4 Tips for Measuring Brand Awareness

Caid Christiansen• October, 21 2015

Since the dawn of advertising, measuring “brand awareness” has been a challenge. With direct marketing, it’s easy to develop an ROI model by tracing the leads produced from a specific marketing campaign, tracking through to conversion, and then tabulating the cost of the marketing campaign.

The struggle has been this: how do you measure the impact of general advertising campaigns?

First off, you have to believe in the power of developing your brand. But, even if you agree that a strong brand will result in increased revenue, you need a way to measure your brand awareness.

A few things you need to know when entering into a branding campaign:

You need to choose a few metrics: A general branding campaign will almost surely not result in an immediate impact to the bottom line. Instead, brand campaigns are a long game. That doesn’t mean that the impact is not able to be measured, it means that you need metrics that will show you the long-term outlook.

Measure shares: The number of shares should increase exponentially over time. The more shares you garner, the higher ranked your future posts will be on all the major sharing sites and search engines.

Track time spent on site: Many companies measure the number of clicks or views for a post; fewer track the amount of time viewers spend on the site once they’ve read the content. This can be a powerful measure of whether your content schedule aligns with your corporate marketing strategy.

ID return readers: If your content is spot-on and creating additional value, you’ll be able to track it with through your return readers After all, your long-term strategy should be to create loyal, long-term visitors who will share your content to others. Where “site visits” can skew your results based on the headline and timeliness of a post, the number of return readers will tell you how engaging and relevant your content is, and ultimately how much brand value you’re creating.

Measuring brand awareness is difficult—but it’s far from impossible. By knowing the right places to look, you can move general ad campaigns from the realm of uncertainty into one of much clearer value.