How to measure brand awareness: 4 key metrics to watch

You know that feeling when you see a brand symbol or a logo and instantly know what it stands for? That’s the power of brand awareness. But creating that kind of recognition doesn’t happen accidentally—it requires careful measurement and analysis.

Understanding how to measure brand awareness is critical to building a brand that resonates with your audience. It helps you ‌track your progress, spot trends, and make smart decisions to enhance your brand’s visibility and impact.

This blog will guide you in understanding the public perception of your brand—especially among your target markets—and show you how to leverage those insights to cultivate a resilient brand identity.

How to measure brand awareness: 4 ways to find out what your customers are thinking

Measuring how well people know your brand is essential to see if it’s making an impact. Here are four different brand awareness metrics, plus accompanying measurement strategies, to get a clear idea of the impact of your marketing efforts.

1. Customer sentiment

Understanding how to measure brand awareness starts with discovering what your consumers truly think of you. It’s essential to form strong emotional connections with your target audience in order to build and maintain high brand awareness and loyalty.

Emotional connections can range from primarily positive associations to deep lasting bonds. At the most basic level, consumers may have a general positive feeling about your brand, such as finding it likable or trustworthy. If the emotional connection is deeper, consumers may identify with your brand’s values, personality, and story, and may even see your brand as an extension of their identity.

The strongest emotional connections are characterized by a sense of shared purpose, and belonging. Consumers at this level feel a deep affinity for your brand and are more likely to become brand advocates, actively promoting your brand to others.

To effectively leverage the power of emotional connections, it’s essential to measure and monitor the emotional landscape of your brand. Below are three critical methods for measuring emotional connections.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis tools analyze online conversations and reviews and social media mentions of your brand using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. By studying the language and context of these interactions, sentiment analysis can provide a high-level overview of the overall emotional response to your brand.

Social listening tools like Brandwatch and Hootsuite offer robust sentiment analysis capabilities, allowing you to track sentiment over time, identify key drivers of positive and negative sentiment, and benchmark your brand against competitors.

No matter the tools you choose, it’s crucial to establish clear sentiment categories—such as positive, neutral, and negative—and establish specific guidelines for each. This helps train the sentiment analysis tool to better understand and accurately interpret the nuances of language and context that are unique to your particular industry. Combine automated sentiment analysis with your own manual review to validate findings and gain deeper insights.

What kind of insights can you gain from sentiment analysis?

Here’s what the results of a sample sentiment analysis can look like:

• 65% of mentions are positive, 20% neutral, and 15% negative
• Key drivers of positive sentiment: product quality, customer service
• Key drivers of negative sentiment: shipping delays, website usability

Such information allows you to refine your strategies, enhance customer experiences, and address pain points to strengthen your brand’s reputation and engagement.

Brand association tests

Brand association tests focus on uncovering the specific emotional attributes and qualities consumers associate with your brand name. These tests typically involve quantitative and qualitative methods—such as surveys with emotional attribute lists or rating scales, open-ended questions, focus groups, and even word association games—to uncover subconscious emotional associations that may not be readily apparent through direct questioning.

Brand awareness surveys often ask questions like “How does our brand make you feel?” or “What emotions do you associate with our brand?” to gather feedback on the feelings evoked by various brand touchpoints, like viewing advertisements, using the products themselves, or the customer experience.

For example, a brand association test could have questions like these:

• On a scale of 1 to 5, how strongly do you associate Brand X with each of the following emotional attributes? (Provide a list of emotions.)
• If Brand X were a person, how would you describe them? (e.g., friendly, ambitious, down-to-earth)
• Think about your most recent experience with Brand X. How did it make you feel? Select all that apply: happy, satisfied, excited, disappointed, frustrated, angry
• When you saw our latest commercial for Brand X, what emotions did you feel? Select all that apply: joyful, nostalgic, inspired, bored, annoyed, indifferent

When you’re running a brand association test, it’s crucial to make sure that your list of emotional attributes covers everything relevant to your brand and industry. It’s also good to include both positive and negative emotions so you can really understand how consumers feel about your brand.

Additionally, when deciding how to measure brand awareness, you could use a scale where participants rate their emotional intensity from 1 to 10 for joy, trust, fear, and surprise—or even use emojis to pinpoint their emotions. Having a variety of questions helps ensure that the emotional data gathered is nuanced and more accurately reflects genuine consumer sentiment.

You can compare the results from brand association tests across different consumer personas and demographics to find out how to make stronger emotional connections.

One way to use this information is to create targeted ads for individual demographics. For example, to target local audiences, you can use Yelp Spotlight to share timely messaging and promotions in a variety of formats on the Yelp app homepage and your Yelp Business Page. By leveraging the Yelp Spotlight feature, your promotions can reach a highly engaged local audience, driving more interactions and conversions.

What kind of insights can you gain from brand association tests?

Brand association tests can help gather insights like:

• 80% describe your brand as friendly and approachable
• 60% view your brand as innovative and cutting-edge
• 20% experience frustration or disappointment with specific touchpoints
• 5% feel inspired and empowered by your brand’s message

Understanding this information allows you to align your messaging and customer interactions with the perceptions and emotions that resonate most with your audience.

2. Brand salience

Brand salience refers to the degree to which your brand is top of mind for your target audience when they think of your product category or a particular need that you fulfill. It’s a crucial aspect of brand awareness measurement, directly influencing consumer choice and purchase decisions. When your brand is well-known and memorable, consumers are more likely to think of it first when they want to make a purchase, giving you a significant advantage over competitors.

Here are a few different ways to measure your brand salience.

Unaided brand recall surveys

One of the most effective ways to measure brand salience is through unaided brand recall surveys. These surveys ask respondents to list the brands that come to mind for a specific product category or need, without providing any prompts or cues.

To measure brand salience, use platforms like SurveyMonkey to conduct unaided brand recall surveys, asking questions like:

• Can you list the top three brands you associate with [product category]?
• When you consider purchasing [product category], which brands immediately come to mind?
• Which [product category] brands do you remember seeing advertisements for?
• Which brands would you recommend to a friend if they were looking for [product category]?

Ensure your survey participants represent your target audience, and analyze the number of people who mention your brand first or within the top three choices to assess your brand’s credibility and visibility.

What kind of insights can you gain from unaided brand recall surveys?

You can gain insights into how much your target consumers remember and associate your brand with your category. Insights can show, for example, that 40% of your target audience mentions your brand first when talking about your product category and 25% would recommend your brand to people looking for one of your products.

Brand recognition tests

Brand recognition tests assess how well consumers can identify your brand with visual cues, such as on logos, packaging, or advertisements. The speed and accuracy with which respondents identify your brand can indicate the level of your brand’s exposure.

You can conduct brand recognition tests using online survey platforms that allow for visual stimuli, presenting respondents with logos or advertisements to identify your brand. When designing brand recognition tests, ensure that the visual cues you use—like logos or advertisements—represent your brand and are well-known by your target audience. Ask questions like:

• Which brand does this logo represent?
• Please take a look at this advertisement. Which brand is being promoted?
• Here are three product packages. Please identify the brand of each package as quickly as possible.

Analyze the speed and accuracy of responses to gauge the strength of your brand recognition.

What kind of insights can you gain from brand recognition tests?

Here’s what the results of a brand recognition test can look like:

• 75% accurately identified your logo within three seconds
• 25% identified your advertisement from just the jingle without a visual aid

You can use these insights to refine your branding strategies, ensuring your logo and messaging are memorable and impactful to your target audience.

Brand lift studies

Brand lift studies measure the impact of specific marketing campaigns or initiatives on brand awareness. These studies involve surveying a control group and an exposed group to assess the incremental change in brand metrics resulting from exposure to your campaign.

You can also use an advertisement platform’s built-in tools to measure brand lift. For instance, you can get detailed insights into the performance of your Yelp campaigns with Yelp’s brand lift partner solutions like Upwave, Kantar, and Dynata.

What kind of insights can you gain from brand lift studies?

Here’s what the results of a brand lift study may look like:

• 20% increase in brand awareness directly attributable to your recent digital marketing strategy
• 30% improvement in ad recall among the exposed group
• 15% rise in purchase intent following campaign exposure

Share of voice

When figuring out how to measure brand awareness, make sure to calculate your brand’s share of voice (SOV), or how much people talk about your brand compared to your competitors. It’s an essential way of tracking brand awareness by monitoring how well you capture people’s attention and engagement in your industry. To measure SOV, track your social media engagement, like the frequency and context of mentions of your brand and mentions of your competitors across social media platforms, websites, and other online channels. You can use tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Mention.

A high SOV means people talk about and engage with your brand more than with your competitors. This is a sign of your strong brand awareness efforts. Use SOV insights to understand your brand image and where you could improve your engagement efforts.

What kind of insights can you gain from SOV?

You can get insightful details into how much your brand is a part of the online conversations among your target consumers. SOV insights, for instance, may show that your brand leads industry conversations by 30% for certain keywords.

Branded search volume and direct traffic

Monitoring the volume of branded queries and your direct traffic on search engines is crucial for assessing your brand’s salience. Direct traffic is when people type in your URL to visit your website instead of going through a search engine.

Tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, and Ahrefs allow you to track the search volume for your brand and related keywords over time, as well as the total number of people who have landed directly on your website.

A high volume of searches for your brand keywords and direct traffic to your website indicates a strong brand recall, demonstrating that consumers actively seek out your brand.

What kind of insights can you gain from branded search volume and direct traffic?

Here are some sample insights you can get from analyzing your branded search volume and direct traffic:

• 35% of branded search volume has increased by a certain percentage over the last quarter
• 20% of your website visits come from users typing in your URL directly

You can use these findings to enhance your brand’s visibility and engagement strategies, driving even more direct traffic and brand loyalty.

3. Brand advocacy

Brand advocacy represents the ultimate level of brand awareness when consumers transform into active promoters of your brand. To really measure the impact of customer advocacy, you have to look at it from multiple angles. Here are a few essential ways to measure brand advocacy.

Referral tracking

Referral tracking is about measuring how many new customers come from recommendations. Set up referral programs that reward your loyal customers for bringing in more new customers using tools like ReferralCandy or Ambassador to measure referral traffic. These platforms allow you to create a tailored referral link for each customer.

When someone uses their link to make a purchase, the original customer gets a reward, and you can track the sale back to them. This lets you see exactly how many sales each customer is driving. This method is most suited for B2B businesses or tech-based businesses.

What kind of insights can you gain from referral tracking?

Here’s an example of what the analysis from referral tracking can look like:

• 30% of new customers come from referrals
• 50% of referral-driven sales are attributed to loyal customers

These insights empower you to strengthen your referral programs and nurture relationships with loyal customers, maximizing the impact of word-of-mouth marketing.

Customer reviews and testimonials

Customer reviews and testimonials are crucial since they’re often the first thing potential customers look at online.

So use tools like ReviewTrackers or Brandwatch to monitor reviews. These platforms aggregate reviews from various sources such as Google, Yelp, and industry-specific sites, providing a comprehensive view of your brand’s online presence.

Utilize the tools’ built-in features to analyze sentiment and measure overall brand perception. Take note of mentions of your products, services, or brand slogans in reviews, and compare your review volume and sentiment with competitors in your industry to gain a relative measure of brand awareness.

You can further leverage the insights you gain from your reviews to plan advertising campaigns. Are you noticing a common misconception about your product or service frequently surfacing in reviews? This might be a good indication that you need to run a campaign to correct the record.

Or is there a feature or benefit that seems to resonate with customers? It may be a good focus area for advertising. To help you distribute your new ad campaign, use tailored approaches like Yelp Audiences to target specific consumer segments across the web and connected TV. This targeted approach ensures that your marketing efforts reach the most relevant audiences, boosting your brand’s visibility and engagement.

What kind of insights can you gain from customer reviews?

You can get direct information on the perception of your brand among your audience. Here are a few examples of what that could look like:

• 70% of reviews are positive, indicating a strong brand perception
• Your brand has a higher review volume than 40% of competitors

You can use these results to guide your brand’s reputation management efforts and highlight areas for improvement to further enhance customer satisfaction.

Earned media

Earned media is the publicity you get through word-of-mouth, press coverage, or organic social media mentions. Unlike paid media (like ads) or owned media (like your Instagram profile), it’s when others talk about your brand independently. When mentioned positively, it’s a powerful form of brand advocacy to build brand awareness, credibility, and trust.

You can monitor for earned media coverage using public relations tools like Cision or Meltwater. Look at the sentiment of the mentions (positive, neutral, or negative) and the reach.

High positive earned media shows that your brand has strong advocates. Amplify this by sharing positive press or user posts. Reach out to those who mention you to build relationships and earn backlinks. Earned media not only boosts awareness but can directly influence your marketing campaigns and customer loyalty.

What kind of insights can you gain from earned media?

There are different types of valuable data that you can gather from analyzing earned media. Here’s an example: 40% of earned media mentions of the brand are positive, with a reach of 1 million impressions.

4. Brand archetype

Brand archetypes are like personality types for brands. They represent different human motivations and can help make your brand more interesting and memorable.

By aligning your brand with a specific archetype, you can create a lasting emotional connection with your customers. Let’s break down a few powerful examples:

• The Hero: Think of Nike, which embodies the Hero archetype by empowering its audience to overcome challenges and push themselves to achieve greatness.
• The Rebel: Harley-Davidson is the classic Rebel archetype that challenges the status quo, promoting freedom and defiance against societal norms.
• The Explorer: Red Bull is the classic Explorer brand, which is all about adventure, discovery, and pushing boundaries.

When you connect your brand with a specific archetype, you can tap into deep emotional connections and make your brand more well-known.

Brand archetype surveys, focus groups, and interviews

One effective way to measure brand archetype alignment is through surveys, focus groups, and interviews. These types of interactions can help identify the archetype that best represents your brand, providing valuable insights into how your brand is perceived.

In surveys, use clear descriptions and examples of each archetype to ensure accurate responses.

For example, your survey can include questions like:

• Which of the following statements best describes your perception of our brand?

“This brand empowers me to achieve my goals.” (Hero)

“This brand provides me with valuable insights.” (Sage)

“This brand encourages me to explore new possibilities.” (Explorer)

• What type of person do you think is most likely to use Brand X? (e.g., adventurous, practical, creative)
• If our brand were a character in a movie, which character would it be?

For qualitative research methods like focus groups or interviews, you can ask people to share specific examples and thoughts about your products, which can help pinpoint areas where your brand might not fully embody its archetype.

What kind of insights can you gain from brand archetype surveys, focus groups, and interviews?

Here’s what the results of a brand archetype survey, focus group, or interview can look like:

• 55% of consumers identify your brand as the Hero archetype—based on the idea that your brand empowers them to achieve their goals
• 25% of consumers see your brand as the Sage—based on the opinion that your brand offers valuable insights
• These insights can inform your brand storytelling and marketing strategies and help connect with your consumers on a deeper emotional level.

Social media listening

Keeping an eye on what people say about your brand on social media can give you great insights. Pay attention to the language and pictures, if any, that people use when discussing your brand. This can help you see if your brand’s personality connects with your audience.

For instance, if you notice that lots of social media users are making reference to your brand as being “adventurous” or “daring,” it might mean that your brand is similar to the Explorer archetype (think brands like Jeep or Patagonia). On the other hand, if people often mention how “imaginative” or “creative” your brand is, it might show a stronger connection with the Creator archetype (like brands such as IKEA or Levi’s).

What kind of insights can you gain from social media listening?

The following are some examples of what social media listening can reveal:

• 40% of social media mentions describe your brand as “adventurous” or “daring,” aligning with the Explorer archetype
• 30% of mentions highlight your brand as “imaginative” or “creative,” similar to the words used to describe the Creator archetype

By leveraging this information, you can refine your social media strategies and ensure your brand’s messaging resonates with the sentiments and expectations of your audience.

Brand awareness is  the first step toward sustainable growth

Knowing how to measure brand awareness isn’t just about numbers; it’s about understanding your audience and building lasting connections. With the right tools and a strategic approach, you can use these insights in your brand awareness campaigns to help improve your reach and to increase your leads and conversions.

Make sure to use a variety of consumer research methods like tests, surveys, and analysis to understand customer sentiment, brand salience, brand advocacy, and brand archetype for better brand recognition.

You can further improve your reach and visibility by implementing these brand awareness strategies based on the metrics and results from your analysis.