Brand health is a broad measure to track. A holistic view of brand health is made up of qualitative and quantitative brand health metrics that would challenge even the most attentive brand manager. However, if you learn the KPIs that matter and analyse them regularly, you’ll find a slew of insights that can feed into your future strategy and prove the effectiveness of your current efforts.
Based on our experience with clients, we recommend that you begin your brand tracking efforts with the KPIs below to assess and measure your brand health.
Read more: How to track, measure and improve your brand health, our free online guide
Perceptual (what people think)
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is the level of consumer consciousness of a company. It includes consumers’ ability to recognise a brand as well as associate it with a given product or service.
KPIs include:
- Top of mind awareness. The ability for consumers to think of a brand in relation to a product or service category. This can be split out into prompted or unprompted top of mind awareness.
- Brand recognition. The ability for consumers to name a brand when presented with a tagline, logo or other brand asset.
- Advertising recall. The ability for consumers to accurately recall or describe an advertisement they have seen recently from a given brand.
Brand associations
Brand associations are the thoughts and feelings that consumers have towards your brand, whether functional or emotive.
KPIs include:
- Functional associations. Traits that consumers have ascribed to the brand that focus around considered, ‘logical’ factors such as value for money, level of quality and company ethics.
- Emotive associations. Traits that customers have (sometimes unconsciously) ascribed to the brand that focus around feelings, such as nostalgia, happiness or anger.
Learn more: Brand distinctiveness: what does it mean for you?
Brand intent
Brand intent is similar to brand awareness, but further along the customer journey. Measures are focused around whether a consumer would consider using a brand and whether they would prefer to use one brand over another.
KPIs include:
- Consideration. The percentage of consumers that would or have considered using a brand to address their needs.
- Preference. The percentage of consumers that would prefer to use a brand among a group of others.
Brand experience
Brand experience involves measures of general like and dislike of a brand, including likelihood to recommend a brand to their friends/family and satisfaction levels based on a recent experience.
KPIs include:
- Net Promoter Score. A score between -100 and +100 that compares the percentage of detractors (those who would not recommend a brand) to promoters (those who would recommend a brand).
- Customer Satisfaction. A score that rates how satisfied a customer is in the moment. Useful for gathering feedback on specific interactions and brand touchpoints.
- Customer Effort Score. A score that measures how much effort was required for the customer to use the product or service and how likely it is that they’ll continue paying for it.
- Sentiment. A percentage score derived from social listening that compares favourable conversations about a brand, to unfavourable.
- Net Trust Score. A score that measures how trustworthy customers find a particular brand.
Related content: What does brand consistency look like and why is it important?
Behavioural (what people do)
Engagement
Engagement measures focus on how people interact with a business outside of pure purchase behaviour, usually with regards to online behaviour.
KPIs include:
- Website activity. Metrics include the number of visits, sessions, session duration, average time spent on a page, behaviour flow, bounce rate, and so on.
- Ad click through rate. A comparison of the number of times an ad is shown (impressions) to the number of times it is actually clicked on.
- Email performance. Measuring your deliverability, open rate and click rate can help measure the level of engagement your emails are generating.
- Social mentions. A broad metric that covers the total number of times that a brand is actively mentioned on various social media channels.
- Share of voice. This often refers to a brand’s share of paid advertising in a competitive space, but can also include other metrics such as organic search term volumes.
Read more: 5 steps to complete a brand health check with a brand funnel analysis
Purchase
These are broad measures that focus on how people interact with a business in terms of purchase behaviour. Typically relates directly to the brand conversion funnel.
KPIs include:
- Usage. The percentage of people that use a brand among a given audience.
- Recency. How recently a given customer has purchased from the business.
- Frequency. The average number of times customers purchase over a given period.
- Value. The average value of customer purchases over a specific period of time.
- Conversion rate. The percentage of visits (whether online or in-store) that result in a sale and/or customer.
Related content: Determine brand health the modern customer brand funnel
Financial (company performance)
Financial measures are most commonly found on sales dashboards, but they are important for a brand manager as well. They represent the materialisation of a brand’s impact on the bottom line of the company.
KPIs include:
- Market share. The proportion of purchases made with a company in comparison to wider market.
- Sales volumes. The total number of products or services sold by a company over a given period of time. This can be broken down by product/service lines.
- Sales revenue. The total value of the products/services sold by a company over a given period of time.
- Cost per acquisition. A measure of how much it cost to acquire one customer or sale.
- Customer lifetime value. The average total expenditure of a customer over the complete course of their interactions with a company.
A brand’s long-term value to the business can be measured in context across perceptual, behavioural and financial metrics. For more advice on brand health including tips, tricks and research techniques, download our comprehensive free guide. 
