If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably already decided that it’s time to start measuring your brand awareness or you may be looking for ways to improve on what you’re already measuring.
We won’t, therefore, waste your time explaining why you should measure brand awareness. Instead, we’d like to offer our thoughts on the best way to measure brand awareness. Because not everyone agrees and many would go as far as to say that it’s not worth measuring at all (spoiler alert, we disagree).
Is it even possible to measure brand awareness online?
Opinion one: Brand awareness is nearly impossible to measure accurately
The first line of thinking is that tracking brand awareness is an exceedingly difficult thing to do, especially as privacy laws make online data unreliable (and it was never massively reliable in the first place). If you’re in this camp, you’re likely to be very cautious of anyone who overpromises on what can be measured, unless they happen to be a data scientist. Some examples of this line of thinking include:
Digital marketing has been around for decades, so you’d think there’d be agreement on whether it’s really possible to measure brand awareness, but there are two schools of thought on this.
• Recast: “…for most brands it’s not realistic to reliably estimate how marketing activity impacts brand awareness.”
• Marketing Profs: “There is no perfect solution to monitoring brand identity in the new privacy-centric landscape.”
• The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: “The concept of brand awareness has been hijacked by poor measures.
Opinion two: Brand awareness can be measured, you just need to know what to measure
The second school of thought says that it’s perfectly possible to measure brand awareness, if you’ve got the right tools and you know what you’re measuring. Several very comprehensive and practically useful guides have been written on the subject and many marketers would attest that they’ve been able to meaningfully track their campaigns’ performance (even with privacy restrictions that limit certain data pools).
Examples of guides to measuring brand awareness include:
• Qualtrics: How to measure brand awareness
• Sprout Social: How to measure brand awareness: 10 metrics to track
• Survey Monkey: How to measure and improve your brand awareness
• YouGov: How to measure brand awareness
The strongest versions of this argument don’t claim that brand awareness can be measured perfectly. They lay out the ground rules for how it can be tracked directionally, especially when you combine several useful signals.
So, is it possible to measure brand awareness or not?
It shouldn’t be a controversial opinion to say that, yes, it is indeed possible to measure brand awareness, and no, you don’t always need to be a data scientist to do this successfully.
A little healthy scepticism is fine. Ad fraud is a problem. Privacy restrictions do limit what you can track. Vanity metrics can make it easy to draw to the wrong conclusion. Survey data can be interpreted in more than one way. But that doesn’t mean that brand awareness should be a guessing game. It just means you have to tailor how you measure brand awareness very carefully, know exactly what you need to track and have the tools in place to do this.
How to measure brand awareness strategically
Unlike some of the guides we’ve mentioned previously, we’re not going to give you a list of all the metrics you can measure to keep track of your brand awareness.
Instead, we’re going to talk about our methodology for making sure that you’re measuring the right metrics. Because, in our view, the best way to measure brand awareness isn’t to rely on one perfect metric. It’s to build a measurement framework around what you’re trying to achieve commercially.
Step one: Tie what you’re measuring back to your core business goals
You’ve heard of vanity metrics, where numbers like social media impressions can look impressive but yield very little commercial results, but it’s also possible to have vanity PR campaigns where a business just wants to see their name in print or they just want as many backlinks as possible. This isn’t strategic; it’s not how we do things, and it probably won’t get you the results you’re looking for.
Every brand awareness campaign should help you achieve your business’ goals. Whether you’re expanding into new markets, on a recruitment drive, looking for external investment, or simply trying to boost leads and sales.
Once you know your goals, you can set objectives to help you meet them. Brand awareness campaigns can help you meet those objectives, so you should set measurable metrics to understand whether you’re meeting them or need to adjust your plan.
For example, say you’ve adapted your core product offering to meet the needs of a different sector. Your goal is market growth, getting leads from this new sector. You might launch a PR campaign to introduce your business to this new audience.
Step two: Make sure you’ve got the right tools in place
Because that’s your goal, you need to measure more than how many pieces of coverage you receive. Are you appearing in the publications your target audience reads? Do you know the circulation? Do you know if the articles you were featured in were shared on social media? Are you earning backlinks from relevant, authoritative websites? Has your presence in Google improved for the topics you want to be known for? Have you gained any ground against your competitors? Are more people searching for your brand by name? Are you getting more leads from that sector? Are you finding sales conversations easier?
The point we’re making is that PR campaigns which drive brand awareness need to be commercially focused campaigns. If your goal is generic coverage, how can you judge whether your campaign has delivered any actual ROI? The more closely your campaigns are connected to your core business goals, the easier it will be to understand whether they’ve been successful.
Having the right measurement tools at your disposal, along with people to interpret the data, will help you to make sure you’re tracking what you need.
Here are a few examples of the types of measurement tools you can use:
• Web traffic: Google Analytics, Hubspot
• Keyword rankings: Semrush, Google Search Console, Ahrefs
• Social media: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Hubspot
• CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce
• Email: Mailchimp, Adestra, Hubspot
• Surveys: Qualtrics,YouGov, Survey Monkey
• PR coverage: Agility PR, CoverageBook.
Just make sure that you choose your tools after you know what you need to measure, rather than building your reporting around whatever data happens to be easiest to access.
Some tools for measuring brand awareness are free (such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console) but many will need paid subscriptions, which can sometimes be a little pricey. It’s worth thinking about this when weighing up whether to use a specialist agency (like Luminous!) for your media tracking, because if you do you’ll have the platform costs covered and you’ll get a team of experts to set up your tracking and help you to interpret the data.
Step three: Make sure the awareness of your brand is leading to something
If you’ve just run a really successful brand awareness campaign, that you can tangibly measure because you’ve gained significant media coverage, quadrupled the number of backlinks pointing to your website, spiked your social media followers, sent you to the top of Google and doubled your site traffic, you’re probably very happy. Unless… leads just aren’t coming in. In which case, it might all feel like a failure.
If this has happened to your business, we’d argue that you might have more data than you need to look at. If you’ve successfully boosted your brand awareness to the point where you’ve permanently increased your site traffic but you’re still not getting any leads, it might be a sign that you need to focus on improving the parts of the marketing journey that help turn brand awareness into business growth.
This might mean improving your marketing funnel with stronger case studies and white papers, running paid retargeting ads to stay visible, making your calls to action clearer, or simply improving the user experience on your website so people can understand what you do more easily.
In other words, brand awareness is only part of the journey. Once people know who you are, your website, case studies, thought leadership and follow-up activity need to give those that are now aware of your brand a reason to take the next step.
Need help with measuring brand awareness?
Whether you’re looking to track your PR coverage or you’d like a more extensive marketing audit to benchmark where your brand currently sits against your competitors, we’d be happy to take a look.
We’re here to help brands think differently about their PR, ensuring campaigns support clear business objectives, from media relations to wider digital marketing campaigns.
By David Biggins
David is an award-winning marketer with a long history of helping large institutions and small businesses to develop their digital marketing.
