How to Measure Brand Awareness in 2023? 10 Metrics & KPIs [+Tools]

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 and learn how to measure them for your marketing campaigns.

Knowing how to measure brand awareness is a crucial step in understanding and improving your marketing efforts. You need metrics that provide a clear picture of where your audience stands in terms of recognizing and engaging with your product or service – but which ones should you be tracking?

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.

How to Measure Brand Awareness Easily?

Well, it depends on which metrics you wish to measure. 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, it gets easy when you know what metric you need to track. To keep things simple, we will analyze different brand awareness KPIs in the following. Each metric represents a different aspect of it and we’ll suggest you the best tools for measuring each KPI as well. Note that you can cover most of these metrics using only one or two of these tools.

Generally, though, you need at least two sets of tools to measure your brand awareness properly.

• Tools to measure metrics related to social media like Mentionlytics, Determ,…
• Tools to measure website-related metrics: On top are Google Analytics and advanced SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush,…

Also, 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 Metrics

Social listening is an excellent method to measure your brand awareness throughout social media. Simply put, it’s the process of monitoring social media and the web for gathering information, especially mentions of the brand.

When performing social listening, here are the top metrics you need to track:

• Total volume of your brand mentions: How much buzz your brand name creates? On which channels?
• Total volume of your product/service names: Do people know your product and talk about it?
• Unique social reach by each channel: How many users have seen the social media mentions of your brand?
• Follower growth percentage by each channel: How many people joined your brand community recently?
• Influencer reach: Are your influencer marketing campaigns working?
• Hashtag performance: How successful are your branded hashtags on each social media?

These KPIs indicate how many people, accounts, and media outlets are talking about you in the digital world.

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

How to measure social listening KPIs?

You can measure all these metrics using a good social listening tool. These tools 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.

Bonus: Mentionlytics also measures social media engagement and share of voice, other important brand awareness KPIs that we’ll cover separately since they are crucial when it comes to measuring brand awareness.

2- Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement metrics can help you define your brand awareness rate. It’s important to keep track of the performance of your own social media activity and the content that you’re sharing.

Generally, the most important metrics to measure social media engagement are the number of

• Likes,
• Comments (+ their sentiments),
• Shares,
• Visibility,
• Saves (on platforms like Instagram and TikTok)

If your social content creates many likes, shares, and comments chances are that your brand is doing fine in increasing awareness.

Additionally, the number of saves shows you how much your users loved your content. It might not be an ideal KPI for measuring the magnitude of your brand awareness, but it surely shows its quality. Consider saves as super likes for your content.

Likewise, the sentiment of comments is another brand awareness KPI that measures the quality of your efforts. Not only do you need to know how many people left comments about your brand, but you should also know how they feel about it.

How to measure these KPIs?

Most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have basic analytics that allows you to see social media engagement KPIs. However, to check the more advanced brand awareness KPIs like sentiment analysis of your social mentions, you need a social media tracking tool. These tools are truly valuable when it comes to measuring 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.

 

3- 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.

How to measure this KPI?

Share of voice is a complicated metric to measure if you don’t use a good tool. You can use Mentionlytics to create automatic SoV reports and immediately see your share of the pie compared to your rival competitors.

Read our comprehensive guide on measuring share of voice to get more information on this metric.

4- 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.

How to measure website traffic?

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.

5- 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.

What questions should you ask?

Normally, brands use these questions in surveys to measure the level of awareness of their brand:

• How familiar are you with our brand?
• Have you heard of our brand before today?
• If you have heard of our brand, where did you first come across it?
• What comes to mind when you think of our brand?
• Which of the following products or services do you associate with our brand?
• How likely are you to recommend our brand to others?
• Have you ever purchased or used our products/services?
• If yes, what was your experience like?

How to conduct online surveys and measure results?

You can use a simple Google Form to gather this information or use tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform. These tools will show you the analytics of the answers, along with demographic information about the respondents.

After designing your questions and creating the survey, distribute them on your social channels, email newsletter, or customer Feedback Platforms if you have one.

6- 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.

How to measure this KPI?

To find and measure 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.

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.

How to measure this?

Your CRM can tell all about it!

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.

How to measure blog traffic & shares?

Use Google Analytics to go through your blog traffic, and also check the social traffic you get from the links you share on social media. Also, you can check how many times your blog post got shared by checking the social media sharing buttons (if you already implemented it on your website).

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.

How to measure backlinks?

Use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to measure your brand awareness through backlinks.

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.

How to measure this brand awareness KPI?

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”).

 

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.