What is brand tracking?
Brand tracking is the ongoing measurement of a brand’s health over time. It asks the same audience-representative questions at regular intervals, so you can see how awareness, perception, consideration and loyalty change, and what’s driving those changes. Brand trackers are usually run as surveys and benchmarked against competitors. Good brand tracking will highlight which brand initiatives work well, impacting sales positively, as well as identifying those which don’t, so those can be targeted and improved.
Key takeaways
- Core metrics cover the brand funnel: awareness, consideration, associations, preference, usage, purchase, loyalty, perceived quality and NPS.
- Most brands track quarterly. Fast-moving categories often track continuously, and slower ones semi-annually or annually.
- Consistency is everything. Keep your sample, questions and timing the same each wave so results stay comparable.
- Brand tracking measures long-term trends through surveys, while brand monitoring follows real-time mentions. Most brands need both.
Why brand tracking matters
Brand tracking matters because brand strength drives commercial results. Strong brands earn more awareness, can charge higher prices and keep customers longer. Without regular tracking, you can’t tell whether that strength is growing or eroding.
McKinsey’s 2021 study of more than 5,300 industrial brands found that the most visible brands command price premiums of 5–10%. Companies in the top quartile for brand visibility also earned about 30% higher return on invested capital than those in the bottom quartile.
Consumer perceptions of your brand can be the difference between:
- Instant trust or instant skepticism
- Charging a premium or discounting your price
- Attracting A-level employees or B-level employees
- Hitting goals or missing goals
So how do you become a strong brand? The first step is to invest in brand tracking research. In a 2017 survey of 150 B2B marketing executives by brand consultancy Spencer Brenneman, 82% of organizations that increased their brand investment said it paid off, most commonly through more sales and new customers. Companies that paired that investment with continual research saw even stronger results.
With so much at stake, it’s important to implement brand tracking.
What are the benefits of tracking your brand?
Brand tracking shows whether your brand is getting stronger or weaker over time, what’s causing the change and how you compare with competitors. That lets you measure marketing impact, spot problems before they affect sales and find new growth opportunities.
A brand is nothing without its customers. It’s essential to listen to them. Brand tracking gathers customer feedback, analyzes the data, and identifies what matters to them. This enables you to improve your product or service in line with customers’ needs and wants.
Brand tracking also helps you:
- Measure and evaluate performance
- Make comparisons
- Test strategies
- Uncover new opportunities
- Keep an eye on competitors
By continuously tracking your brand, you will also be able to assess (and report on) its performance over time – is it performing better or worse than before? A real-time tracking process can flag up issues before they become a problem, and highlight where things are doing well.
And with mobile devices, apps and social media, customer engagement with a brand now happens through a multitude of channels and touchpoints. These are a challenge to collate, but the right brand tracking metrics will be able to aggregate them for analysis.
By continuously collecting qualitative and quantitative data from your customers, you will be able to assess brand health constantly and adapt your marketing and brand strategies accordingly.
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Brand tracking vs. brand monitoring
Brand tracking measures how people perceive your brand over time, usually through recurring surveys. Brand monitoring watches what’s being said about your brand in real time across social media, news and review sites. Most brands need both. Monitoring catches issues as they happen, and tracking shows whether they have lasting impact.
| Brand tracking | Brand monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Measure long-term brand health and trends | Catch real-time mentions and emerging issues |
| Main data source | Recurring surveys of a consistent sample | Social listening, news, reviews, forums |
| Timeframe | Weeks, months, years | Minutes, hours, days |
| Questions it answers | Is awareness growing? How do we compare with competitors? | What are people saying about us right now? |
| Typical cadence | Quarterly, semi-annually or continuous | Always on |
| Best for | Strategy, campaign effectiveness, competitive position | Reputation management, crisis response, quick wins |
What metrics should a brand tracker measure?
The core brand tracking metrics are brand awareness (aided and unaided), consideration, brand associations, brand preference, usage, purchase, loyalty, perceived quality and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Together they cover the brand funnel, from first awareness through purchase to advocacy.
Measuring your brand health with a brand tracking study allows you to not only understand the commercial value of your brand but also to record changes and optimize your strategy to get the most from it.
You need to measure your brand regularly. This allows you to track key metrics over time and learn what’s driving any improvements. Many companies run a brand tracking study quarterly, although if you’re running new advertising campaigns more regularly than this, it’s a good idea to increase the frequency so you can see how they’re contributing to your brand.
Key measures to track as part of your brand tracking studies include:
Net promoter score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand. It gets right to the point of what you need to know:
On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [brand] to your family and friends?
Brand loyalty
Brand loyalty provides a view of how likely a customer is to continue to buy from, or interact with, your brand. It’s usually measured by purchase intent and serves as a good marker for how strong your brand is. If it’s strong, customers are much more likely to buy from you again in the future. Elicit feedback from existing customers with the question:
How likely are you to purchase [product or service] from us again?
Brand awareness
Brand awareness covers two measures – brand recognition and brand recall. Brand recognition is a measure of consumers’ ability to recognize your brand and can be measured as aided awareness (in response to a prompt such as showing a product or brand logo) and unaided awareness (with no prompt). Brand recall is the consumer’s ability to remember the brand, whether after using a product or seeing a piece of advertising. This is a good measure of how a piece of communication has contributed to awareness of the brand in general.
Brand consideration
Brand consideration measures the share of your target audience who would consider buying from your brand the next time they purchase in your category. It sits between awareness and purchase in the brand funnel. A brand with high awareness but low consideration usually has a perception or relevance problem, not a visibility problem. Ask:
Which of the following brands would you consider the next time you buy [product or service]?
Brand associations
Over time, consumers develop perceptions about your brand, and it forms an image in their minds about who you are and what you stand for. By measuring brand association, you can see whether how you want to be seen matches how you’re actually perceived. Be careful to set achievable targets here – your brand tracker should measure what makes you unique. After all, what brand wouldn’t want to be seen as having good products and great customer service? Think about what makes your brand unique – you can look to your brand values if you have any – and try to draw that out in your research. A good way to measure brand associations is through open text feedback. These give consumers the opportunity to leave verbatim feedback without prompting so you can get an accurate view of how they really feel. With the right text analytics software you can analyze those comments and group them by topic to see which associations are the strongest. Use questions such as:
What negative associations do you have with [brand]?
What positive associations do you have with [brand]?
Brand preference
Brand preference is an easily achievable metric that calculates the number of consumers who prefer to buy your branded product over the same product from a brand competitor. It can be simply measured with a list of tick boxes of other brands, and the question:
Tick which brand of [product] you prefer to buy.
Brand usage
Brand usage tells you how often consumers purchase your brand’s product or service. Using tick boxes with your and competing brands, ask the question:
Please select which of the following brands you buy or use regularly.
Brand purchase
Brand purchase identifies previous or existing customers, with the question:
Have you purchased [product] from [our brand] before?
Brand perceived quality
Perceived quality measures how customers rate your product’s performance, reliability, appearance and finish compared with its marketing. You can tailor questions to uncover these.
How to run a brand tracking study
To run a brand tracking study, set clear objectives, choose a consistent set of metrics, survey a representative sample at regular intervals, and benchmark the results over time and against competitors. Here are the steps:
- Set your objectives. Decide which business decisions the tracker will inform, such as campaign investment, positioning, or competitive response. These decisions shape everything that follows.
- Choose your metrics. Select the brand tracking metrics that cover your brand funnel, from awareness and consideration through to purchase, loyalty and advocacy.
- Define your audience and sample. Include your customers, competitors’ customers and prospects across the demographics you target. Set quotas so each wave’s sample is comparable.
- Design your questionnaire. Build a core set of questions that stays the same every wave. Add a short rotating section for campaigns, launches or one-off topics.
- Set your frequency. Most brands track quarterly. Faster-moving categories track continuously, and slower ones semi-annually or annually.
- Field and analyze. Compare results against previous waves and competitors. Look for statistically significant changes, and find what’s driving them.
- Report and act. Share recurring dashboards with stakeholders, and tie each insight to an owner and a next step.
Brand tracking methods
The most common brand tracking method is a recurring online survey of a consistent, representative sample of people in your category. Many brands add social listening, review data and sales data to explain why their metrics move.
Traditional brand tracking studies can be overwhelming. However, once you know what to measure and how to reach your target audience, moving your research in-house or building it from scratch becomes more approachable.
Design your tracker
An effective brand tracker doesn’t need to be overly complex. At its core, your brand tracker should enable you to accomplish the following:
- Keep a pulse on your category and brand. This gives you an understanding of how your brand compares with your competitors, allowing you to gauge your overall brand health and see its performance over time. Use a combination of perception metrics such as awareness, recall, and associations, along with performance metrics like purchase, usage, and loyalty.
- Respond to special circumstances (product updates, promotions, etc.) Brand trackers are a great way to see the success of your marketing activities as well as understand if those activities impact overall brand awareness.
- Visualize trends with a recurring reporting system. Brand trackers are the most effective when you can action the data. When designing your system, be sure to set up recurring reports so you can share crucial time-series data with stakeholders instantly.
- Keep every wave consistent. A brand tracker only works if each wave can be compared with the last. Keep the sample definition and quotas, question wording, answer scales, question order and fieldwork timing the same from wave to wave. If you have to change something, such as adding a competitor or rewording a question, run the old and new versions side by side for one wave. That lets you account for the change instead of mistaking it for a real shift in brand health.
Choose your research platform
A brand tracker needs a research platform that can design, field and analyze the same survey wave after wave, with automated reporting for stakeholders.
From designing the question set to distributing your survey and analyzing the results, you’ll need a research platform to do the heavy lifting.
Look for a platform that gives you the flexibility to change your questions and ask new ones without a lot of complicated work in the back-end system. Your platform should also make the analysis simple; the last thing you want is to have to export it all to a spreadsheet and spend weeks analyzing it yourself.
An Experience Management platform goes further than a basic survey tool. Instead of a snapshot each time you run a study, you can track brand perception continuously across segments and markets, benchmark against key competitors, and get alerted when loyalty signals shift before they show up in sales data. Sentiment analysis across feedback, social media and review sites helps explain why your metrics are moving. And with access to global panels, you can reach the audiences your tracker needs without long recruitment delays.
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Who should you track in your brand study?
A brand tracking study should survey a representative sample of your category: your customers, competitors’ customers and prospects, across the demographics you target.
You’ll need consumers to answer your survey. Panels of respondents are prerequisites for any kind of market research. For a brand-tracking study, make sure you have a good mix of existing customers, prospects, and a wide range of demographics. This allows you to see how your brand is performing with different target groups.
How often should you run brand tracking?
Most brands run their tracker quarterly. Slower-moving categories may track semi-annually or annually, while fast-moving categories and brands with frequent campaigns often track continuously. The right frequency depends on what you track, how fast your market changes, competitor activity, your campaign calendar and unexpected events.
‘How often should we run our brand tracker?’ is one of the most common questions teams ask. Marketing and research teams want to know so they can plan their calendars and workflows. Executives want to know for budgeting. Product teams want to know so they can expect when to get updates on the strength of their brands. Agencies want to know so they can plan campaigns.
A brand tracker’s main value is being able to show you how your brand’s impact in the market has changed over time, across campaigns and during market evolutions. Running a brand tracker one time will only give you a snapshot of where your brand is now, but running it again later (many times) is far more valuable because it shows how your marketing, competitive activity or shifts in consumer behavior are affecting the brand’s impact since the last time you ran the tracker.
The frequency with which you should run your tracker will depend on a few different factors.
Factor 1: What you are tracking
For most brands, tracking is primarily focused on a brand funnel – how efficiently a brand moves buyers from general brand awareness, down to purchase intent, and eventually into loyalty and advocacy. For most brands that track a brand funnel, running a tracker at least annually should provide enough data for them to measure market shifts without spending unnecessary budget resources.
Factor 2: How quickly your market changes
Some markets simply move faster than others. Marketers working on a toothpaste brand probably don’t need to deal with the market velocity that occupies marketers working in high tech. If your industry sees swift changes with fast news cycles, aggressive competitors, changing technology and frequent product innovations, you may need to run a tracker more often – monthly or quarterly.
Factor 3: The entrance of new competitors
The entrance of a major new competitor may merit an ad-hoc new measurement of your brand. The entrance of Red Bull, an Austrian beverage company, into the US market, would have been an excellent time for Coke to run a pre and post-entry brand tracker measuring the impact on Coke’s purchase intent.
Dunkin Donuts’ aggressive move into coffee should have had Starbucks running trackers to gauge the reaction from buyers.
Amazon’s short-lived entrance into the mobile phone market with its Fire phone likely triggered Apple and Samsung to run trackers to understand how the market was changing.
If Blockbuster Video had more effectively anticipated the brand impact of Netflix and video streaming, it may have had time to add its own streaming capabilities to protect its market share rather than going belly up.
The entrance of a major new competitive force should cause you to consider running an impromptu tracker to help guide your reaction decision.
Factor 4: The frequency of your ad campaigns
Brand trackers are not infallible when it comes to measuring the impact of individual marketing campaigns, but when run correctly, they can give you helpful knowledge about which campaigns are moving the needle and which aren’t. You may want to plan brand trackers to run before and after major marketing campaigns to understand how effective your efforts were.
Factor 5: Unexpected events
Some unexpected company events aren’t welcome – like when a celebrity sends out an unfavorable tweet about your brand, or when a customer videos an employee acting inappropriately and it goes viral.
Other unexpected events are welcome – for example if your product gets a shoutout from this year’s biggest popstar. But regardless of whether the event is positive or negative for your brand, it may offer an opportunity for you to run an impromptu brand tracker to understand how it is affecting your brand.
Overall tracking frequency
Most brands run their tracker quarterly. Slower-moving categories may go semi-annually or annually, and fast-moving ones often track continuously. This frequency allows sufficient time in between tracking waves, fits into their research or marketing budget, accounts for normal market events and yields enough data to act on with proper guidance.
Brand tracking FAQs
What is a brand tracker?
A brand tracker is a survey you run repeatedly, with the same core questions and a consistent sample, to measure brand health over time. It typically measures awareness, consideration, associations, preference, usage and loyalty for your brand and its competitors.
How often should you run brand tracking?
Most brands run brand tracking quarterly. Brands in fast-moving categories, or with frequent campaigns, often track continuously. Brands in slower-moving categories may track semi-annually or annually. You may also want to run an extra wave around major campaigns, competitor launches or unexpected events.
What’s the difference between brand tracking and brand monitoring?
Brand tracking uses recurring surveys to measure long-term brand health and trends. Brand monitoring uses social listening and media data to follow real-time mentions. Tracking shows how perception changes over time, and monitoring shows what people are saying right now.
What questions are in a brand tracking survey?
A brand tracking survey usually includes aided and unaided awareness questions, consideration and preference questions, brand association statements, usage and purchase questions, and a loyalty measure such as Net Promoter Score. The core questions stay the same each wave so results can be compared.
How much does brand tracking cost?
Brand tracking costs depend mainly on sample size, the number of markets and languages, how often you track, the cost of panel respondents, and whether you run the program in-house or through an agency.
Can you run brand tracking in-house?
Yes. With a research platform that handles survey design, panel sourcing, analysis and automated reporting, many teams run brand tracking in-house instead of relying entirely on an agency. In-house tracking also makes it easier to add questions quickly when something changes in your market.
