How to Measure Brand Awareness – 7 Effective Ways

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Brand awareness. It sounds like there’s just more and more to do with marketing and digital marketing. There’s branding and then brand awareness. Yes, it may seem like a lot because you’re just absorbing everything in. 

Once you’re all done, you will see that it all flows together hand in hand. Doing it will feel like a habit, and the learning will slow down. Because you’ve already learned so much in the beginning. 

So you’ve started branding and want to measure brand awareness? Read on and let’s get started. 

Table of Contents

Benefits of Focusing on Brand Awareness

So before you measure anything, you need a reason to want to measure it. We will not go too much into what brand awareness is, we’re only going to talk about how to measure it.

As a background, brand awareness is basically how much or how many of your potential customers think of your brand when they need what you are selling.

Definitions are hard for some people, let’s just look at an example. Heinz.

They did a campaign where they asked people to draw a bottle of ketchup. Of course, they didn’t say that they were from Heinz. But it turns out that the people drew Heinz ketchup. They have a whole video on this.

This is brand awareness, people know Heinz sells ketchup, they like Heinz, they think Heinz is good ketchup.

Here are a couple of benefits on why brand awareness is important:

• Increased Loyalty
• Increase Sales
• Increased Publicity
• Establishes brand Equity

Can It Really be Measured?

The answer is yes. The answer is no. The answer is yes and no? Well, there is no simple way to quantify or qualify your brand awareness. We would have to question everyone and test them, and it would be very difficult to get a 100% accurate answer.

Although, things are looking better now. With the presence of social media and all kinds of analytics, it’s easier for us to measure who has been looking at our brands.

So yes, the answer is yes. If you get clear KPIs to measure and pull a conclusion from the numbers.

The next question is the first question. How?

Methods of Measuring Brand Awareness

Again. Some marketers believe that brand awareness has nothing to do with marketing. And then others believe that simply being able to recognize a brand will push you to buy it.

It’s true, brand recognition, however perfect, will not make a conversion. But brand awareness is the first step to being the best brand out there or the worst. Do you believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity?

Anyway, here are some ways you can measure your brand awareness.

1. Brand Awareness Surveys

There are different ways you can conduct your survey. But the survey is the oldest known method that gives direct and real results to your question of brand awareness.

The only bias here is if your subjects are not properly sampled.

Let’s say you want to ask people if they’ve heard of your brand, but you’re asking people who have submitted their phone numbers to your mailing list. Of course, their question is going to be yes, and you’re going to get 100% but it will be extremely inaccurate.

It’s not only about the samples, there’s also the question that you give out. Some questions are more “suggestive” than others. You want them to give a straightforward answer to a neutral question.

Let’s say you want to know if your customer enjoyed your products.

If you ask:

• How much would you say you enjoy our product?

You are assuming they enjoy your product, and you will not get a suitable answer.

But if you ask:

• Do you enjoy our product?
• Extremely did not enjoy – Did not enjoy – It was okay – Enjoyed – It was amazing

This gives your surveyor a better standing so that they are choosing with no subconscious suggestions pushing them.

Let’s look at a couple of ways you can do surveys, and how to best conduct them.

In-person Interviews

These are direct interviews where you ask questions directly to people without them having to tick any boxes.

You can do this privately in a room. People are usually willing to do this in exchange for free merchandise, especially in malls. You can also do this when you’re launching something and they just finished a purchase, so you give them a survey to fill for a discount on their next purchase or something like that.

Your question has to be deeper, how much do they know of their brands, which products do they buy, would they recommend your brands to their families and friends, and so on.

This is great for brands that are already established, it’s okay if you’re still new. But you’re already setting up booths in fairs and things like that.

Telephone Interviews

These are questions asked over the phone. I’m not sure people still do this very often because you can hardly get people to pick up an unknown number.

Your question can vary, it can be broad. It depends where you get your number list from. If you’re calling everyone, then you can ask anything, but if you’re calling from your list of subscribers or members, you need to ask a deeper question.

Usually, this still happens after you make a customer service call. They usually get in a couple of questions. So they help with data and information, which is reasonable.

These are great for bigger corporations. If you’re a smaller company, you might be better off with an in-person or online questionnaire.

Mailed Questionnaires

This can be both emailed or sent through to your address. But it mostly happens by email.

You can ask for your potential customer’s time and you can always offer something for them filling out a survey. It seems tedious and you would assume people would do it, but have you tried it? You know you always skip it.

It’s great for all businesses, especially in the digital age. This is a great survey for you to try out.

Online Questionnaires

Online is very general. It can be anywhere. On the website, through a link from social media. The option is endless.

You can ask silly questions, people on the internet follow links, and finish the questionnaire.

Online, you can do anything. Just think about what data you’re trying to collect and create questions to get the answer. It’s always a good idea to go deeper in your questionnaire because if you’re just asking if they’ve heard of you, it won’t do much.

Except if you’re a very new brand, and you’re just testing the waters. So again, it depends on your goal.

2. Brand Impressions

Brand impressions, in this discussion, are defined as how many times your brand is mentioned all throughout the internet. Maybe you’re mentioned by other brands or maybe you’re mentioned by customers or potential customers.

We are not looking at how you were mentioned, it can be good or bad, we’re just looking to see if you were mentioned.

Instagram has KPIs of its own. And if you look into the insights on Instagram, you can see that “impressions” is one of its insights. The brand impression we’re talking about here is different. Because on Instagram, it just defines how many people have seen your post or your story.

You can get the data, mentions of your brand throughout the internet, through different software or websites. They are mostly premium, but they would provide free trials so that you can choose which one you like the most.

This will not give you the entire picture, the entire answer you are asking. But it can give you a rough idea of how you are doing right now.

A great tip is to search for your competitors using the same software. That way you can compare and see if you’re doing better, or if you still need to improve.

3. Direct Traffic

If you have a website. You can measure brand awareness through direct traffic. If you are blogging or using SEO services, you would often look at organic traffic.

There are also social, referral, and others. They are all found on Google Analytics.

You want to look at direct traffic because that’s the traffic that comes from people directly typing your URL on the search bar. So they don’t go through a google search because they already know you.

The internet is a great way to project and get information. But people are a creature of habit. Some people would just type, without using a URL, and type your brand name. If that happens and then they click on your website from a google search result, maybe your homepage. That would count as organic traffic.

So that’s why some people are against measuring brand awareness. It’s a lot of guessing games and the result will not give you clear instructions on how to proceed. But it’s good information to have. Even vaguely.

4. Search Volume Data

All you need for this is in Google.

Google Adwords Keyword Planner
Google Trends

You can use these two things to check out how many people are looking for your brand name.

Let’s take another look at Heinz. Heinz’s brand name is very specific, SEO-wise, that would not be best. Nowadays, small businesses are taking another approach, they like to slip in the actual product name. Eg: Ketchup4All

If you are one of those businesses if you use the product name in your brand. It will be harder to measure brand awareness because your name is merging with the generic name itself.

Yes, it’s good for SEO, but the first thing we learn about business is that we don’t want our brand name to be so popular that it becomes a generic term, so why should we want to use the generic name instead of a unique brand name?

5. Listening to Social Media

Social media is the best place to scour for your brand’s status. Because this is where all your customers hang out. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Check all of them.

There are multiple software and websites to help you out with this.

Sometimes the result may be extreme. You may be trending on Instagram, but few people have heard of you on Facebook. This is completely normal. If you want a better analysis you can read user personas for each of the social media.

That way you can make better use of your results and adjust your campaign according to your goals. Do you want more people on Facebook to talk about you, or is your primary concern simply keeping yourself trending on Instagram?

Here are a couple of things you can check if you’re on a business feature or a business page.

Measure Number of Mentions

Check how many times you’ve been mentioned or tagged on something. Again, you can do this by monitoring your numbers, maybe over a month or over a quarter. You can gather the data daily or weekly.

You can also use software to help you so that all you need to do is to monitor and analyze the graph as you do on Google Analytics.

Estimate Reach

You want to also check out the reach. How many people are your posts reaching? We are checking to see how many people are seeing; we are not talking about engagement yet. On Google, this would be something like views and not clicks.

You can then compare the data against engagement, referral traffic, conversions, and so on.

If you are using software, each of them would have them believe that standard metrics they think are the best. It’s better if you look at each of the social media and figure out which metrics you want, and what you think is most effective.

Track Engagement

Engagement does not equal conversion. It also does not equal mentioning you and asking your customer services.

Engagement is about the likes and genuine comments people leave behind about your content. Or what people are saying about your brand to other people. Are they reposting your brand and mentally adding you to their wish list?

Or are they skipping you because you’re boring and spamming their social media feed?

Analyze the Sentiment of Your Public

The last step is analyzing all the data you have gathered. Just like an experiment, you need “control”. In this case, you need a benchmark. So what are you going to measure against?

The easiest way is to measure when you first start, measure again after a quarter, and then analyze your growth and track your goal.

You may also set a goal with each campaign you launch so that you can measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

Another way to do this is to look at your competitor. A competitor in this case must be someone very similar to you. If you’re a small soda beverage company, you can’t compare yourself to Coca-Cola, it doesn’t work that way. You can measure up, but somebody not too far away. Because we want to make these goals realistic, achievable. You wanna be stepping up, not looking at the stars, and getting lost.

6. Inbound External Links

This specifically translates to links from other websites which are leading back to the pages on your website.

This can be made, and be built over time, with the right campaigns. But if you grow big enough, this will grow on its own. This may be a harder option to do, that’s why it’s placed so low on the list.

It would be especially hard for small businesses that are not too active on their websites. But if you are and you are constantly mentioning your website on social media, and constantly promoting it. Then yeah. It’s a good thing. You might get some results from this method.

You can check your backlinks on Google Analytics or on third-party SEO software.

7. Community Reach

This may just be the easiest way to track your brand awareness. Just watch how many people are following you. How many people are a fan of your page?

That’s it. Very simple.

But again, this is not very effective. Because there’s not much you can do with the data. Why are they following you? But that’s a question for the marketer. Our role here is simply to figure out how many people recognize you.

Set Your Goals Then Track Your Progress

Yep, so that’s it. You now know how you can measure your Brand Awareness. Remember to set goals first, set a plan so that you can actually analyze the numbers you managed to track.

Don’t get overwhelmed with all the different platforms and methods. Focus on what you want and what you need. Remember, the tools are supposed to help you, not confuse you.

Want to improve your customers’ loyalty to your brand?
Take the first step by reading this post.

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Bhushan Lele

Bhushan spent the last 15+ years building businesses and learning what really matters to customers. At Custom Logo Cases, we help brands turn everyday tech accessories into high-quality, on-brand marketing tools.