Without brand awareness, the buyer’s journey can’t begin. It is a phase that defines how the new and would-be consumers recognize and recall your business.
It also clearly indicates your market dominance. Since it is such an integral element, you must keep it in check for success.
Getting your business’s name out there is surely a complex process, including various steps.
Thankfully, with particular brand awareness KPIs, you can determine where you stand in your industry and if you secure a place in the audience’s mind.
Without further delay, let’s jump right into how to measure brand awareness.
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What is the Need For KPIs for Brand Awareness?
According to Statista, in 2024, advertising spending worldwide reached around 917 billion US dollars. From these numbers, you can get an idea of how important brand awareness has become for the competitive landscape.
A brand’s reach, even among non-users of its products, is a key component of brand awareness, which is measured outside a company’s customer base.
Let’s take the brand awareness that the majority of luxury brands have produced as an example. While not everyone has the means to buy a YSL or Chanel, there is barely anyone on the internet who doesn’t know these brands.
Whether you come up with a great brand story or a great promotional campaign, making the brand known to a larger audience is always a purpose.
The internet gives you various channels to engage with your online audience and establish real connections. You have a slew of opportunities for building engagement, loyalty, and trust while supporting the practical and efficient promotion of your business’s goods and services.
However, to get the most out of any strategy, you need a mechanism to define, track, and comprehend its performance process.
That’s where knowing the KPIs to measure brand awareness becomes of utmost importance.
Brand awareness KPIs help you monitor performance transparently, assess its efficacy, and determine what needs to change.
Apart from unraveling the current state of your marketing efforts, they help in defining specific goals for the future.
After knowing the rudiments of brand awareness metrics/KPIs, let’s discuss how you can obtain insights using them.
How To Measure Brand Awareness: 10 Brand Awareness KPIs
Following are the brand awareness KPIs that will help you find out how familiar is your intended audience with your business:
1. Find the Click-Through Rate (CTR)
It is one of the extremely significant and useful brand awareness KPIs. This metric assesses the degree of interest and engagement that your target audience has with your content.
It reveals the effectiveness of your advertising and brand awareness efforts. CTR directly impacts your Quality Score on Google Ads and other platforms, resulting in a lower cost per click and a higher ranking for your ad on search engine result pages (SERP).
The figure is displayed under the insights tab of many analytics programs, like Google Analytics and SEMRush.
Using this KPI, you can test various iterations to maximize your future marketing efforts.
2. Track Brand Mentions
This is one of the brand awareness KPIs that applies on various platforms. It is not limited to social media. It includes your mention in any article, report, broadcast (radio, TV), or through any joint activity with a collaborative partner.
This metric can be calculated in a number of ways, including
- The overall number of brand mentions
- Mentions of specific products or services you provide
- Social reach of individual channels
- The number of new members who join your community over time
- Effectiveness of influencer marketing campaigns
- Hashtag performance
With the increase in brand mentions, reach, and interaction, your brand awareness goes up as well.
Additionally, with such brand awareness KPIs, you can focus more on the strengths of your brand.
3. Check the Performance of Blogs
If you are a veteran digital marketing player, you must be checking the total and organic blog traffic and social media referrals already.
Hence, it takes the third position on our list of brand awareness KPIs. To identify the most effective traffic sources, a brand must analyze the organic and direct blog referral sources (LinkedIn, Facebook, direct, email, and organic).
These aforementioned channels usually receive most of our attention. This data also comes handy in determining the number of unique pageviews compared to the pageviews that each channel brings to the website.
You should delve into the most popular blog content downloaded and other elements, such as internal blog post links or conclusion CTAs.
This KPI helps you understand the content types your audience likes and the best way to endorse such content. With this information, you can produce similar blogs to lead website users down the funnel and spark interest in your offering.
If you are not getting as much traffic as you expect on your blogs, here are 15 amazing tips.
4. Calculate the Rate of Audience Growth
As one of the simplest brand awareness KPIs, you can calculate the audience growth. It reveals how effective your campaign is at raising brand awareness and recall within your target audience.
Determining the audience growth rate enables you to monitor the growth of your online presence and see how your follower count changes over time.
For instance, if you want to know the rate of audience growth for a month, you can use a simple formula.
Here is the formula: (Number of Audience at the end of the month- Number at the beginning) / number at the beginning) * 100.
Related Blog: Conversion Rate in Digital Marketing: 7 Great Tips For Businesses
5. Unravel Social Listening Metrics
If you want to know how your potential clients feel about you, this is going to be one of the useful brand awareness KPIs.
It involves tracking mentions on blogs, forums, social media, and news or publication sites.
It includes how often mentions occur, which platforms receive the most mentions, which demographics mention them most frequently, and whether or not they are positive.
Here is how you can understand the sentiment of the audience using social listening:
Reach of mentions: This indicator counts the number of people who have come across internet mentions of your brand. The more followers you have, the more your reach will become. It is also from the list of brand awareness KPIs on social media that helps discover audience size and brand visibility.
Sentiment analysis: To ascertain if a social media post is favorable, unfavorable, or neutral, you can use social listening tools. For instance, there is a feature on SEMrush called Media Monitoring for sentiment analysis. This assists in determining how the general public feels about your company and its offers, which can help you identify possible problems and modify your products in response to customer demands.
Net Promoter Score: This is one of the valuable brand awareness KPIs that assesses the likelihood that clients will recommend your goods or services. It basically defines the audience’s satisfaction and loyalty. Social listening tools can be used as a stand-in for surveys, typically used to measure NPS.
6. Assess Backlink Profiles
Backlinks are external connections pointing to your website; you may use a free backlink checker to identify them.
It’s important to pay attention to the quantity and quality of backlinks.
This is one of the types of brand awareness KPIs that help you learn a lot about your brand’s popularity by looking at the backlinks pointing to your website. Additionally, you should also consider the source of those links.
Links from well-known magazines and influential people in the field are reliable signs of a strong brand presence.
Other than that, links from blog entries on specific topics or industries can provide insight into your company’s target audiences.
You can track your backlink growth with backlink checkers like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush.
Also Read: Role of Social Backlinking For Marketing Strategy
7. Understand Share of Voice
This gauges how visible your brand is compared to your rivals. With time,
With SOV, you can gauge how well your business is represented in social media, marketing, and advertising. You may learn how your brand is viewed online and how your competitors are being talked about by using it.
So, if you want to know brand awareness KPIs for social media, this can give you quite effective results.
The major benefit of it is that you can more effectively manage your advertising spend by measuring SOV.
A social listening tool like Mention.com can measure social SOV manually. Alternatively, you can use the following method to get your social SOV:
Number of brand mentions/total number of brand mentions (yours + your competitors’) x 100.
8. Monitor Engagement on Social Media
The majority of social media networks come with powerful analytics tools that you can use to track the frequency and nature of audience interactions with your content.
One metric for assessing social media involvement is brand impressions. In addition, likes, shares, views, follows, comments and public hashtags represent engagement.
Social media algorithms also naturally promote content with strong engagement, increasing its impressions and reach. Thus, a strong social media presence can serve as an invaluable resource for branding and marketing.
A post receives more impressions the more times the audience shares it. Doing this increases the likelihood of people following you on social media and seeing your content regularly.
If you want to learn how to improve your social media engagement posts before you start using the brand awareness KPIs, click here.
Related Blog: KPIs For Social Media: Get Battle-Tested Results For Engagement
9. Measure Direct Traffic
When a customer visits your website directly instead of discovering you through an advertisement or on Google, you can call it direct traffic.
When your website receives a lot of direct traffic, it means that your customers are aware of you and are willing to visit your site. This is a sign of high brand awareness and brand recall.
Like several other brand awareness KPIs, you can use Google Analytics to determine whether more people are becoming aware of our brand.
Bounce rate: It indicates whether your content satisfies user purpose, delivers a positive user experience, and adds value. If visitors don’t find what they are looking for, a high bounce rate may indicate this.
Return visitors: Users who visit your website more than once are considered return visitors. These may be easier to convert.
Time Spent on page: This aids in your comprehension of how visitors engage with your website and content.
Sessions: These are the actions a user does starting when they visit your website and continue until the end of the session. Sessions display a user’s collection of interactions and the total amount of time they spent on them in essentially one session.
10. Conduct Customer Surveys
Finally, this is the last one from our list of brand awareness KPIs and its process is pretty simple.
However, surveys require work from your clients, so driving them to fill it may be challenging.
Therefore, consider offering something in exchange for their engagement, such as a coupon, discount, or the opportunity to win anything.
It’s crucial to include questions in your survey that will help you achieve your main objective of assessing brand awareness.
Bonus: Removing pointless questions will increase the percentage of completed surveys.
FAQs
How do brand awareness and website traffic relate to each other?
Since more people are looking for or learning about your brand, an increase in direct or referral traffic may be a sign of increased brand awareness.
Is search volume one of the brand awareness KPIs?
Yes, monitoring the frequency of online searches shows how interested and aware potential buyers are of it.
How frequently should brand awareness KPIs be measured?
You can monitor brand awareness KPIs monthly or quarterly to monitor growth trends and make necessary strategy adjustments.
In Conclusion
All in all, these were all the important brand awareness KPIs. Hopefully, after reading this blog, you will successfully learn how to measure brand awareness.
Incorporating these brand awareness KPIs can help you set targets for your marketing campaigns. And it identifies the places where you need to put more energy.
If you want to analyze your marketing campaign’s performance on a macro level and don’t have the resources to analyze data from various tools, we are a call away.