Whether you are thinking about marketing for a big or a small company, you will have to work on branding. Bringing your company closer to your audience and building awareness ultimately depends on it. The question is: what are the most relevant branding KPIs and metrics you need to establish and monitor?

Key brand tracking KPIs

Measuring brand health is complicated because it involves qualitative and quantitative metrics. However, focusing on the following aspects will help to put your brand on the right path.

  • Brand awareness refers to consumers’ ability to recognize a brand and associate it with its products or services.
  • Brand associations are consumers’ thoughts and feelings toward your brand.
  • Brand intent focuses on learning whether a consumer would prefer to use one brand over another. 
  • Brand experience refers to general like or dislike of a brand.
  • Behavioral KPIs measure how people interact with a business outside of pure purchase behavior.
  • Purchase KPIs focus on measuring how people interact with a business in terms of purchase behavior
  • Financial KPIs are often regarded as sales KPIs, but they matter to marketers, too. They measure the impact of the brand in material terms.

KPIs to measure brand awareness

  • Top-of-mind awareness: could be prompted or unprompted and evaluates whether your potential customers remember your brand.
  • Brand recognition: the capacity of your potential customers to name your brand when presented with a brand asset (e.g. your logo).
  • Advertising recall: customers’ ability to remember or describe a brand’s ad.

Evaluating brand associations

  • Functional associations: Rational or logical traits that consumers have ascribed to the brand (e.g.value for money)
  • Emotive associations: Irrational or sentimental traits that customers have ascribed to the brand.

Brand intent: What to analyze

  • Consideration: refers to the percentage of consumers that would consider using a brand to address their needs.
  • Preference: consumers that would prefer using a brand among a group of others.

Brand experience: What to measure

  • Net promoter score: A score between -100 and +100 that compares the percentage of detractors to promoters. In other words: people who would and would not recommend your brand.
  • Customer satisfaction: Rates how satisfied a customer is about a specific interaction.
  • Customer effort score:  The score that measures how much effort was needed for a customer to use the product or service. It also measures how likely it is that customers continue paying for it.
  • Sentiment: A percentage score that compares favorable conversations with unfavorable ones on social media.
  • Net trust score: The score that measures how much customers trust your brand.

Behavioral KPIs are relevant for branding, too

  • Website activity: number of visits, sessions, session duration, average time on page, bounce rate, etc.
  • Ad click-through rate: The number of times an ad is shown divided by the clicks.
  • Email performance: deliverability, open rate and click rate.
  • Social mentions: Total number of times that a brand is actively mentioned on various social media channels.
  • Share of voice: Refers to the brand’s share of paid advertising in a competitive space, but it can also include organic search term volumes.

Purchase KPIs: The nitty gritty

  • Usage: Percentage of people using a brand among a specific audience.
  • Recency: How recently specific customers have purchased.
  • Frequency: Average number of times customers purchase within a time range.
  • Value: Average value of customer purchases in that time.
  • Conversion rate: Percentage of visits that result in a sale. 

Last but not least: Financial KPIs

  • Market share: Purchases made with a company in comparison to the wider market.
  • Sales volumes. Total number of products or services sold over a given period of time.
  • Sales revenue. Total value of the sales in that time.
  • Cost per acquisition: How much it costs to acquire a customer. 
  • Customer lifetime value: Average total expenditure of a customer over the entire time of their interactions with the brand.

What are the most relevant KPIs in marketing?

Marketing KPIs include purchase, behavioural and financial KPIs, as well as brand association, experience, awareness and intent.

How do I choose the best KPIs for my marketing campaign?

Since there are a lot of different KPIs, the ones you should choose will depend on your marketing goals and what you’re trying to achieve.