How to measure brand awareness: KPIs, metrics and strategies to grow your business

“Me, measuring brand awareness?”, you might be thinking, “don’t I need a big research agency to do that?”

Good news: you really don’t. The truth is, doing brand awareness tracking in-house has never been easier, and you too can learn how to measure brand awareness.

Here we’ll turn you into a champion of brand awareness analysis, with ten tactics to use and eleven metrics to focus on. It doesn’t get more practical than this.

Read on to learn how to measure and build brand awareness effectively.

First of all, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page: what do we mean by ‘brand awareness’?

Brand awareness is a measure of how familiar people are with your brand – whether they recognize your name, recall your products, or understand what sets you apart. It’s the foundation of brand growth, helping you stay top-of-mind with potential customers and stand out in a crowded market.”

Why tracking your brand awareness KPIs is important

Whether you’re launching a new business or trying to revive an old one, brand awareness metrics are vital in measuring the success of your marketing efforts. 

These metrics track the performance of your brand across various platforms, from social media to search engines.

When measured and tracked over a period of time, businesses can directly attribute the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, sales or sign-ups. Perhaps you’re looking for Qualtrics competitors or Latana alternatives— we’ve created rundowns of the best tools to look into.

If you haven’t started measuring brand awareness yet, take this as a sign!

Why measuring brand awareness matters

Understanding and tracking brand awareness isn’t just about reporting vanity metrics to your execs – it’s about making smarter marketing decisions.

Here’s why it matters:

1. Prove the impact of your marketing

See which campaigns are driving real brand recognition and optimize your efforts for maximum impact.

2. Understand how consumers perceive your brand

Find out if your brand is associated with the right qualities and make adjustments to strengthen your positioning.

3. Benchmark against competitors

Compare your brand awareness levels to industry rivals and uncover opportunities to stand out.

4. Spot growth opportunities

Identify untapped markets, new customer segments, or areas where brand recognition needs a boost.

5. Build stronger customer relationships

Increased awareness leads to stronger trust, loyalty, and long-term brand advocacy.

How to measure brand awareness: 10 strategies and metrics to grow your brand

The tactics we’re about to show you range from simply keeping tabs on certain types of website traffic, all the way through to conducting regular brand tracking studies across the year.

Ideally, you should combine these tactics to get an accurate view of your brand awareness. Ultimately, all the data you need is already in your organization, you just need to know where to look.

Here are ten tried and tested ways that help you measure brand awareness based on the most important brand awareness metrics. Just remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to brand awareness analysis, and you’ll have to combine them to give more context to the data:

1. Run regular brand awareness surveys
2. Check your social media followers
3. Use Google Trends data
4. Let brand tracking software do the heavy lifting
5. Look into your brand name mentions
6. Look for branded search volume in your Google Analytics
7. Check your share of voice and share of impressions
8. Analyze your performance with earned media
9. Dive into your referral traffic stats
10. Keep an eye on how your content is performing

One last thing before we start: it’s important to note that brand ‘awareness’ and brand ‘recognition’ are slightly different things. To learn more, check out our guides on how to measure brand recognition and brand perception or chat directly with our consumer research experts with a demo.

1. Run regular brand awareness surveys

Surveys are one of the best ways to measure your brand awareness. Simply select your target group—aka the people who you most want to be aware of your brand—and ask away.

For measuring brand awareness specifically, online surveys to consumers (rather than just your existing customers) are your best bet. 

Running brand tracking and brand perception surveys over time will reveal those crucial fluctuations in knowledge and appreciation of your brand, allowing you to spot trends and act before they become issues.

It’s important to have a clear strategy in mind when creating a brand awareness survey—are you assessing unprompted brand recognition or brand recall?

Are you trying to see if your target audience knows exactly what your brand does, and what their sentiment is towards you? Are you planning to use multiple-choice options, or are you opting for free text?

Attest’s data shows clear changes across consumer perception and awareness. We get rich, insightful data on a regular basis, which means we can get on with building the strategies and campaigns we know will work.

CMO, Rover

How to measure your brand awareness

Conduct unprompted brand recall surveys to determine the percentage of consumers who mention your brand when asked about your product category.

With a handful of the right questions, asked to the right target audience, you can measure important brand awareness metrics that include:

• Unprompted brand awareness—this is when your target audience will name your brand when prompted to think about a product or service you offer.
• Prompted brand awareness—this is when the person being surveyed says they are aware of your brand when presented with a list of brands.
• Level of brand awareness—this is the number of people who can correctly identify your product or services and the correct brand attributes associated with that product or service.

And running a brand awareness survey gives you direct feedback from your target customers. When carried out at regular intervals, brand tracking allows you to monitor brand awareness growth over time and tie that growth to specific marketing activities.

Self-service brand tracking software complete with brand awareness survey templates makes brand tracking more accessible for brands, meaning they don’t have to pay a research agency.

2. Check your social media followers

Some might consider this a vanity metric, but at a surface level, your social media following gives you a sense of how broad your reach is and how many people are familiar with your brand. 

Assuming most people will follow you because they’re interested in you and like you, it gives you a pretty good picture of your brand awareness.

It also means these people are more likely to see your content more frequently—meaning they’re less likely to forget who you are and what you’re up to. Staying front-of-mind in a market full of established and emerging brands is key to maintaining familiarity.

Keep an eye on the reach of your posts—aka the number of eyeballs your content gets in front of—and use this metric to plan your posts for optimum brand awareness. If posting at a certain time of day results in better reach, factor that in for future posting. Get granular with it! 

Luckily, there are some brand monitoring tools out there that automatically give you a heads-up when someone mentions you anywhere. You get real-time updates on new mentions, not only allowing you to always have up-to-date data, but also to reply to these mentions right away.

3. Use Google Trends data to measure brand awareness KPIs

The Google Trends competitive analysis tool is a valuable asset for brand awareness measurement. It roams the internet looking for mentions of your brand, so you can examine whether those mentions are increasing or decreasing over time. You can also benchmark this data against your competitors.

Again, context is important here; it’s crucial to take all of your brand and marketing activities into account when drawing insight from Google Trends data.

It’s also important to note that using Google Trends data is harder for those with more generic brand names or names that are already associated with something else. 

4. Let brand tracking software do the heavy lifting

From the brand tracker we can understand the emotional drivers from users, to make both product and business decisions.

We can see how our competitors are doing, we can see where the opportunities are for us to grow and disrupt the space even more.

CMO, WorldRemit

Once upon a time, brands had to rely on big research agencies to do their brand tracking. They were expensive, took months to complete, and even then you wouldn’t have full access to the data collected—only the stuff the agency wanted to show you. 

Brand awareness is just one brand health tracking metric that you should be tracking—but you can easily do it yourself and get the full picture.  

With Attest’s brand tracking software, you can run quarterly or monthly brand tracking surveys with full visibility of the data—data which comes back in days, not months. 

Brand tracking software is the best and most reliable way for marketers and brand managers to measure brand recognition and awareness, as well as a whole host of other things, like brand sentiment and NPS. No more basing your next marketing campaign on guesswork, you’ll know exactly where to strike.

Ready to give it a try? Check out the Attest brand tracking software, or grab a copy of our free guide to get started with bringing brand tracking in-house.

5. Look into your brand name mentions

Another way to know if people are aware of your brand, is to know if they’re talking about you. Or rather tweeting, blogging or commenting. Sounds like an impossible task?

Not with brand management tools like Brand24. They allow you to keep tabs on all social media platforms, blogs, websites, and publishers to see who’s talking about you. And not just that: you’ll also be able to engage with those mentions to give an extra positive spin to them. 

6. Track your branded search volume

Search data is an important one when it comes to brand awareness analysis and even market share. The trick is not only to look at the amount of traffic driving into your website, but also what keywords people are searching. 

The more people directly type in your brand’s name, the better. It means that they remember you and see you as an interesting option for whatever they’re looking for. They’re not just looking for ”the best vegan cupcakes”, they’re specifically looking for your vegan cupcakes.

You don’t need any difficult tools to look into this, just head over to good old Google Adwords, Analytics and Search Console and you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for. 

7. Check your share of voice and share of impressions

Your brand awareness should be measured alongside that of your competitors. A boost of 25% in brand awareness for your brand is great, but if your competitors are growing it at double the rate, you need to step things up a notch.

A great tactic to measure this is to look at your share of voice and share of impressions over time. Whereas brand mentions focus on how many people are talking about you (and what they’re saying), this way of measuring also takes into account that those people are talking about your competitors. 

Share of impressions is related to this in that it shows you how well you are performing in generating organic traffic and paid search traffic. If you combine these two metrics, you’ll get valuable insights on how well you’re covering your market and where to tweak your marketing strategy.

You can also run some competitive market analysis using the top competitive analysis tools to gather insights about where your competitors fit into the market and how you can win over customers.

8. Analyze your brand image awareness with earned media

Look beyond your own website stats if you want to get the full picture on your brand awareness- it’s simple enough when you ask the right brand image survey questions.

Alternately, if you’re being mentioned with backlings on third-party websites, you’ll be generating extra publicity and awareness (and some good AI and organic search visibility).

While it does not directly measure brand awareness, combining this tactic with one of the ones mentioned above will show you how third-party publicity contributes to your brand awareness over time. This will help you make sense of the effectiveness of your brand awareness campaigns. 

If you’re not sure how to start tracking your brand awareness, you may want to work alongside a brand tracking company who can give you a head start with the more complicated side of brand analytics. They can also help you understand how target customers view your brand—get a head start with these brand identity examples.

9. Dive into your referral traffic stats

Not only branded searches, but also referral links are important to keep tabs on when you’re analyzing your brand awareness efforts. Other brands knowing about you and them being willing to share your name with their followers and visitors plays a key role in growing your brand awareness.

You can find these stats in Google Analytics, but do be wary of high bounce rates to filter out referral links that do more harm than good.

Keep tabs on the referral links that generate real traffic and combine this strategy with one of the ones that focuses more on brand awareness in numbers to give context to the data. 

10. Keep an eye on how your brand’s content performs

Shares and likes are not a thing of the past or vanity metrics. If you look at them the right way, you’ll be able to spot trends that give you important insights in your brand awareness strategies. 

Analyzing your brand awareness campaign is not just counting the people that know your brand, it’s also about knowing what blog posts, videos, and social media content have been working and in what way it contributed to the rise in brand awareness. And that is as simple as looking at how people react to it. 

Simply dive into the analytics tools that your favorite social media or video platforms are already offering. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn all give you very detailed reports on how each of your individual posts are performing when it comes to views and more importantly: engagement.

Turn brand mentions into valuable consumer insights

All the brand awareness metrics discussed above have value if used right and can help you build brand awareness while measuring brand recognition.

The metrics you choose to measure will depend on your objectives—are you looking for deep insight into the connection your target demographic has with your brand or just a general understanding of trends?

With this in mind, you can start creating brand awareness campaigns that align with your marketing strategies and render real results, not just a vague concept and more web traffic: but getting in front of new audiences to raise brand awareness.

If you’re looking for more direct feedback, a brand awareness survey is a great tool to implement in your research. If you’re looking to track the overall impact of your marketing, using website traffic metrics or social listening tools can give you a good idea. Get in touch to send your brand tracking survey.

Looking for more on brand tracking? Head over to our Consumer Research Academy—it’s full of tips and guides from the experts in our Customer Research Team.

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