Brand tracking – Explained!

What do we mean by brand tracking?

Brand tracking is how you continuously track the development and progress of a brand – it could be your brand, or a competitor’s.

That’s right – there’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye on your competitors’ performance!

You do this by regularly monitoring a number of key metrics that will reveal your organisation’s reputation, fame and positioning.  

What metrics should you use to track your brand?

Deciding which metrics to use for your brand tracking depends on what aspect of your brand you want to learn about. Let’s talk about a few key ones.

Perhaps you want more people to know about your brand. This is when you’ll track brand awareness.

There are two key types: prompted and unprompted awareness. As you might expect, prompted awareness is when people see your brand name and recognise it. Unprompted awareness is when people recall your brand name in relation to your category even when they haven’t been reminded of it. 

Simply put, the higher both of those are, the more recognised you are as a brand, and the better chance you have of growing your market share.  

From here, you may want to track how many people actively choose your brand. 

Purchase intent is another crucial metric to track if you want to know how many people are willing to buy your product or service. Your awareness might be high, but you need that awareness to translate into purchase intent to ensure revenue and growth. 

You may also want to know if customers will stick with your brand. 

This is when you’ll track brand loyalty. When you combine purchase history with purchase intent, you’ll get a good idea about how likely your customers are to stay with you or go to a competitor. 

Beyond just loyalty, you may want to know if your customers would promote your brand. This is the ultimate test of how positive your customers feel about what you offer.

Say hello to your Net Promoter Score, often called NPS. For this you’ll ask your customers a single question – how likely are they to recommend your brand to someone else? 

Good NPS scores vary from industry to industry, so make sure you know what’s good for yours so you can truly understand how your brand is doing. 

Some additional context to how your brand is perceived might also be useful. 

Brand perception questions will provide the answer. You can ask your customers to describe your brand, testing how well your messaging resonates. Or you could get ratings against certain features or personality traits to track how well you perform against your most valuable attributes. 

And finally, you may also want to know how your brand stacks up against your competitors.

Most of the metrics we’ve covered here will work for this. All you need to do is conduct research into what consumers think about your competitors’ brands as well, and compare that to your own brand’s results.

And what do you do once you’ve tracked your brand?

You keep doing it! 

To make sure you’re aware of, and react to trends in your market, your industry and among competitors, you need to make sure you keep updating your metrics. 

And you can use that insight to plan your marketing activities and campaigns, resulting in a boosted share of market and sales.