Brand tracking metrics are essential tools that help us understand how a brand is perceived in the market. These metrics are critical to building brand equity and staying competitive as a company in constantly evolving industries.
At Drive Research, we believe quantifying your brand’s performance can cause some of the most important data to use for meeting your business goals.
Brands that track their equity and other performance metrics often outperform those that don't, by helping maintain dominance and competitiveness in markets.
With that in mind, keep reading to learn the most important brand metrics you should track and why!
What Are Brand Metrics?
Brand metrics are quantifiable or measurable variables of brand performance. Without them, it’s challenging to measure performance for marketing or business goals.
It’s also important to note that brand tracking is one of the few projects where continued performance tracking is needed to understand a baseline and determine a current status based on baseline data.
Most importantly, you want to choose metrics that you can utilize or learn from.
Some common brand metrics include:
Let’s discuss.
Brand Awareness: aims to measure the percentage of people that know about a brand. It answers questions like, "Have people heard of us?" or “How much of the market knows we exist?”
Brand perception: another critical metric that asks what people associate with a brand. It tells us what people think of when they hear a brand's name. Positive perceptions, or ones that lead to a higher value of perception, often lead to higher sales for brands.
Brand loyalty: this is critical for measuring against competition. Having loyal customers stick around and spend more with your brand is one of the biggest edge over competitors, as it keeps customers coming back. Brand lovers also spread the word, acting like ambassadors and attracting even more potential loyal customers.
Brand equity: this is the culmination of all these metrics and is aimed at measuring a brand's overall value in the market. It's influenced by awareness, perception, loyalty, and occasionally more metrics than that. Brand equity helps us measure how much a brand is worth in its respective market.
Why You Should Track Brand Metrics
Brand tracking is also critical to hitting your goals regularly.
Whether it’s business, marketing, or other goals, brand tracking can help show (based on a baseline performance) where the brand is currently.
From the start of tracking, you can establish a baseline performance that you can then measure against in the future to see if your brand is on track, ahead, or behind on hitting goals.
Furthermore, you’ll also be able to find any slip-ups or mistakes in the process based on the metrics to take immediate action when needed.
Brand tracking also provides quantifiable data points that can be measured. Typically, these are used for strategy but can also be needed when measuring performance to see if certain strategies worked or didn’t.
You’ll be able to double down on any strategies that are working while eliminating strategies that hurt or didn’t work to increase marketing and business efficiency.
Brand Metrics to Track
Now, we’ll walk you through our personal favorite brand metrics to track. Each metric has its own set of benefits that provide deeper insights into how your brand can improve.
Awareness
Awareness is like your brand's footprint in the market. Adding onto this, brands with high awareness are more likely to be considered by consumers when they make purchasing decisions.
Generally, the most common way to track brand awareness is through surveys. Surveys simplify the tracking process and make tracking competitors a breeze. And take it from us: include varied questions to gather better feedback.
The top reason surveys are common is because of their ease of use and quickness to collect large amounts of quality data.
Social media platforms are also a treasure trove for gauging mentions and engagements. Using web analytics, it’s possible to quantify how many people are talking about a brand.
It’s important to increase positive mentions and shares on social platforms to enhance this metric. To boost awareness, companies often invest in advertising and strategic partnerships to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Perception
How do your favorite brands make you feel? This is brand perception!
By definition, brand perception is generally what consumers think and feel about a brand. The variables to measure perception can depend on the brand and its products’ features. Usually, we work with brands to best find out how to quantify the data to measure it.
Gathering this type of data can be done by using the following:
It’s possible to do competitor perception research alongside your brand's measurements for brand perception as well.
This is yet another reason why perception is such a key metric - using more in-depth methods or getting in-depth survey feedback, you can find where your brand might fall short and why.
Loyalty
Providing the biggest edge for brands over competitors is brand loyalty.
Loyalty measures and reflects how likely customers are to return for repeat purchases. High loyalty means customers are satisfied and prefer your brand over others (by default).
It’s common to measure loyalty through customer retention rates and survey feedback.
Factors that brands can track that watch for loyalty fluctuation (whether positive or negative) are things like:
- Customer service satisfaction
- Product reviews & satisfaction
- Brand values & personal values comparison
- Brand perception and value
Other measurements like net promoter score (NPS) can be used to measure loyalty where customers are asked questions to answer on a scale from 0 to 010 like “How likely are you to recommend this brand to a stranger?”
While there are many ways to measure brand loyalty, the most common is with surveys to track changes over time.
Things like loyalty programs and rewards can help boost brand loyalty as well. Brands like Apple and Starbucks exemplify strong customer loyalty by offering unique experiences and quality to customers consistently.
Recommended Reading: 10 Famous Brands That Depend on Market Research
Marketing Metrics
Marketing metrics like web analytics, social media analytics, and more help gauge the effectiveness of campaigns.
They can include data points like click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on investment (ROI). These metrics indicate whether marketing efforts are paying off or falling short.
In our experience, tracking these marketing metrics is easy and a great way to keep a pulse on the overall brand performance. While we would not recommend using this instead of other metrics, it’s a great one to add and use alongside others.
Since brand tracking data can be used (and should be used) to feed marketing efforts and campaigns, it’s an important metric to keep an eye on.
By analyzing marketing metrics, brands can optimize their campaigns for better results, double down on performing campaigns, and learn from ones that don’t perform.
Using Brand Tracking Data
Now that you’ve got the data, you need to know how to use it effectively! Keep reading to see what we suggest.
Plan Changes
When planning changes, it’s best not to guess and instead, use data! That’s why so many clients work with us to get quality primary data for their brands.
You’ll also want to make sure you know what determines success in your campaigns or brand metrics before starting any new changes. That way, you’ll be able to track progress towards brand goals.
Selecting the right metrics, paying attention to the data, and making changes accordingly are the best ways to go about making planned changes for your brand. It’s why our team preaches making data-driven decisions instead of blind assumptions.
Track Performance Over Time
Tracking metrics over time gives a clear picture of brand health.
By watching indicators like loyalty, perception, and awareness, it’s possible to maintain high numbers and act if things dip in performance. For instance, if brand awareness increases after a change, it’s possible to assume strategies and campaigns are performing as planned (based on the data).
Long-term data comparison also shows trends and cycles that brands might miss otherwise. Since you can track both your brand and competitors over time, you’ll be able to get market data alongside your brand data.
These data points can act as industry averages, but also show where your brand might be ahead or behind.
Lastly, aligning historical data with current performance is necessary to understand current performance. That’s why doing any kind of brand tracking at all continually will help your brand in the long term.
Improve Business and Marketing Strategy
Brand tracking data can and should be used to drive business and marketing strategy.
All clients who come to us for brand tracking projects do so to give their brand an edge in the market.
Using the data points is better than guessing when it comes to strategy, as it gives companies a way to track the performance of business and marketing strategies.
For example, if brand loyalty dips in performance, certain strategies can be deployed to get the metric back to baseline performance.
Implementing a new loyalty program, loyalty discounts, or other ways of catering to past customers can increase the number of loyal customers (and the brand tracking data will show).
Need more convincing? Research shows that 90% of loyalty program owners report a positive ROI, with the average being 4.8x.
Why You Should Use Drive Research for Your Brand Tracking Projects
As a third-party brand tracking company, we’re dedicated to providing clients with the highest quality brand data possible.
Continuous brand tracking can be difficult, especially when you try to do everything yourself.
Brands that trust us to do their tracking simply consult with us on what metrics they want to track and we provide them with continual brand data they can use to keep their brand ahead.
There’s a reason hundreds of brands trust us to do their brand tracking. Along with expert data analytics and collection, we also put our clients first. We help them every step of the way and provide expert market research analysis and insights for their data to help them understand it better.
Contact Our Brand Tracking Market Research Firm
Wondering if we can help your brand stay ahead of the competition? Reach out to use to get a custom brand tracking quote today.
Drive Research is a market research company that specializes in brand research. Our team is well-versed in working with a variety of brands, and will ensure you get the highest quality, relevant data.
To learn more about our market research services, get in touch with us today.
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Austin Parker
Austin has an extensive background in SEO as he's been blogging since 16 years old back when the internet was in its infancy. As fitting, he holds a Bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing.
Learn more about Austin, here.
