10 brand metrics to track your performance

Branding and rebranding can be tricky. There are several factors to consider. Then, when your brand is ready, you need to make sure it performs to your – and your customers’ – expectations. But how do you quantify your brand’s performance? What metrics best express how your brand is fulfilling its goals? The right metrics will give you a deeper understanding of how your brand is faring compared to your competitors and meeting customer needs. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at brand metrics, along with our list of the 10 metrics you need to monitor in order to track your brand performance.

Data is an important driver for numerous aspects of marketing. Brand metrics are quantifiable measures of brand performance and health. And you must keep monitoring these metrics to stay on top of trends, watch for indicators that you need to make changes, and learn how your competitors are faring. 

Tracking these metrics allows you to measure the impact of your marketing strategies and campaigns. It can also provide feedback on your brand health and the effectiveness of your overall brand strategy. Simply launching your brand without tracking metrics puts you at a distinct disadvantage.

When you measure and track brand metrics, you have a quantifiable calculation of how your brand performs for your customers and against your competitors. Keeping tabs on brand metrics ensures that you can see when you are succeeding and catch any slight downward trends that may need to be acted on immediately, before they affect your brand health.

Brand metrics are also useful when you need ‘hard numbers’ to present to leadership. You can justify your spending on campaigns and demonstrate the value of your marketing team with a clear presentation of quantifiable data.

What should you look for in terms of brand metrics? The best metrics meet the requirements of the SMART framework. They should be strategic, market-driven, actionable, repeatable and account for all of the touchpoints throughout the customer journey. 

Let’s take a closer look at the SMART requirements:

Strategic

The metrics that you choose should be aligned with your organisation’s strategic objectives and goals. Without this alignment, the metric is meaningless.

Market-driven

The metric must be measured through the lens of the market. Internal company metrics should not be measured for brand performance data. You’re looking for external metrics that measure brand performance for customers and against competitors. 

Actionable

Metrics must offer guidance for action. If no action is associated with the metric, it isn’t a valuable measure for your brand. In other words, if you measure a metric and you have no way to exert an impact on the metric if it changes, it’s not a good metric for brand performance. 

Repeatable

A metric is only valuable if it is consistent and repeatable. This helps to create benchmarks and measure trends.

Touchpoints

Metrics should include all aspects and touchpoints of the customer experience. You need to understand how your customers are affected upon every interaction with your brand.

If a brand metric meets all of the SMART criteria, it’s a beneficial metric for you to track.

There are three categories of brand metrics: performance, perception and behaviour. Understanding the categories will give you an insight into the metrics that fall under each one. With that knowledge, you can choose a balanced group of metrics for measuring your brand performance.

How is your brand performing relative to your business goals? Performance metrics evaluate how customers feel and think about your brand and how your brand is performing financially. 

Brand performance metrics are affected by your brand’s ability to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. They evaluate how your customers act on their perceptions of your brand. Do they return to purchase again? Do they become a loyal customer? Or are they subject to churn?

Financial metrics provide hard data about how your products and services are producing company revenue. How your customers feel about your brand has a direct impact on the financial metrics.

Measurements of performance include:

How do customers view your brand? Are they aware of you? Are you relevant to them? Understanding how your brand is perceived by your target market is another important metric.

According to recent research from Nielson, the need to drive brand awareness has never been more important. The perception of your brand directly affects how people feel about your brand and, therefore, how they think and act. Stronger perceptions influence purchasing behaviours. This adds value to your business.

Currently, brand perception is strongly influenced by social media. Your customers are looking for product reviews, brand interaction, feedback and other social interactions in order to make their purchasing decisions. Your social presence has an impact on your brand performance, awareness and consideration.

Your brand perceptions and associations eventually add up to your brand equity, which is the additional value your business achieves through having a recognisable name.

Measurements of perception include:

Although behaviour metrics can be used internally, you’ll remember that our SMART guidelines tell us that we must only consider market-driven metrics. These include customer experience and reinforcement of your brand value proposition. 

There are several things that you can do to affect behaviour metrics. Improving your perceived authority and visibility within your industry will encourage your customers to pay attention to your brand, seek out your products and engage with your company.

Some actions that you can take to improve behaviour metrics include, but are not limited to:

Behaviour metrics include:

The following 10 brand metrics are the ones that we at SurveyMonkey feel are the best for tracking brand performance. They tick all the boxes for SMART metrics and fall into one of the categories we mentioned above. Let’s discuss each metric, how it’s measured and why you need to use it.

What is brand awareness? Quite simply, it’s the extent to which people in your target market are familiar with your brand. 

Brand awareness is measured by two basic metrics: unaided brand recall and aided brand recognition. In unaided brand recall, you measure the number of people who think of your brand in association when asked about a particular industry or category. In aided brand recognition, you measure the number of people who recognise your brand from a list of other brand names. 

This is a particularly useful metric because it helps create benchmarks for your brand equity and also the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. 

What experiences and thoughts do people associate with your brand? With those associations in mind, what do they expect from your brand? You can measure everything from the expectation of durable, high-quality products to associations with sustainability, DEI and authenticity. 

Brand associations and attributes will help shape your brand identity, support your brand positioning and give you an edge over your competitors. Ensure that your associations are relevant, consistent, in line with your positioning and credible. They need to meet these criteria to add value to your brand strategy.

Measure brand associations with Likert scale questions asking survey participants to rate how much they agree with statements about your brand. You may even discover some new associations.

Monitor your brand associations to make sure they continue to align with your most desirable attributes.

Do your customers have favourable opinions about your brand? We mentioned perception as one of the categories of metrics that you need, and it is a measurable metric in itself. Brand perception metrics measure opinion and sentiment towards your brand. 

Measure brand perception with customer satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter® Score (NPS) surveys and brand perception surveys. Use our brand perception survey template as a starting point. It’s fully customisable, and you can quickly get started with tracking this vital metric.

We can’t stress enough the importance of tracking your brand perception. How your customers think and feel about your brand affects every part of your business. 

When a customer chooses your brand, regardless of price or convenience, you’ve achieved brand loyalty. Customers who are loyal to your brand become brand ambassadors, recommending you to others in your target market. 

The gold standard measure of brand loyalty is the NPS. This distinctive single-question survey is best coupled with some clarifying questions to obtain the most valuable and actionable information. Other ways to measure brand loyalty include questions that reveal purchase intent, brand esteem and brand trust. 

Factors influencing brand loyalty include customer experience, product satisfaction, brand perception and identifying with brand values.

‘On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?’

With this one question, you can swiftly determine how your customers feel about your brand. Your Net Promoter Score will show you how many of your customers are promoters, passives or detractors. Your clarifying questions will help you identify actionable areas for improvement.

Try out our NPS survey template to get started. When you gather your data, our custom dashboard will do the NPS calculation for you and present the results in a way that's easy to view and present to others.

Because your NPS is a direct reflection of your loyal customers, it’s a crucial metric to track.

How do your customers actually make purchases from your brand? Metrics for brand usage reveal insights into the frequency of purchase (how often), how purchases are made (where and when), purchase quantities (how much) and share of wallet (percentage of a customer’s spending on a type of product that goes to one company).

Brand usage data is gathered via survey questions that ask for the particulars of respondents’ shopping habits in relation to your brand and your brand’s products.

Are your customers satisfied with your products, customer service and brand in general? Measure the extent to which your customers are satisfied with your brand, products and services by asking customer satisfaction survey questions. These questions can be open or closed questions that target customer sentiment. Use a variety of questions to pinpoint areas for improvement in product development, customer service, etc. 

Have you managed to create high brand equity? Brand equity is the additional value that a brand generates by having a recognisable name when compared to a generic equivalent. Brand perception is the most critical component of brand equity.  

The value of brand equity may be tangible or intangible. Positive brand equity will manifest through word-of-mouth referrals and repeat customers. The increases in sales lead to tangible proof of brand equity through high revenue and profits. Intangible benefits are qualitative, such as awareness and positive perception of your brand.

Measure equity with brand awareness, perception, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty survey questions.

Track the number of customers who prefer to buy a product from your brand rather than a similar product from a competitor. It’s a simple metric that should be followed to determine trends and keep a lookout for significant changes.

This is accomplished with a simple question asking which product the survey respondent prefers to purchase, with a list of choices including your brand’s product and those of your competitors.

Market share is a measurement of your brand position relative to your competitors. Growth in market share for your brand equals a decline for the competition. Measuring market share against your competitors and the industry overall ensures that you see any indicators of change and can act accordingly.

Your brand’s market share can be calculated by dividing its total sales or revenue by the industry’s total sales over a fiscal period.

Look over the metrics. Now take a look at your business objectives. Consider which metrics are the most relevant to your brand right now, at this point in your business’s journey. Do the metrics that you’re considering align with the SMART framework? Which metrics will you want as benchmarks as your brand grows?

If you’ve reached this point and concluded that this sounds like a little too much to work out and keep track of, we can help. Our Brand Tracker monitors the relevant metrics that you need to know in order to view trends, gain insights and monitor your brand health. Awareness, perception and more are measured over time for dynamic insights into how your brand evolves. The Brand Tracker provides our AI-powered insights to save you from having to pore over the numbers. A custom dashboard displays relevant data to share with your team in clear, visually dynamic graphs and charts. 

Monitor brand health, awareness, perception, reputation, competitive threats and more, all in one place, with our Brand Tracker.

Brand metrics are vital for tracking your brand’s performance. You must monitor performance, perception and behaviour metrics to truly understand where your brand is now, where you need it to be and how it is progressing along the way.

If you’re managing multiple types of surveys and questions, and analysing data isn’t something you’re looking forward to, give the SurveyMonkey Brand Tracker a try. It measures all of the relevant metrics, uses AI to analyse the data, and then puts it all into a customisable dashboard for you. 

And if you’re in need of other market research solutions, such as idea screening, product concept analysis and price sensitivity testing, we’re here to help. 

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.