How to Measure Brand Awareness

Ben Tippet

To measure your marketing you need to know how to measure brand awareness. This post will go through key metrics like search volume, website traffic and social media mentions. Find out the tools and strategies to get clear visibility into how well your brand is recognized.

What is Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is the extent to which the target audience is aware of and can recognize a brand. It’s the foundation of the connection between the brand and the customer so it’s crucial for marketing success. Familiar brands which have high brand awareness generate more sales. Familiarity helps in promoting new products and reviving old brands. Known brands which people buy from earn a positive and trustworthy position in the minds of the target audience.

Brand awareness acts as an economic moat, prevents competitors from stealing market share and builds trust so people buy again. Brand awareness becomes a key metric to measure when people are actively looking for a recognisable brand for a specific product or service. Combining multiple tactics gives a more accurate view of brand awareness and gives a holistic view of consumer familiarity with the brand.

Brand awareness vs brand recognition

Brand awareness includes the ability of consumers to recognize a product by its name and the positive associations with it. Brand recognition measures the ability of customers to recognize a brand when shown its visual or verbal cues.

To show the visual and verbal elements that make a brand identifiable, brand recognition surveys ask about consumer familiarity with the brand which contributes to brand recall.

Brand awareness vs brand perception

On the other hand, brand perception is formed by consumers’ experiences and interactions with the brand, including their opinions and attitudes towards it. Brand image surveys ask what people think of when they hear your brand name, brand identity surveys ask how consumers perceive the brand based on their interactions.

By listening to the audience and getting visibility into how they see the brand, social listening tools help you understand these perceptions.

Why Measure Brand Awareness

Measuring brand awareness is crucial to measure the success of marketing and market positioning. It provides a measurable way to measure the impact of marketing strategies, brand awareness metrics tells you what to do next and what to improve. This process confirms or challenges your brand identity and offerings, gives you an accurate measure of progress and impact of actions. You can measure the success of brand awareness campaigns by looking at website traffic, brand searches and online conversations.

Real time data is key to getting accurate and granular changes in brand awareness campaigns so marketers can adapt fast. And analysing earned media helps you understand the overall impact of marketing and PR efforts.

Benchmarking

To see how a brand’s awareness changes over time, benchmarking is essential. Knowing the current state and tracking progress helps you know where to improve or adjust.

Brand awareness surveys give you a human readout of aided or unaided brand awareness and if you do them regularly you can see how the needle is moving.

Market positioning

For market positioning you need to measure brand awareness vs competitors. Competitive analysis tools give you insights into how competitors fit into the market so you can find opportunities to grow and differentiate.

Brand image awareness analysed with earned media gives you a fuller picture of brand awareness and helps you understand brand awareness campaigns over time.

Brand Awareness Metrics

Brand=awareness Metics

You can measure the quantifiable impact of a marketing strategy with brand awareness KPIs. Here are some:

  • Branded search volume
  • Website traffic
  • Social media mentions
  • Share of voice
  • Content engagement

These give you an idea of how well your brand is performing. Brand mentions and share of voice metrics give you visibility of your brand vs competitors and quality of coverage.

To see how far your content goes Reach measures the total number of people who saw it. Impressions are counted every time an ad or post is displayed on a screen so it’s a measure of total exposure to users. This metric helps you track reach and frequency of content. Reach gives you an idea of how many people saw your posts and how influencer posts can spread brand awareness.

Branded search volume

Branded search volume is a brand awareness metric. It measures the number of people searching for a brand’s name in search engines. Branded keywords are variations of your brand name and tracking them helps you measure brand awareness through search engine visibility.

Tools like Google Adwords and Google Analytics can measure branded search volume, how many people search for your company name and associated keywords.

Website traffic

Website Traffic Tracking Ahrefs

Brand awareness and recognition indicators include website traffic, which is direct and referral traffic. Direct traffic is how many people visit your site by typing in your URL directly, that’s how aware they are of your brand. Referral traffic is from links on other websites and shows which brands are recognising and sharing your name with their followers.

Google Analytics and tools like Ahrefs or Moz can track traffic and keyword rankings to give you brand awareness insights.

Social media mentions

Online visibility and conversations around a brand are reflected in social media mentions. Measuring how many times your brand is mentioned online helps you track brand awareness. Reach of those mentions can be measured by tracking how many people saw the brand name mentioned online, focus on the source of the mention and its following.

Share of voice

The Share of Voice metric measures a brand’s visibility vs competitors. It measures the brand’s presence in the market vs others. It gives you an idea of how much a brand is being talked about vs competitors so you can understand brand performance vs other players in the market.

Tracking share of voice is important for refining market positioning and brand awareness efforts.

Content engagement

The level of audience interaction with a brand’s content is measured by content engagement. Engagement metrics like likes, shares or comments show how aware people are of your brand and how they socialise with it.

Social media and video platforms give you detailed reports on individual post performance so you can see which content resonates with your audience.

How to Measure Brand Awareness

How To Build Brand Awareness Pyramid

Brand awareness can be measured by:

  • Brand awareness surveys: get direct feedback from your target audience with minimal interpretation required.
  • Social listening tools: track brand mentions, see which platform has the most mentions and analyse the sentiment of those mentions.
  • Google Trends and Analytics: use to track branded search terms and website traffic patterns for brand awareness.

Brand awareness surveys

Brand awareness surveys give you direct feedback from the target audience on how familiar they are with the brand. Conducting a brand awareness survey regularly helps you spot changes in brand knowledge and appreciation, so you can catch trends early and fix issues before they get out of hand. Make sure to frame your questions carefully and consistently so you can benchmark and track changes over time.

By asking a random sample of people if they know the brand, surveys can give you insight into the audience’s awareness of the brand.

Social listening tools

Social listening tools track brand mentions and audience sentiment across multiple online platforms. They help you monitor:

  • Total brand mentions
  • Positive brand mentions
  • Negative brand mentions
  • Neutral brand mentions

They give you insight into organic mentions and engagement around the brand on social media.

Sentiment scores from social listening tools give you an idea of overall public sentiment around your brand and products. Brand monitoring tools give you real-time updates on brand mentions, which platforms the audience is using and the context of the mentions.

Google Trends and Analytics

Google Trends and Analytics can be used to track branded search terms and website traffic patterns. Google Trends data gives you an idea if brand mentions are increasing or decreasing over time, context for brand awareness.

Google Analytics is recommended for site traffic, to see how search terms and traffic patterns reflects brand awareness.

Brand Tracking Software

Brand tracking software gives you a complete measurement of brand awareness, performance and growth opportunities.

  • Reinforces the unique selling proposition (USP)
  • Helps marketers understand competitors and identify growth opportunities
  • Consolidates consumer engagement data from multiple touchpoints
  • Quarterly or monthly brand recognition and awareness insights

This continuous collection of qualitative and quantitative data helps you measure brand health and adjust your strategy accordingly. Tracking your brand helps you understand its commercial value and adjust your strategy based on the changes you’ve recorded.

Brand tracking software features

A good brand tracking software should aggregate data from multiple channels and have visualisations of trends. A key feature is the ability to visualise trends with recurring reports for stakeholders.

Being able to change questions and adjust surveys easily is also important for brand tracking.

Brand tracking tools

Brandwatch, Mention, Google Alerts and SEMrush are the popular brand tracking tools. Brandwatch is a powerful tool to track brand mentions and audience sentiment across multiple online platforms. Mention helps brands track online mentions, manage social media and analyse audience sentiment in real-time.

Google Alerts is a free tool to track mentions of your brand online, sends you email notifications whenever your brand is mentioned. SEMrush allows brand tracking by monitoring brand mentions, competitor behaviour and market trends.

Common mistakes

Common mistakes that can trip up marketers when measuring brand awareness are:

  • Using performance marketing metrics like CTR and conversions for brand campaigns which don’t measure brand awareness at all
  • Measuring brand awareness at a level that doesn’t align with the business strategy and getting irrelevant or misleading data

For brand awareness, consistency in visual identity, tone of voice and digital output is key.

Qualitative data

Missing out on valuable feedback and context behind the numbers by not looking at qualitative data. Qualitative data gives depth and context to the numbers, a fuller picture of consumer perception. This data can be gathered through methods like focus groups, in-depth interviews and open-ended survey questions, to understand why consumers feel a certain way about a brand.

Irregular measurement intervals

Accurate tracking and complete understanding of brand performance can be compromised by irregular measurement intervals. Regular and consistent measurement intervals are key to accurate brand awareness tracking. Consistency allows for benchmarking and trend analysis so you can see the impact of your efforts over time.

How to increase brand awareness

Increase Brand=awareness

Several brand awareness strategies including social media presence, content marketing and influencer partnerships are involved in increasing brand awareness. To increase brand awareness, standing for something beyond your products can differentiate your brand and build awareness. Authentic storytelling humanises the brand and gives it depth, appeals to the audience’s desire for authenticity.

Creative campaign ideas like the ‘Fall in Love’ campaign by H&M can capture attention and build brand awareness without promoting the product. Earned media coverage which includes organic brand mentions or references is often more trusted than sponsored reviews and can drive big brand awareness.

Social media presence

By engaging with the audience and sharing relevant content a strong social media presence can increase brand awareness. Socialising on social media helps build trust and familiarity, word of mouth marketing is especially powerful. A clear social media marketing strategy with a consistent publishing schedule across all platforms is key to brand awareness efforts.

Exploring underutilised platforms like TikTok, Reddit and Quora can also extend your brand’s reach. Social listening tools can help you find opportunities to respond and surprise your audience and build brand awareness.

Content marketing

Brand awareness and trust can be built through content marketing strategies like storytelling and thought leadership. Treat your brand as a person and define its narrative and you’ll create a personality for the brand and infuse it into your marketing and make it more relatable to the audience.

Creating content that resonates with your target audience increases brand awareness and trust. Consistency in brand identity, messaging and customer experience is key to not confusing and disappointing the audience.

Influencer partnerships

To extend your brand reach partnering with influencers is a good strategy. Partner with influencers who share your brand’s values and audience and you can build brand awareness. Influencers can introduce your brand to new audiences and give you authentic endorsements and increase your brand’s credibility and visibility.

Conclusion

Measuring brand awareness is key to understanding your brand’s position in the market and guiding your marketing. Key metrics like branded search volume, website traffic, social media mentions, share of voice and content engagement give you valuable insights into brand performance. Using methods like surveys, social listening tools and Google Trends and Analytics will give you a full understanding of brand awareness. Avoid the mistakes and leverage strategies like social media presence, content marketing and influencer partnerships and you can increase brand awareness big time. By measuring and improving brand awareness consistently brands can build a strong relationship with their audience and achieve long term success.

FAQs

Why measure brand awareness?

You should measure brand awareness because it measures the success of your marketing, guides your next steps and makes sure your brand stands out in the market. It’s a key tool to understand your brand’s position in the market.

What are the key metrics to measure brand awareness?

Branded search volume, website traffic, social media mentions, share of voice and content engagement are the key metrics to measure brand awareness.

How do social listening tools help with brand awareness?

Social listening tools can help measure brand awareness by tracking brand mentions and audience sentiment across online platforms and give you insights into customer opinions. This can help you understand your brand reputation and where to improve.

What to avoid when measuring brand awareness?

When measuring brand awareness don’t forget to overlook qualitative data and use inconsistent measurement intervals. These will skew your results.

How do influencer partnerships increase brand awareness?

Influencer partnerships can increase brand awareness by extending your brand reach and give you authentic endorsements and increase your credibility and visibility.

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