Brand Tracking Metrics You Can't Live Without

The concept of brand tracking is seen around us every day.

You’ve chosen your Mortal Kombat fighter and you’re ready to rumble. A swift kick, a powerful punch, and that secret combo special chips away at your opponent’s health. But their attacks do just as much damage. 

Your eyes are glued to the health bar of your fighter as well as your foe’s. Whoever’s health reaches 0 first loses, and you want to be the victor.

You don’t need a physical health bar to track your brand, but you certainly can put one together. 

Brand tracking is all about checking the health of your brand’s performance. Is it sticking with your intended audience? Are your marketing campaigns making a dent?

What Actually is Brand Tracking?

Brand tracking measures the effectiveness of your brand performance across the board. It’s a temperature check of your brand’s health, as well as that of your competitors and the overall market.  Understanding that allows your team to tweak your marketing efforts. 

It’s also another way to get to know your target audience better. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.

Let’s break down the benefits of brand tracking. 

• Brand performance over time. Is your brand making an impact? Has it grown overtime or remained stagnant? Are people even aware of your brand at all? Knowing where you stand as a brand and whether you’ve seen growth can impact the business decisions you make. 
• Understanding your brand’s value. What sets you apart from your competitors? Are you providing a service or product that addresses a customer’s needs? You’ll want to find out what your brand excels at and lean into that, especially if it differentiates you from all the others in your market.
• Building trust with your customers. Like we said, tracking your brand allows more contact with your target audience. The more you seek them and their opinions out, the more they’ll see you as a trusted brand. Trust goes a long way to making a brand stick in the minds of an audience.

3 Key Metrics for Brand Tracking

When it comes to brand tracking, there isn’t one size fits all. You have to decide what metrics are important to growing your brand. What works for an early-stage company might not be relevant to a dinosaur in the industry. 

What we’ve done is list out some key metrics you might want to consider. Think of it as a menu of metrics, all of which roll up into your overall brand experience .

But these are metrics you’re going to want to measure sooner or later. We’ve even put together some templates to help get you started.

Brand Awareness 

Measuring your brand awareness [link to measuring brand awareness] is a vital metric for performance. The more people know and talk about your brand, the better. It can mean more conversions or even more investment dollars. 

Bottom line: this is a KPI that brings in the money. When you track this metric, you want to be aware of three other elements: 

• Brand Recall. This is where someone thinks of your brand without a prompt. It just pops into their head when they think of needing a product or service in your particular space.
• Brand Recognition Does someone know your brand by sight after they see something, like your logo, associated with it? 
• Top-of-Mind Awareness. Here you want to measure whether your brand is the first thing people think of when they need a product in your industry. If you’re in the top 3 products mentioned, you’re doing pretty well. 

Brand Perception 

How does one think and feel about your brand? What are the feelings that come up when people think of your brand? Are they warm and fuzzy? 

Every interaction someone has with a brand adds up to their overall perception of it. Here are the elements that make up brand perception: 

• Visual. The aesthetic someone first encounters with a brand. If done well, visuals also communicate a brand’s personality and identity. Can people pick you brand out of a line up by visuals alone? 
• Experiential. This is how a brand experience startles a person’s senses. Is your brand experience memorable? Or is it forgettable? 
• Value Alignment. What does your brand stand for? People flock to brands that share similar values to theirs. Do you and your target audience have any shared values? 
• Quality. Are you providing a quality product or service? One that has value to your customers? In other words, does your product live up to its promises? 
• Reputation and Legacy. Does your brand have a long-lasting reputation? Is it something that a customer is likely to pass on to their children? Does your brand have what it takes to stay the course? And what kind of reputation precedes it? 

Brand Equity 

How much sway does your brand actually have among your target audience? Here is where you want to measure whether your brand is seared into the minds of customers. You’ll also want to look into how much that influences buying decisions.

You can measure brand equity with this handy cheat sheet, known as the Customer-Based Brand Equity Model, or CBBE for short.

• Identity. What is associated with your brand identity? What do people remember about it? 
• Meaning.Does your product or service perform as advertised? Is your service effective? Is it the right price?
• Response. This goes back to brand perception. How does your target audience think and feel about your brand?
  Resonance. Does your brand stick with your audience? Does it resonate with them at all? 

Putting it All Together 

With any or all of those metrics, you’ll want to analyze the results and put it all together. You’ll want to examine the trends and changes both to your brand and the greater market. 

We’ve put together a list of tools you can use to help crunch the data here in this nifty Brand Analysis guide. 

Brand Analysis Template

You can also get started on your Brand Analysis in Helio with our easy peasy template. Give it a try!