Many marketing key performance indicators are vanity metrics. They look great on pitch decks but don’t meaningfully add insight into the business's growth.
This isn’t because all marketers are grifters or somehow incompetent. It’s because sales funnels and human psychology are messy and unwilling to lend themselves to tidy scientific methods.
Measuring brand awareness is often as nebulous as any other marketing metric. How do you meaningfully measure how aware your target audience is of your brand? If you can measure it, what do you do with that information?
We’re here to help agencies and marketing teams find more success with social engagement and improve the bottom line.
First things first.
Why measuring brand awareness matters
As you know, awareness is the first stage of the customer journey. After all, you can’t think of a company as the solution to your problem if you’re unaware it exists.
The majority of marketing efforts often go into the awareness stage. It’s the first step towards conversion and falls into two camps.
- Aided awareness: Aided awareness prompts the memory of your brand by its name or logo, helping a person remember that you offer the solution to a problem.
- Unaided awareness: Also called top-of-mind awareness, unaided awareness is when you immediately spring to mind as a solution to your target market’s problem without prompting by marketing assets.
In a perfect world, you would always have unaided awareness. Your brand is top-of-mind anytime someone wants or needs the product in your industry.
But before you enjoy such market dominance, learning how to measure brand awareness will get you to the aided stage; an ad, social post, or other piece of content will make them remember you.
Measuring how well you’re facilitating brand awareness helps you target your efforts, in addition to:
- Analyzing campaign performance more accurately
- Meeting your target audience where they are
- Understanding your social perception
- Determining future campaign focus
- Predicting audience behavior
- Guiding business decisions
So, how do you do it effectively?
How to measure brand awareness
The whole concept of measuring brand awareness is elusive. You’re trying to quantify perceptions that strangers have about your business. These things are immaterial and abstract, making them hard to pin down.
So, the first step is to organize the chaos. Before you go on a data-gathering mission, get clear about what, where, and how.
What are you measuring?
Measuring brand awareness is tracking the public’s recognition, recall, and engagement with your brand across different social media platforms and touchpoints.
Great!
Which platforms? Which touchpoints? How are you tracking?
This is what you figure out first. Start by identifying your issue.
They might look like:
- Poor understanding of your product or service
- High traffic with a low conversion rate
- Poor like-to-comment ratio
- Low brand recognition
- Low organic traffic
- No community buzz
- No social shares
Now you know what to measure and from which platforms, instead of gathering random data from everywhere without any specific focus regarding your marketing strategies.
Qualitative vs. quantitative
Bear in mind that to measure brand awareness you need to consider two data types,
- Qualitative research is about understanding the subjective experiences of your potential customers. This data isn’t numerical. It’s more about gauging sentiment. This is the data you get from reviews and social media comments. It’s the tone and language used to discuss your brand.
- Quantitative data, on the other hand, concerns variables you can measure objectively. In this case, you use Google Analytics and other data dashboards to analyze engagement, curate polls, and survey results, making conclusions based on numerical results.
Keep this in mind when forming your awareness strategy. What type of data you gather will depend on what problem you’re trying to solve.
So, to reiterate, your plan of attack is:
Determine the problem you’re solving → hone in on the audience and platform that speaks to this problem → determine which data type is the most helpful to measure → build your method for collecting results.
Brand awareness measuring methods
The last step in your action plan is choosing your method. Here are a few to consider.
Evaluating Content Marketing SEO
SEO can provide a massive boost to your brand awareness efforts. When someone Googles a problem your company is a solution for, they should find your name. Using tools like Google Trends, you can track awareness metrics and search volumes related to your brand and industry keywords.
Take the FinTech company SoFi as an example. When you search “refinancing student loans” or "how does refinancing student loans work" on Google, SoFi consistently ranks among the top 5 results because of their trusted reputation.
This kind of search success and strong brand awareness don’t happen overnight. It results from a careful, thoughtful SEO awareness strategy and strategic marketing campaigns.
To measure brand awareness in your SEO, perform a content audit. Use your SEO research tool to analyze what keywords you’re ranking for. Ask yourself these questions:
- What are we doing on referral platforms that generate awareness?
- Are we positioning ourselves as a solution to a problem?
- Are we answering common user queries in our content?
- Where is our traffic coming from?
- Are we ranking for industry-specific keywords?
- Are we getting any branded traffic?
- Does our company name reflect the service we offer?
- Are we maximizing semantic search?
- Are we optimized for local search?
This is brand awareness you can measure quantitatively. Even better, you can use the data to adjust your content plan immediately, so you’re not leaving any awareness potential on the table.
(If you need help with your content audit, we’ve simplified the process if you want to take a look.)
Analyze your backlink profile
A healthy backlink profile is a big part of good SEO. Once you’ve done your content audit, do a backlink audit.
You’re looking for several things:
- Who’s linking to you? If reputable sites are linking to you, they know who you are. This is good news! It means your marketing efforts are working. They trust your site enough to link you to their own, signaling to search engines that you are credible and exposing you to a wider audience.
- How many links do you have? If you don’t have many links or most of them are spam, it’s hard for people to find you.
- Are any links broken? Audit for broken or outdated links and remove them.
When measuring these links, look for patterns in the types of sites that are linking you. This gives you a targeted idea of who knows you and can inspire future link-building opportunities.
How many links do you have? If you don’t have many links or most of them are spam, it’s hard for people to find you. Google puts a lot of stock in a good backlink profile. Weak backlinks show Google you’re not an authority, so Google will prioritize ranking other sites over yours. Focus on backlink efforts if your profile is poor.
Are any links broken? – Broken links have the same result as weak links, and search engines don’t like them. Audit for broken or outdated links and remove them.
Track the buyer's life cycle
Understanding brand awareness isn’t just about knowing how many people recognize your name—it’s about grasping where and how your audience encounters your brand throughout their journey. This is where AI lifecycle marketing and social listening tools become valuable.
Social platforms introduce your brand to new audiences, and tracking how direct traffic, referral traffic, and organic search contribute to brand discovery helps refine your approach.
Centralize your metrics
Data centralization is key. According to the database platform Kohezion, 40% of companies cite data centralization as a lead driver of improved data quality and reliability.
Google Analytics helps track traffic over time, revealing trends in how people engage with your brand. Centralizing these insights lets marketing teams refine their awareness campaigns with greater precision.
StoryChief’s Analytics is a centralized place to track many metrics for each piece of content, including:
- Audience demographics
- Weekly content audit
- Real-time insights
- Keyword rankings
- Impressions
- Traffic data
- Read times
- Comments
- Clicks
- Shares
- Views
Social Listening
Social listening is a method of measuring brand awareness that allows you to track brand mentions across the web. It’s like having a magic tool to know whenever someone talks about you in rooms you’re not in.
Social listening helps you measure audience sentiment and evaluate the tone behind conversations about your brand. It helps you with social media engagement and provides valuable insights into your brand reputation.
Imagine you’re an e-learning platform that recently launched a referral program. Through social listening, you can measure the response to the program in real time by measuring brand mentions across the web.
Tools like SproutSocial are great for this. They have a listening tool that measures the impact of brand awareness on your actions and keeps you at the helm of your brand’s reputation.
Putting it all together
The first step to measuring brand awareness is clearly mapping the problem you’re trying to solve. This will give you the blueprint for what audiences and platforms to target.
Next, choose your measuring method based on the best type of data (qualitative or quantitative) to collect for your marketing goals.
Finally, choose a method. Centralizing your efforts is the best bet. It keeps everything you measure in one easy-to-use location, allowing you to make business decisions that grow your brand into a powerhouse.
Try StoryChief's free Content Audit. Discover gaps, enhance readability, and boost your SEO—all in just a few clicks. Start now and see measurable improvements in traffic, engagement, and conversion rates.