can use Google Trends and Google Ads.

Of course, various tools such as Adobe Analytics and Mixpanel can show you the number of times your brand is searched online. Nevertheless, Google tools are free to use and highly reliable.

Also, note that there is a challenge in using branded search volume data in case your brand has a generic term such as Shell, Virgin, Total, and others. So, you might need to be more specific, to get results only regarding your brand.

5- Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement metrics can help you define your brand awareness rate. If your posts, or posts that mention you, get many likes, shares, and comments chances are that your brand is doing fine work in increasing awareness.

Social media tracking tools are truly valuable when it comes to reporting social engagement.

With such tools, you can get reports of your performance on social platforms and gather all engagement and visibility metrics in one place automatically. Plus, tools like Mentionlytics offer sentiment analysis of your social mentions, which means that you get to know your audience’s emotions toward your brand.

Pro Tip: Always keep an eye on your new followers on social. This KPI is undeniable evidence that more people are becoming familiar with your brand name.

6- Share of Voice

Share of Voice is a critical KPI for your brand awareness, as it shows you how many people are talking about you compared to your competitors.

It helps you identify the potential you have for increasing your brand awareness to people that know your competitors — so they’re interested in what you offer — but they don’t know you yet.

7- Leads and Sales

New marketing leads and increased sales are reliable KPIs that your awareness campaigns are driving results. After all, it’s more likely to purchase a brand you’re already familiar with than a completely unfamiliar one.

8- Blog Traffic and Shares

If you leverage content marketing, then your blog traffic is an invaluable metric of your brand awareness. If your blog traffic is increasing, that means more people are getting to know and engage with your brand. It also means that the channels you share your content work great.

Our advice: Except for traffic, always check out your blog shares. It indicates brand awareness, but most importantly that readers like the quality of your blog posts.

9- Backlinks

Backlinks are also a great KPI. You can track your backlinks by checking out the referral traffic in your website’s Google Analytics, or other tools such as Ahrefs. That way you can see which websites are referencing your brand, product, or services.

The more backlinks your website and content get, the better you perform in search engines. Also, that way your website’s organic and referral traffic increases as well.

10- Online Media Coverage

Last, you should include in your brand awareness campaign metrics the online media coverage your brand gets from news outlets and other websites, apart from social channels.

Media monitoring will help you have a complete overview of your awareness campaign results. That’s because you include the earned media, namely the publicity your brand gets without ads and content marketing efforts.

Real-time vs Point-in-time: Which Method to Measure Brand Awareness?

Now, it’s only reasonable to think about how to measure brand awareness metrics in terms of frequency. We briefly analyze below the 2 most common ways.

Real-time Brand Awareness Measurement

Real-time brand awareness measurement is basically the method of keeping an eye on your KPIs at all times, to continuously monitor the results of your campaigns and marketing efforts.

With this method, you can see the evolution of your KPIs as it happens, catch any mistakes, and pivot your strategy before it’s too late.

Point-in-time Brand Awareness Measurement

On the other hand, point-in-time brand awareness measurement is the method of reviewing your brand awareness KPIs at specific intervals, like quarterly or yearly, or after the end of a certain campaign.

This method is good for reflecting upon past actions, campaigns, and strategies. And, mostly, understanding your brand awareness status.

Pro Tip: Use both methods to keep up-to-date with your brand awareness status changes. Take into account what has already happened to learn from your mistakes and build your brand awareness with a strong, data-driven strategy.

Brand Awareness Vs. Brand Recognition: What’s the Difference?

Brand awareness and brand recognition are two slightly different things. In fact, brand awareness is the foundation needed for brand recognition.

In detail, brand awareness is when customers know that your brand exists, ie. your brand name, logo, and what you do. However, brand recognition is when they can recognize your brand, without being exposed to your brand name. So, they can tell by your brand colors, logo, or even jingle (“ba-da-ba-ba-ba..I’m lovin’ it”).

Source: Simon Sugar on Twitter

Ready to measure your brand awareness?

It’s pretty common that marketers, like you, can get confused as to how to calculate brand awareness. After all, there are so many different brand awareness metrics.

However, each KPI we analyzed above represents a different aspect of it.

So, if you’re wondering: “What is the KPI for brand awareness?”, our answer is that there isn’t only one. Pick from the above-mentioned metrics the ones that best fit your marketing strategy and go!

You got this!

FAQ

What is a Good Brand Awareness Percentage?

A good brand awareness percentage depends on the stage of your business. For example, if you run your business for a couple of years now, but 10% of the market knows you, that is excellent. Nevertheless, if you run it for 10 years that percentage might be low. You should, also, take into consideration your competitors and their share to understand your score better.

How to Measure Brand Awareness Online?

The key metrics to measure brand awareness online are brand online mentions, website traffic, branded search volume data, social media engagement, Share of Voice, blog traffic and shares, backlinks, and online media coverage.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/metrics-to-measure-brand-awareness