Metrics matter in brand management, but you need to be selective about what brand metrics you use to avoid getting lost in a sea of data. Choosing the right brand metrics means you can make more impactful and strategic business decisions.
Instead of getting bogged down by vanity metrics (looking at you, 10K Instagram followers), you should use tangible metrics that give you insights into how your customers think and feel about your brand.
Let’s take a dive deep into the important brand tracking metrics that will set you up for success.
Contents
What are Brand Metrics?
Different Types of Brand Metrics
Brand Measurement Metrics
How to Use Brand Metrics to Drive Growth
Choosing the Right Brand Metrics
Measuring Brand Health with Meltwater
What are Brand Metrics?
Brand metrics are the vital signs of your brand's health. They’re essential pieces of data that show how others perceive your brand. They will show you whether your brand is thriving or getting lost in the noise.
Learn more about building and maintaining brand loyalty and brand awareness
With brand tracking, sales figures alone are not enough to measure brand performance — they tell a small part of a much bigger story. You also need to consider brand awareness metrics like brand recall, customer engagement, and net promoter score.
These metrics expose nuances about the why behind your sales, giving you an inside look at where your brand excels and where it might fall short.
Measuring brand awareness illustrates how familiar people are with your brand. If they don’t know you, they can’t buy from you. And if they do know you, they also need to trust you before they’re willing to purchase.
Different Types of Brand Metrics
You can sort brand metrics into a few different categories, including:
Sentiment metrics
Understanding public perception of your brand through sentiment metrics can help you manage your brand’s reputation and monitor for potential crises.
You can track brand sentiment through surveys, on social media, and reviews. Brand tracking software like Meltwater can monitor consumer sentiment in real time and show you how people are talking about your brand online.
Sentiment metrics are based on the general tone around how people view and comment on your brand.
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Performance metrics
A brands performance metrics indicate brand health from a profitability and awareness standpoint. Essentially, it measures how you're pacing against your business goals. Metrics to track for brand performance include:
- Revenue
- Market share
- Valuation
- Brand equity
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Retention rate
Marketing metrics
Strong brand marketing is essential for building customer loyalty, which heavily influencers the other metrics on this list. Metrics and marketing KPIs indicate how well your messaging is resonating with current and potential customers.
Consider tracking:
- Social engagement
- Content metrics (such as time-on-page or pages-per-session)
- Email clicks and opens
- A/B test results
For more, check out must have marketing KPIs, email marketing metrics, and content marketing metrics
Reputation metrics
Regularly monitoring your brand reputation means you won't get caught off-guard if a crisis is brewing. Social listening solutions like Meltwater can help you keep tab on your reputation by flagging when a spike in mentions occurs and alerting you in real time.
Learn more about managing brand reputation
Reputation metrics include things like:
- Net Promoter Score
- Online reviews and ratings
- Customer satisfaction
- ESG and DEI standing
10 Brand Success Metrics
Measuring brand awareness and performance can take many forms. We’ve narrowed down 10 essential brand metrics examples to track as part of your wider brand strategy.
Net Promoter Score
Brand Loyalty
Customer Satisfaction
Share of Voice
Brand Recall
Customer Lifetime Value
Brand Trust
Social Media Engagement
Conversion Rate
Brand Associations
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the likelihood of customers purchasing your brand again, on a scale of 1 to 10. It's calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters:
- Scores of 9 or 10 indicate a high likelihood of being repeat customers, or promoters.
- Scores of 7 or 8 are considered neutral.
- Scores of 0-6 are considered detractors.
The higher your NPS, the more positive your customer experience is and your potential for brand advocacy is increased. This is good news for organic growth through word-of-mouth marketing.
Brand Loyalty
Measuring brand consideration metrics like loyalty reveals how much work you might have to do to get customers to keep buying from you. Loyal customers are those who consistently choose your brand over another option.
Typically, loyal customers are less price-sensitive and will provide consistent revenue. They’re also more likely to advocate for your brand and share it with others, which can help you drive more organic growth.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys tell you how satisfied customers are with your product, service, or a recent experience. Your satisfied customers are more likely to stay loyal and share their positive experiences with others.
CSAT, brand loyalty, and brand sentiment all fall under the brand reputation management umbrella. Comparing these metrics can give you a better idea of whether your reputation may be at risk and help you figure out how you can get ahead of it.
Share of Voice
Share of voice refers to how much of a conversation you command compared to other brands. We measure share of voice using social media mentions, PR coverage, and advertising.
A higher share of voice can indicate how much you dominate your industry. The higher the share of voice, the greater the brand awareness and influence.
Brand Recall
Another slice of the brand consideration metrics pie, brand recall refers to your customers’ ability to remember your brand when they’re ready to make a purchase. The higher the brand recall, the more likely you are to be the first company a customer thinks about when making a purchase.
Customer Lifetime Value
One of the most overlooked brand measurement metrics, customer lifetime value (CLV) measures the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the life of the relationship.
A high CLV indicates your brand is doing well at retaining customers. This is key for long-term profitability and reducing customer acquisition costs.
Brand Trust
Customers need confidence in the products and services you sell. Measuring brand trust will help you see where you stand in building long-term relationships with customers.
When customers view you as reliable and authentic, they’re more likely to continue buying from you and may even stand by you in the event of a crisis.
Social Media Engagement
Engagement metrics can help with measuring brand awareness. Things like likes, shares, and comments show you whether your marketing is resonating with your audience.
Even better, engagement can also help you grow brand awareness. When people engage with your content, it signals to social media algorithms that people found your content valuable in some way. This can encourage the algorithm to show your content to more people, giving you more opportunities to grow your audience and gain even more engagement.
TIP: Check out our blog for a deep-dive into the social media metrics you need to keep an eye on.
Conversion Rate
Brand health metrics like awareness, sentiment, recall, and engagement give you context about another essential metric: conversion rate.
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors or leads that complete a desired action, such as purchasing a product or signing up for a service. A high conversion rate indicates you excel at convincing customers to take the next step. They see something special in your brand and want to be part of it.
Brand Associations
What do people associate with your brand? Are they making connections that align with your brand values or are there gaps? Brand associations feed into customer values. If your brand misaligns with what consumers are looking for from the brands they choose to support, you will quickly lose market share and fall behind your competitors. Manage you brand association by learning about your customers with consumer insights.
Choosing the Right Brand Metrics
Of these brand metrics to track, you’ll want to choose the ones that are the most relevant to your strategy. We recommend dialing in on a few key metrics that give you the most complete picture of your brand health without weighing you down in numbers and data points.
Ultimately, you need to decide why these brand metrics matter and how they can help you improve your brand’s performance.
First, we suggest starting with a goal. What exactly about your brand do you want to change?
Increase your social media followers?
Rebuild trust after some bad PR coverage?
Send your conversion rate soaring?
You might not use all of these brand metrics at once, and that’s okay. Choose the best metrics that tie back to your goals, then track those metrics as your campaign progresses.
How to Use Brand Metrics to Drive Growth
Brand monitoring tools can centralize your efforts and make brand tracking metrics a breeze. Tools like Meltwater do all the heavy lifting and can monitor online conversations you didn’t know were happening.
Once you have the data in hand, there are a few things you can do to improve your brand’s performance.
Identify any weak areas
Brand metrics can help you spot areas that need improvement, such as a low follower count, subpar customer satisfaction, or low conversion rates. Use your brand KPIs to figure out what type of campaign to run next so you can start working toward a specific goal.
Compare your brand metrics to competitors
It’s always helpful to know where you stand compared to your competitors. For example, if a competitor has a bigger share of voice on a product, you can work backward to find out why. It might have better reviews, or they might be getting more press coverage, for example.
Use your metrics alongside a competitive analysis to see where you might be able to get ahead.
Tip: Learn how to use social listening for benchmarking and check out our blog explaining how to perform a competitor analysis
Create targeted campaigns to address specific goals
Once you have an idea of where you need to move the needle, start developing campaigns that target those areas.
Let’s say you want to gain a greater share of voice for a product category. You might work with influencers to go viral on social media or connect with journalists to gain some positive coverage.
As you work through your campaign, keep an eye on your brand KPIs to see how they change. This will give you an idea of whether your efforts are paying off.
Measuring Brand Health with Meltwater
Meltwater offers comprehensive social listening and consumer intelligence solutions that tracks important brand metrics in real time. Keep tabs on the data that matters most to you and get alerts when trends or conversations shift.
Different metrics inform different aspects—while social media engagement rates may tell you how much people love your posts, conversion rates show if their interest translates into action. Meltwater uses the power of AI to dissect what these metrics mean and give you spelled-out insights you can use.
Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below.
