When marketers are fleshing out a brand, many ponder over how to build loyalty and resonance with their customers.

Seldom do people consider the importance of first ensuring awareness of the brand. Yet, this is the most important step.

After all, only once people recognize your offering will they be loyal to it! And brand awareness is not as easy to create either. As per Pam Moore, it takes at least five impressions for people to recognize your brand.

To make sure that enough people recognize your brand, you must effectively track brand awareness and health. This could have proven to be challenging, considering the scope of data required.

However, thankfully, we live in a socially connected world.

According to Statista, approximately 50 percent of the world has an internet connection, while over 2.6 billion people have access to Facebook alone. In such a virtually condensed world, it has become relatively easy to measure and track consumer behaviour, including brand awareness.

Here are some of the key analytics and metrics that can help in measuring brand awareness.

1. Website Traffic

One of the primary ways to gauge your brand awareness is to keep tabs on your website traffic. Every business must have a visual representation in the form of a website. It allows customers to get an overview of a given brand, its offerings as well as its values.

Naturally, the more people know about your brand, the higher will be your site traffic. By analyzing the number of visits your website gets in a given time period, you can easily monitor your brand awareness for that period.

The question arises, how can you measure your site traffic? There are various tools that can help you. Among the most popular and effective tools is Google Analytics that allows you to monitor not just site traffic but the demographics, interests, and behavior of your site visitors.

2. Search Volume

Did you know that, according to Think With Google, over 63 percent of purchases begin with online searches? You will be surprised just how many people search your brand or service on Google after coming across it on a billboard or ad!

Brand awareness is generally promoted via ad campaigns and ATL activities. And their effects can be gauged via the number of people that actively seek information about the brand. This is why you need to track your search volume.

Here, tools like Google Trends and Adwords Keyword Planner can come in handy. All you need to do is search for your brand name, and the tool will track whether the search volume for the given keyword is increasing with time.

3. Survey

There are two major elements of brand awareness, namely recall, and recognition.

Brand recognition refers to the ability of your target audience to recognize a brand from a pile of competing products or services. Brand recall revolves around remembering your brand when provided with seemingly non-related stimuli.

While the recall is easier to measure with modern analytics and tools, brand recognition is often much harder to gauge. A traditional yet effective way to assess brand recognition is by surveying your target audience.

For instance, let's say you want to see how impactful your professional logo design is. To see whether your consumers remember the ultimate symbol of your business, you can place your logo with those of others and ask your respondents to identify each logo.

For optimum awareness, your target audience should be able to identify and recall your logo. Therefore, make sure that the symbol is up to the mark. Learn from the success stories around you.

4. Social Listening

One of the inherent flaws of traditional tools like surveys, focus groups, and questionnaires is the response bias. People are not always truthful when answering questions when they know they are being judged on it.

This is why such metrics should be accompanied by modern analytics like social listening. Here, you monitor different websites and social media platforms to see how people converse about your brand.

By listening to organic conversations regarding your brand, you are more likely to understand the thoughts of your consumers. For instance, do they think of your business when discussing the sector you operate in? If they do, is it in a positive light or a negative one?

There are various social listening tools available. Some of the best ones include Mention, Awario, TweetDeck, and Brandwatch. Such platforms condense it all for you within a given system so that you don't have to monitor different platforms manually.

5. Earned Media Value and Share of Voice

While identifying the reach and frequency of your paid content is easy, the real trick is to measure your earned media value. This includes all the publicity and traction your brand has able to generate organically.

Why does it matter? This is because it measures the extent of the awareness of your brand when you include word of mouth. Here too, social tracking tools will help you.

You can then use the data provided to calculate your share of voice. This refers to the number of people that are talking about your brand compared to your main rivals. Use social tracking tools to monitor both your mentions' as well as your competitors.

Divide your total mentions by the cumulative figure of the sector to find your share of voice. The more share you have, the more people know about your business.

Measure, Adapt, and Evolve!

Yes, keeping a check on your brand performance is essential. However, this is often not enough to get the results you want. Instead, this is the first step.

After you have used analytics to measure your brand health, use the insights to alter your campaigns and branding efforts when needed.

Every brand must learn to adapt and evolve to ensure its success. Make sure you do the same!

Author Bio

Erica Silva

Erica Silva is a blogger who loves to discover and explore the world around her. She writes on everything from marketing to technology. She enjoys sharing her discoveries and experiences with readers and believes her blogs can make the world a better place.

Find her on Twitter: @ericadsilva1