What Is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the degree to which your target audience recognizes and remembers your brand and its products or services. It takes into account brand recognition, recall, and market dominance.
Brand awareness can be broken down into two main categories:
- Aided awareness: The extent to which consumers can recognize a brand when prompted with its name or logo
- Unaided awareness: The likelihood that a brand will come to consumers’ minds when they’re thinking about a specific product or service category. Also known as top-of-mind awareness.
Growing brand awareness is important for aiding new, would-be customers in the first step of the buyer’s journey. These are the stages a customer goes through, from becoming aware of your brand to becoming a customer.
Improving brand awareness, then, is also the first step to earning revenue. Because if someone isn’t aware of your brand, how will you convert them into a customer?
Why Is Measuring Brand Awareness Important?
Tracking brand awareness helps you understand how well you’re achieving your marketing or business goals. For example, to increase conversions, improve engagement, or enter a new market.
Specifically, measuring brand awareness helps you:
- Understand market position: Compare your level of brand awareness to your competitors’
- Assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns: Measure changes to brand awareness over time to see whether your awareness campaigns are producing results
- Guide business and marketing decisions: Use insights from measuring brand awareness to influence company strategy
- Improve audience targeting: Measure brand awareness across different demographics to identify the groups familiar with your brand, and discover those who may not have heard of it yet
- Gain insight into customer perception: Understand how well your brand resonates with your target audience
9 Ways to Measure Brand Awareness
1. Social Listening
Social listening lets you track brand mentions on social media, blogs, forums, or news websites. Helping you measure brand awareness on the basis of how often your brand is coming up in conversation.
Social listening also helps you understand audience sentiment, which is how people feel about and perceive your brand.
For example, say you’re a pizza restaurant that’s launched a new deep-pan crust. You use social listening to measure how many people mention your restaurant online. Which indicates brand awareness.
And how they feel about your new pizza, which tells you audience sentiment.
When using social listening, look at the following metrics:
- Overall brand mentions
- Positive brand mentions
- Negative brand mentions
- Neutral brand mentions
Use a social listening tool like Media Monitoring to measure brand mentions, reach, awareness, and audience sentiment.
Find Media Monitoring in the Semrush App Center, under "Categories" > "Media Monitoring."
To get started, simply enter two branded keywords or hashtags. Select your language. Then, click “Create Project.”
Media Monitoring will look for mentions of your keywords and generate a report with its findings.
For example, the “Summary” tab shows your latest brand mentions. And a graph of mention volume by date. If this number is increasing, it’s an indication more people are becoming aware of your brand.
Look at your “Presence” score to measure your brand’s popularity for a specified time frame. Use this metric to measure brand awareness and set benchmarks.
Click the “Mentions” tab to review all your mentions sorted by date. And see the sentiment for each one. Including neutral, positive, and negative.
Click on the “Analysis” tab to learn more about your reach and awareness. For example:
- Mentions over a specific time period
- Brand reach (an estimate of how many impressions the posts featuring your brand have received)
- How people feel about your business
- The most influential websites that mention your brand
2. Share of Voice
Share of voice (SOV) measures how much your brand is seen or heard in the market compared to your competitors.
This helps you see:
- Brand presence: Understand how much of your market's attention your brand captures. For example, a business with high SOV could receive lots of media coverage or have an increased presence in search engine results pages (SERP).
- Brand position: Learn how your brand is positioned in the market and compare this against competitors. For example, a higher SOV could mean your brand is more well-known vs. other businesses in your market or industry.
- Marketing effectiveness: Use share of voice to assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Increasing your SOV may correlate with improved brand awareness, engagement, and consideration.
Measure your share of voice by comparing your website traffic, social followers/engagement, and paid advertising placements against competitors in your industry or market.
Then, use that information to adjust your marketing strategy.
For example, if you notice that Competitor 3 has a higher SOV on social media than you, focus on improving your social media content strategy to increase your share of voice.
To find your website traffic share of voice metric, use Position Tracking. The tool helps you see SOV for your brand and competitors.
3. Social Media KPIs
To measure brand awareness on social media, focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you how well your target audience recognizes, remembers, and engages with your brand.
Like:
- Reach: The total number of unique users who saw a post in their feed
- Impressions: The total number of times a post is displayed on a user’s feed
- Engagement rate: Measures the number of engagements with a post relative to the total number of followers
- Audience growth rate: The increase or decrease in the number of followers your account has over a certain time period
- Video views: The number of times users have seen your video content
An increase in these metrics signals that your brand awareness online is improving. This could be from paid social campaigns, influencer marketing, or organic social.
Use a tool like Social Analytics to measure key social media metrics. Including engagement rate, follower growth, reach, and more.
First, connect the accounts you want to analyze. Use our Social Analytics configuration guide for more on how to do this.
On the “Overview” tab, you’ll see a quick summary of your accounts and important metrics.
Choose a social media channel to analyze. For example, click on “Facebook.” Then, click on the “Engagement” tab.
Here, you’ll see impressions, reach, and engagement rate for that channel:
To measure your brand awareness over time, select a date range that reflects the duration of your recent efforts. For example, if you've been actively promoting awareness for six months, choose that.
Use this information to set yourself a benchmark.
Then, review your brand awareness at regular intervals (i.e., every quarter). And whenever you launch a new awareness initiative. For example, a Facebook advertising campaign that uses a carousel ad to show multiple images of your latest product launch.
4. Web Traffic
Monitor web traffic to see how many people visit your site and where they came from.
This is similar to counting the number of visitors to a brick-and-mortar store. It gives you a clear indication of whether your brand awareness is improving or not.
Measure the following metrics:
- Direct traffic: Visitors who land on your site by typing the URL into their browser, using a bookmark, or clicking a link in an email
- Referral traffic: Visitors who land on your site via a link from another website
- Organic traffic: Visitors who land on your site from search engine results pages
- Organic social traffic: Visitors who land on your site from organic social media posts
- New visitors: People visiting your site for the first time
- Returning visitors: Visitors who have visited your site before and are returning for a new visit
- Page views: The number of times visitors view pages on your website
- Time on site: The amount of time a visitor spends on your website in a session
An increase in traffic (for example, organic social traffic) indicates more people may be becoming aware of your business. And clicking through to your website.
Use Google Analytics to measure web traffic. The platform helps you quickly set up and analyze web traffic from various sources.
5. Search Engine Visibility
Search engine visibility assesses your brand’s presence in search results when people look for keywords relevant to your business. It helps you gauge the effectiveness of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Measure the following metrics to understand how search engine visibility impacts your brand awareness:
- Keyword rankings: The position your website occupies in the SERP for a specific keyword
- Organic click-through rate (CTR): The number of visitors who click on your result in the SERP after seeing it
- Branded keywords: Keywords that include your brand’s name or a variation of it
- Branded organic traffic: Visitors who land on your website from the SERP after searching for a branded keyword
- Authority Score: A Semrush metric that indicates the quality and trustworthiness of your website based on its backlinks, content quality, site structure, and other elements
Use Domain Overview to see where your domain ranks for various keywords.
Simply input your domain name, set your location, and click “Search.”
The “Overview” tab reports your domain’s performance across various SEO metrics. Scroll down to “Organic Keywords” to see how your domain ranks in Google over time.
An increase indicates that more people have potentially become aware of your business.
Scroll down to “Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic” to see how much estimated traffic your site gets from branded keywords. This tells you how much brand awareness you have among people searching on Google.
6. Conversions
As your brand awareness increases, so should your revenue.
As audiences get more familiar with your brand, there’s more opportunity for them to start progressing through your marketing funnel. And the more potential customers that enter the funnel at the top, the more can become a customer at the conversion stage.
A conversion is a predetermined action that’s valuable to your business. For example, purchasing a product, signing up for a course, joining a newsletter, or downloading a resource.
Conversions can’t happen without awareness building first. So, measuring your conversion rate over time can help you understand the impact of brand awareness campaigns.
Conversions could come from:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) ads: Digital advertising where companies pay each time their ad is clicked
- Paid social ads: Social media content paid to reach an audience broader than your following
- Content marketing: The creation and distribution of content (e.g., blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, or webinars) that engage your target audience
- Email marketing: Sending email campaigns to a targeted or segmented group of subscribers
Use Google Analytics to see conversion rates on your website. You’ll need to set up conversion tracking first by creating events.
Then, navigate to GA4 and go to “Reports” > “Lifecycle” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic acquisition.”
Then, click on the pencil icon in the upper-right corner.
Find “Metrics.”
Then, click “Add metric.” And look for “Session key event rate.” Then, click “Apply.”
You should now see “Session conversion rate” in your “Traffic acquisition report.”
Here, you can see the conversion rate for each channel. Which helps you know which areas to focus your marketing efforts on.
For example, if organic search generates a higher conversion rate than organic social, consider whether you need to double down on your SEO strategy to continue this trend.
7. Customer Surveys and Reviews
Measure brand awareness by getting direct feedback from your customers and audience.
Use a survey to ask questions about brand recognition and familiarity. For example, you could show an image of your brand logo and ask if customers recognize it and where they saw it.
Or create a survey about how customers perceive your brand and its reputation to gain a deeper understanding of your brand image.
Alternatively, use a Net Promoter Score (NPS).
NPS gives you an indication of customer loyalty. And how likely a customer is to spread word-of-mouth recommendations about your brand. Which is a positive reflection of brand awareness improving.
NPS surveys often ask direct questions, such as “How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”
The survey responses are then broken down into three groups:
- Promoters (scores of 9-10): Enthusiastic, happy, and loyal customers who are likely to promote your brand to others
- Passives (scores of 7-8): Satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who could be tempted by a competitor's offering
- Detractors (scores of 0-6): Unhappy customers who can damage the brand through negative word-of-mouth
An NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters: NPS = % Promoters − % Detractors
For example, you survey 100 customers. 50% are promoters, 30% are passives, and 20% are detractors. Your NPS score would be 30.
NPS scores vary by industry, but scores of 0 or less signal customer satisfaction issues that need to be immediately addressed. A score of 30+ is considered good, and 50+ is excellent.
You’ll also want to track your reviews and star ratings on third-party websites like Yelp and Google.
Look at your average star rating. A high score indicates a positive brand reputation. And an increase in the volume of customer ratings could also mean that more people are becoming aware of your brand.
8. Influencer Impact
If your brand collaborates with influencers, measure the impact of their posts on your brand’s awareness.
The KPIs and benchmarks for influencer marketing will depend on what you’re looking to achieve by partnering with influencers. For example, are you looking to generate leads or brand awareness?
Here are some common KPIs to measure the impact of influencer campaigns on brand awareness:
- Engagement rate
- Leads captured
- Website traffic
Depending on your goal, make sure you set your influencer campaign up for success by ensuring you can measure the results.
For example, give each influencer a UTM tracking code to the link they share on their social post. Then, measure the increase in clicks to your website from that link using Google Analytics.
Or use Social Analytics by Semrush to measure influencer post engagement rates, reach, impressions, and more. And get insights into how your influencers' campaigns are improving brand awareness or generating a positive return on investment (ROI).
9. Media Impressions
Keep track of the number of times your brand’s content is shared across digital media platforms. This metric highlights the potential reach of your brand’s messages and can tell you how well your public relations (PR) campaigns are performing.
To measure brand awareness in media, use Media Monitoring. This tool keeps track of all media mentions across the web.
Then, look at what backlinks your brand has. Backlinks are links on a website that point to another website. Google values these backlinks and sees them as a sign of trust—another brand or website has vouched for you.
Use Backlink Analytics for a comprehensive view of your backlink profile.
Measuring Brand Awareness Across Multiple Channels
For brand awareness to be effective, it needs to occur across multiple channels. Including organic, paid, and social.
This is where Semrush can help. Semrush tools give you data-rich insights into your SEO, PPC, social media, PR campaigns, and more to understand the impact of your marketing efforts on increasing brand awareness.