Brand awareness strategies can help you reach new audiences and increase exposure for your message and products. However, it’s crucial to know how to measure brand awareness so you can build the most effective campaigns for your target audience and business goals.
By measuring the right brand awareness metrics, you can also allocate your marketing resources more efficiently and find innovative ways to optimize your strategies.
Still, there’s no uniform solution to measuring brand value and campaign effectiveness. Measuring the success of an Instagram influencer campaign, for example, is much different than measuring the success of a display ad campaign — even if you’re reaching the same target audience.
That’s why it’s important to find the most suitable metrics for your brand awareness strategies and goals. And that’s where this guide can help.
Here, we’ll explore the importance of brand awareness KPIs, and how to use brand awareness metrics to increase your visibility and engagement across the open web.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
Measuring brand awareness begins with choosing the right brand awareness KPIs. The metrics you select will depend on many factors, such as your brand awareness objectives, ad forms, and campaign strategy.
Once you choose the most efficient brand measurement metrics, you can start to track your campaign progress and tweak your techniques to help increase brand awareness. Depending on which ad platform you use, you should be able to access real-time reports of these metrics and break them down by different categories, such as audience and campaign type.
Brand awareness KPIs are also the gifts that keep on giving. With campaign analytics at your fingertips, you can better understand how to move your audiences through the funnel, ultimately driving lead generation and sales.
How do you measure brand awareness online
Brand awareness online can be measured through metrics like website traffic, social media engagement (likes, shares, comments), search volume for brand-related keywords, and referral traffic from other websites.
How do you measure brand awareness offline
Brand awareness offline can be measured through surveys, focus groups, interviews, and tracking brand mentions in traditional media sources like newspapers, magazines, and television.
Brand Awareness Metrics
There are many brand awareness metrics available to advertisers — from brand visibility and website traffic to social media engagement. While some brand awareness KPIs are broadly applicable across different strategies, others should be used more selectively based on their relevance to each campaign or platform.
Here, we’ve identified six brand awareness metrics that we believe are most relevant for today’s advertisers. These metrics and KPIs can serve as important indicators of campaign effectiveness, helping to gauge and guide the success of your awareness efforts.
1. Brand Visibility
Brand visibility is a fundamental KPI for measuring brand awareness. Brand visibility is the extent to which a brand is seen and recognized by potential customers — a core objective of many brand awareness campaigns.
Brands can measure visibility by tracking their campaign impressions. Impressions represent the number of times your ad or content was displayed to users, regardless of whether the user engaged with the content or not.
It’s important to note that impressions alone may not fully indicate how effective your awareness campaigns are at conveying your messaging or driving action. They are more useful for assessing the overall reach, visibility, and delivery of your campaigns.
How to Measure Brand Visibility with Impressions
It’s important to understand how to measure reach and brand visibility. Many digital marketing and social media platforms allow advertisers to track the impressions of their ads, posts, or campaigns. Advertisers can also use a search platform like Google Ads or performance advertising platforms like Taboola to measure brand visibility and impressions:
2. Branded Search Traffic
Branded search traffic refers to the amount of people who visit your site after searching with a keyword that contains your brand name or product. Measuring branded search traffic involves continuously tracking those branded keywords. An increase in search volume for brand-specific keywords, for example, indicates growing awareness and engagement among consumers.
This metric is particularly useful for evaluating the impact of multichannel and social media marketing efforts, as it reflects consumer interest beyond specific marketing channels. In fact, it could be considered a brand consideration metric.
Brand consideration represents a deeper level of engagement where consumers not only know about the brand but also consider its products or services. This distinction is important because it signifies a higher level of interest and potential intent to engage further with the brand. A customer for example, might see your brand in a social media ad and then search for it on Google to find out more information.
How to Measure Branded Search Traffic
Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used brand awareness tools to measure search volume, providing valuable insights into user behaviors and website engagement. Additionally, advertisers can use other keyword research tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, and SEMrush to identify search volume trends and keyword performance.
3. Website Traffic
Website traffic and branded search traffic are related but not the same. Website traffic refers to visits from various platforms such as search engines, advertising campaigns, social media platforms, and other referral sources. Analyzing changes in website traffic volume over time can provide insights into the effectiveness of brand awareness efforts across these channels.
How to Measure Website Traffic
You can use your website’s own analytics engine to measure traffic and access statistics about visitors. Beyond that, you can use additional platforms such as Google Analytics to access more advanced metrics and reports about visitor behaviors and demographics, using this data to increase website traffic.
4. Social Media Engagement
Social media plays a pivotal role in today’s marketing landscape, significantly influencing customer experiences and decision-making processes. As such, you might use social media metrics to gauge your brand awareness performance and customer engagement.
How to Measure Social Media Engagement
If you’re looking to measure and improve social media engagement, you might use key metrics such as reach, impressions, likes, shares, comments, clicks, follows, mentions, and hashtag usage. All major social media platforms provide built-in statistical tools to measure and track these KPIs, eliminating the need for additional systems or skills. However, supplementary social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer offer enhanced capabilities for cross-platform performance tracking.
5. Brand Awareness Surveys
You can use brand awareness surveys to collect insights and feedback directly from your customers. Unlike many other metrics, the data from these surveys can help both qualify and quantify your brand awareness performance. For example, you can assess whether people’s perception of your brand aligns with the brand’s vision and core messaging. Surveys also help show customers that their feedback is valued, fostering higher levels of loyalty and engagement.
How to Perform Brand Awareness Surveys
Make sure your brand awareness surveys are concise and easy to comprehend, ideally including multiple-choice options to facilitate user responses.
For example, you might ask questions such as:
- What is your opinion of our brand?
- How did you first learn about our brand?
- Why did you choose our brand over others?
- Are you aware of any of our competitors? If so, which ones?
Property booking site Giggster, for example, invites new customers to answer a quick, two-question survey about their experience:
Surveys can be administered via phone, email, or directly on your website. Testing different survey methods can also help determine which solution yields the highest response rate from customers. Various platforms are available for conducting surveys, such as Survey Monkey, Typeform, and Google Forms.
6. Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is a measure of people who visit your website from referral sources, such as social media, search results engines, or backlinks in blog posts. By measuring referral traffic, you can better assess the performance of referral and social media campaigns. For example, you might start a referral program, inviting loyal customers to become advocates for your brand and encourage people to make their first purchase. You might also use SEO strategies to improve your search discoverability, increasing referral traffic from key sources like Google.
How to Measure Referral Traffic
Google Analytics stands out as a particularly valuable tool for measuring referral traffic and brand awareness. Advertisers can use this offering to better understand which referral sources are most effective and how referral traffic changes over time.
How to Choose the Best Brand Awareness Measurements for You
There is no universal solution to measuring brand awareness; each metric has its own use cases and benefits. As such, you should choose your own brand awareness metrics based on your unique strategies, platforms, and goals. If you’re launching an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram, for example, you might measure social media engagement and referral traffic. Whereas if you’re launching a content marketing campaign, you might measure brand visibility and website traffic.
It’s also important to choose a mix of hard and soft metrics for your brand awareness campaigns. For instance, consider combining hard data metrics like referral traffic or search volume (e.g. impressions, clicks, conversions) with more qualitative insights from brand awareness surveys to obtain a well-rounded view of customer perceptions. And remember, once you identify and measure key metrics for brand awareness, you can use your insights to inform future performance marketing campaigns.
Which Are the Brand Awareness KPIs You Can Use When Working with Taboola?
As a leading content discovery platform, Taboola provides the tools that advertisers need to drive brand awareness across the open web and reach their target audiences. With a network of 9,000 premium publisher properties, Taboola offers a range of native advertising formats and solutions to help boost brand visibility and increase performance results.
When it comes to brand awareness measurement, advertisers can use their Taboola Ads dashboard to access a range of metrics, including:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Advertisers can also customize their reports dashboard to display exactly the metrics they choose to track:
Once they raise awareness, advertisers can launch Taboola retargeting campaigns to help increase leads and sales while lowering their customer acquisition cost.
For example, consider this brand awareness case study: Ancestry, the world’s largest collection of family history records, wanted to increase brand awareness and familiarity among target audiences in the UK. So they ran a series of Taboola native video ads in key placements across trusted editorial sites. As a result, Ancestry achieved a 38% higher online ad awareness and 32% higher video completion rate than their goal.
Looking for more inspiration for your campaigns? Check out these brand awareness examples.
Final Thoughts
Measuring brand awareness doesn’t have to be complicated. You just have to identify the brand awareness metrics that best align with your campaign goals, strategies, and platforms. Whether you’re looking to boost brand visibility, increase social media engagement, or drive website referral traffic, there are plenty of metrics you can use to track your performance.
Also, remember that brand awareness measurement is an ongoing endeavor. It’s important to continuously monitor your brand awareness KPIs and adapt your strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
With native advertising platforms like Taboola, for example, you can access advanced targeting options and analytics to optimize your campaigns for maximum impact and unlock new opportunities to drive brand awareness.
