CleanPix Blog

How strong is your brand? You won’t know until you start tracking a few key branding metrics. Fortunately, that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today!

In this article, I’ll answer the question “what are brand metrics?” Then I’ll outline the five most important branding metrics for your company and how to measure them.

Sound like a plan? Great, let’s get started!

What Are Brand Metrics?

Let’s start with a definition to make sure we’re on the same page.

According to Qualtrics, an experience management company headquartered in the US, brand metrics are: *“*Quantifiable variables that you measure to track your brand’s performance.”

Without branding metrics, you won’t be able to tell how well your marketing campaigns are performing, what customers really think of your company, or how your products and services stack up against the competition. This is all vital information!

5 Branding Metrics to Track

Branding metrics are important. The question is, which ones should you track? While there are loads of options available to you, the five most important are:

• Brand Awareness
• Brand Consideration
• Perceived Quality
• Product Purchases
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Let’s take a more detailed look at each metric and how to track them. That way you can accurately measure and improve branding efforts for your company.

1. Brand Awareness

If you were to climb onto the roof of your house and shout your company’s name at the top of your lungs, would your neighbors know what you were talking about?

If not, you might need to work on (and track!) brand awareness for your organization.

Brand awareness refers to the level of recognition consumers have for a company and the specific products they create. When I say “Coke” you immediately know what I’m referring to.

Some brands, like Band-Aid and Kleenex, have achieved such a high degree of brand awareness that many people use their names as replacements for generic terms. We say things like “go put a band-aid on that cut” even if we don’t actually own bandages made by Band-Aid.

To sell products and/or services to consumers, they have to know that your company exists. This is why brand awareness is so important. It’s the first step in the sales process.

How to Track Brand Awareness

This branding metric can be tricky to track—but it’s not impossible! The easiest way is to survey your audience via phone, email or website form.

Ask current customers how they heard about your brand. This will give you a good idea about hows people discover your company’s products.

Then ask random selections of people if they’ve heard of your brand and/or the products it produces. This will tell you how recognizable your company is.

Other ways to measure brand awareness include analyzing direct website traffic (i.e. how many people type your URL into the address bar), monitoring search traffic for your brand name, and listening for brand mentions on social media.

2. Brand Consideration

Brand awareness is important, but it doesn’t guarantee sales. This is why you should be tracking the brand consideration metric as well.

Brand consideration measures the percentage of consumers who would be willing to purchase a product or service from a company that they’re aware of.

For instance, most people have heard of Apple. The tech company is famous around the world for its Mac computers, iPhones, and other gadgets. Even so, many devout Microsoft users would never consider buying the latest Macbook Pro model.

Apple obviously does just fine without the support of die-hard Microsoft fans. But this example shows the difference between brand awareness and brand consideration.

Tracking brand consideration will help you determine the ways your products and services are perceived by your target audience and how they compare to your competition.

How to Track Brand Consideration

To track this branding metric, take a similar approach to the one outlined above: survey your market via phone calls, emails, and website forms.

Latana, an AI-powered brand tracking tool, suggests giving survey participants a list of similar brands (including your own), then asking them which ones they’d consider buying from to measure brand consideration.

Of course, this isn’t the only way. You can also track consumer behaviors on your website to understand buyer intent. For example, how many people click the “Buy Now” button?

While not everyone who clicks a “Buy Now” button will actually make a purchase, those that do were at least considering it, which is useful information to know.

3. Perceived Quality

Perceived quality is another one of the most important branding metrics. It’s related to brand consideration, but distinct enough to deserve its own section in this post. After all, a potential customer might consider buying your product, even if they believe its quality is questionable.

When your target audience thinks highly of your company’s offerings, they’ll buy them more often, leave favorable reviews, and encourage others to make purchases, too.

How to Measure Perceived Quality

This branding metric is a little easier to measure than the others we’ve covered so far. Why? Because you have easy access to more tangible data.

For instance, you can comb through customer support interactions to see how many customers complain about your products and services. You can also read reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other sites to determine perceived quality.

But don’t forget to survey your audience as well!

Ask current customers about the quality of your offerings. Then ask a random selection of people who’re aware of your products, but haven’t used them, what they think.

4. Product Purchases

At this point, you’ve measured brand awareness, the percentage of product-aware people who would consider making a purchase from your company, and their beliefs regarding the quality of your offerings. But you still don’t know how many people are actually buying.

This is so important! Ask yourself, do any of the other branding metrics above matter if no one spends money on your products and services? The answer is: not really…

The only reason you work so hard to properly brand your company is to improve sales. So make sure that you track product purchases to ensure your efforts are paying off.

How to Track Product Purchases

Fortunately, product purchases is the easiest branding metric to track. Look for:

• Total Number of Sales: How many sales has your company made in the last week, month, or year? Ideally, this number will increase over time.
• Sales Conversion Rate: What percentage of people who visit your website or walk into your store actually make a purchase? The higher, the better.
• Customer Lifetime Value: How much money does your company make from the average customer over their lifetime? CLV is important because it will help you determine how much you can spend to acquire and keep customers.
• Average Order Value: How much is each order worth to your company? The more customers spend per transaction, the more money your brand makes.

Tracking product purchases will tell you how effective your branding efforts are. It will also help you understand how to improve your branding in the future.

5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score, more commonly known as NPS, measures brand loyalty. Did you know that it costs 5-25x more to acquire a new customer than keep an existing one?

Companies with high Net Promoter Scores are typically quite profitable. Take time to improve your organization’s NPS and your brand will reach new heights. Fortunately, measuring NPS is very straightforward as there’s only one way to do it.

How to Measure NPS

Like many of the other branding metrics we’ve talked about, you’ll need to create and send a survey to calculate your Net Promoter Score. Ask your customers:

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [Brand/Product/Service] to a friend, family member, or colleague?”

Once you’ve received your survey results, you need to segment participants into one of three categories: detractors, passives, and promoters.

• Detractors: Survey participants who respond with a score of 0 – 6.
• Passives: Survey participants who respond with a score of 7 or 8.
• Promoters: Survey participants who respond with a score of 9 or 10.

Then eliminate the Passives from your results and run the rest through this formula: (Number of Promoters — Number of Detractors) / (Number of Respondents) x 100.

For example, let’s say you surveyed 100 people. 15 were detractors, 20 were passives, and 65 were promoters. To find your Net promoter Score, you need to subtract 15 from 65 to get 50. Then you need to divide 50 by 100 (the number of people surveyed) and multiply the result by 100. Your NPS in this hypothetical scenario is 50.

Net Promoter Scores can range from -100 to +100. The closer your company scores to +100 the better, as this means your customers are satisfied and likely to remain loyal.

Build a Better Brand With Data

The branding metrics listed in this article will help you gauge the health of your brand.

By tracking brand awareness, brand consideration, perceived quality, product purchases, and Net Promoter Score over time, you’ll be able to determine the best ways to optimize your branding efforts and ensure greater future success for your company.