Brand awareness metrics should be on the mind of every marketing and communications team every day, but especially in 2025. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, marketers are constantly pushed to keep up with new tools (looking at you, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), changing guidelines and regulations (ahem, TikTok vs. the U.S.), and more.
Fundamentally, knowing where to start and what to look for can be intimidating. But, once you crack the code, possessing a clear guide for measuring your brand’s key performance indicators (KPIs) is invaluable. Consider this: according to a recent report from HubSpot, people exposed to brand messages on LinkedIn – whether through video, blog post, or otherwise – are six times more likely to convert. So don’t overlook the power and influence brand awareness can have on your sales and marketing pipeline.
The metrics you track should offer a crystal-clear picture as to how your audience thinks, where they are most active online, and what makes them tick when it comes to recognizing and engaging with the type of content that resonates with them.
Let the confusion end today. Here, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to measure brand awareness, including a map to the most important metrics, to clear up any uncertainty.
Table of Contents
Why Measure Brand Awareness
If you call all facial tissue “Kleenex” or you’ve referred to yourself as an “Apple” or “Google” person, you’ve demonstrated brand loyalty (and awareness).
That kind of public consciousness infiltration is what awareness can do for a brand. As a term, brand awareness refers to how familiar your target audience is with your brand or its products/solutions and how well they recognize them.
In a world where influencers reign supreme due to customer reliance on research and outside opinion, the benefits of brand awareness are endless. Some of the top reasons why you should prioritize brand awareness and measure related KPIs include:
- Cultivate trust (i.e., a bond between your brand and your customers)
- Create association and advocacy (i.e., “Google it,” “use a Kleenex”)
- Build equity (i.e., positive and negative perception both affect end cost/value)
- Evaluate and validate efforts (i.e., quantify your influence and return on investment from your marketing, public relations, and analyst relations efforts)
- Understand brand/product/solution positioning (i.e., compare your brand/product/solution to, and differentiate it from, your competitors’)
- Communicate shared values and purpose (i.e., connect more strongly with your target audience)

How to Measure Brand Awareness via KPIs
Awareness falls at the top of every marketing funnel, and knowing the awareness rate of your brand in the market means you can accurately calculate buyer’s journey conversion rates.
For the marketing and business minds out there who like neat, tidy, and clean-cut numbers, brand awareness KPIs can sometimes cause frustration. But you can quash that frustration by bringing the right tools, metrics – and data-driven digital marketing agency – to the table.
Brand Awareness Measurement Tools
PAN’s brand-to-demand approach helps connect the dots from brand to demand to growth with a tailored mix of brand awareness and demand generation activities. With this, brands are better positioned to engage potential buyers at every stage of the marketing and sales funnel with a simple, seamless narrative thread. For PAN’s B2B tech and healthcare clients, the proof is in the numbers.

Harnessing the power of data, analytics, and strategic insights can unlock measurable impact and tangible results. Using only one or two tools, you can measure most brand awareness metrics. Let’s walk through some of the top solutions available.
For Social Media
If it’s social media you need to track, the possibilities are endless. For businesses on a budget, you might want to start with a more cost-effective tool like Hootsuite or Mention. If you can make a larger investment, solutions like Meltwater, Sprout Social, Khoros, Brandwatch or Sprinklr will offer even greater community analysis and conversion integrations.
For Web
Broadly, Google Analytics should be your go-to. When combined with other resources like Looker Studio and Semrush, you’ll be able to dive even deeper into key areas like search engine optimization (SEO) to glean insights and forge strategies to maximize visibility and traffic for your website.
For Going Beyond
Are you thinking you want to dive even deeper than what web and social tracking can offer? Then you’re looking for a more holistic approach, like PANoptic, or social and digital listening through tiered options with Meltwater or Critical Mention. Brandwatch and Cision are also great tools for omnichannel brand monitoring and analysis. One completely free way to monitor mentions on a small scale — for the budget-conscious team — is to track various terms and phrases via Google Alerts.

To measure effectively, make sure you’re looking at the most relevant and trustworthy KPIs. In the next section, we walk through the top 10 metrics PAN experts recommend every brand measure.
Top 10 Metrics to Measure Brand Awareness Online
Brand awareness metrics gauge brand recognition, recall, and audience perception, capturing brand visibility in the market and the associated sentiments. The top brand awareness metrics are online brand mentions, social media engagement data, earned media coverage, share of voice, branded search volume data, survey data, leads and sales, and website and blog traffic, shares, and backlinks.
Now, let’s get into the metrics themselves.
1. Brand Mentions
Is your brand name buzzworthy? A combination of brand monitoring and social listening, brand mentions offers a measure of how often your company, products or services are being talked about online within online forums and social media platforms.
When tracking, you want to consider both direct (i.e., explicit references to your brand name) and indirect (i.e., references to your brand or its product/solution without mentioning it by name) mentions. Indirect brand mentions include misspellings of your brand name, references to products only (i.e., “Macbook” without “Apple”), and use of taglines or slogans without your brand name.
How to Track Brand Mentions Online
To track brand mentions, we recommend the one-two punch of a good social listening tool plus a media monitoring solution. This will provide you with helpful and reliable information for how customers are engaging with things like branded hashtags and your brand name as a whole — you can even track your competition and compare.
2. Social Media Engagement Metrics
Interaction with your social media content is proof of public interest in the work you’re doing. Plus, the more people engage with your content, the more in-network algorithms will show it on others’ feeds — thus, increasing your brand’s visibility and awareness.
At the same time, it’s important to remember that social media is, in fact, social. Meaning — don’t overlook the importance of engaging with others’ content, too. It fosters brand loyalty by showing your company cares, and each like, share, and comment allows you to reach an extended community.

Depending on the type of content you share and where you’re posting or engaging, core metrics might include:
- Likes/Reactions
- Comments (and Sentiment Within)
- Shares
- Reach/Impressions
- Saves
- Views/Plays
- Follower Growth
As bonus, measuring social engagement effectively will help you identify optimal posting times and the best content types that will peak engagement.
How to Measure Brand Awareness on Social Media
Simple social media engagement — as in likes, comments, shares — can be measured directly through in-network reporting across most platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook/Instagram, X, TikTok, etc.). These can be pooled together manually for deeper reporting and analysis.
However, if you are hoping to track deeper metrics like sentiment and more easily create dashboards or better analyze community reactions, a social media listening tool is invaluable.
3. Earned Media Coverage
Earned media coverage looks at the promotion of your brand through external, unpaid channels. Often viewed as the toughest media coverage to achieve (especially with top tier media outlets), it’s also considered one of the most effective forms of thought leadership. Examples of this might include mentions in, or authorship of, articles in news, blog, and trade publications, as well as podcast appearances and unsolicited reviews online.
How to Track Earned Media Coverage
When it comes to monitoring whether your earned media strategy is working, the tracking method should vary depending on your core area of focus. For example, through social listening, you can track earned media data and keep an eye on brand mentions and keywords. You can also employ a media monitoring tool like Meltwater or use Google Alerts to comb the web for organic mentions as part of your earned media measurement strategy.

4. Share of Voice
Share of voice (SOV), a critical brand awareness KPI, shows how your brand measures up to its competition among online conversations. This is important as it can help you better understand your opportunities to increase awareness within your competitors’ audiences.
It may be obvious, but the more market share you possess, the more influential and authoritative your brand will become for current and potential customers.
How to Measure SOV as a KPI
This is, perhaps, the most difficult brand awareness KPI to measure. We recommend using a social listening tool to build a dashboard for this as a starting point. If you and your team are not able to budget for a solution that can do this well, use this formula from Sprout Social:
Share of voice = Your brand metrics / Total market metrics
Building on the SOV framework, PAN uses a proprietary “share of impact” (SOI) metric that adds quality indictors to the equation, instead of just measuring overall volume. This provides a much more accurate competitive comparison when evaluating your media coverage versus that of the top competitors in your market. This metric reflects the following three quality indicators, as well as a weighted average calculation of SOV:
1. Publication tier
2. Quality of coverage
3. Message pull through
Contact us to learn more about SOI, our formula, and the benefits of leveraging this metric for measurement.
5. Branded Search Volume Data
Yet another critical awareness metric is branded search volume. This helps you track whether current and prospective customers are searching for your brand by name as opposed to searching for generic terms that lead to you.
By definition, branded search volume measures the frequency people search specifically for your brand by name.
How to Measure This KPI
At no cost, you can find and measure a broad view of this metric using Google Trends. SEO solutions like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz can also help you navigate the data around search volume, while social listening tools can further complement reporting.
Related Read – Integrating SEO and PPC to Boost B2B Revenue
6. Leads and Sales
New marketing leads and actual sales data are no-brainer numbers to pay attention to when it comes to awareness. After all, if people are signing up to hear more from your brand or purchasing your products and services, it can only mean they’re aware you exist and do good work.
How to Track These KPIs
Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions are going to be the best place to pull KPIs related to leads and sales, as well as keep an eye on the customer journey from the top of the funnel to the bottom. If your CRM is separate from your email marketing platform, make sure the two are integrated so you can be confident the numbers are accurate. An integrated CRM also ensures that you and your teams can track contacts across platforms, nurture budding relationships through every stage of the customer journey, and easily identify contacts who are ready for sales outreach.
7. Brand Awareness Survey Data
The importance of survey data cannot be overstated. As any smart marketer knows, surveys are an incredible opportunity to gain unfiltered insight straight from your customers.
In an era of all-digital everything, the opportunities for how and where to conduct brand awareness surveys are endless — via email, SMS, social media, and even e-commerce point of sale (POS). Simple Google Forms can handle brand awareness surveys, or you can opt to integrate via your CRM or tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform.
Though multiple channels are available, to truly judge awareness, you will likely want to target a questionnaire randomly to best gauge true brand recall. (Pro tip: Seek out a brand strategy agency for help acquiring a deep knowledge of your target audience via surveys and research.)
Brand Awareness Survey Questions
It’s important to customize a brand awareness survey so that it best fits the needs and goals of your company. That said, common survey questions and prompts that might help you measure awareness include:
- Do you recognize this image? (Include brand logo or other marquee creative above or below text.)
- Are you familiar with our brand/product?
- Where/How did you hear about us?
- Which of the following products/services/traits/messages do you associate with our brand?
- How likely are you to recommend our brand to others?
- What emotions do you feel when you think about our brand?
- Have you ever purchased our products/services before today?

8. Website Traffic
One of the simplest and most tracked brand awareness metrics, website traffic measures the number of visits to your website. Whether you have one page or 500, it’s important to keep track of brand interest via website traffic.
In fact, the very basis of digital marketing relies on the simple measurement of website traffic and its rate of conversion. Website traffic is often also tied to other brand awareness campaign efforts, like organic social media or paid digital ads.
Simply put, high traffic breads brand familiarity.
How to Track These Metrics
Most likely, you’ll want to track this data using Google Analytics, but tools like Amplitude and other Google alternatives are also available. No matter which solution you use, make sure you follow UTM tracking parameters and are tagging all campaigns accordingly. Doing so will ensure you can trace actions to specific campaigns and understand attribution.
9. Blog Traffic and Shares
Content marketing efforts, like blogging, are huge drivers of brand awareness — and that’s likely why you create read-worthy resources in the first place. If you are blogging (or if you have a resource center with other strategic storytelling-forward content such as case studies or white papers), then blog data offers invaluable metrics.
Beyond simple traffic to blog articles, make sure you also capture social media shares as a measure of how your audience views the quality of your content.
Note: If you want to take tracking a step further, scroll depth and time on page can also help paint a picture of content quality.
How to Measure Blog Traffic and Shares
Google Analytics should be your go-to for blog traffic data. In addition to page views, use it to capture referral traffic from social media as a broad measure of shares. If you hope to track shares directly, make sure you’re labeling all social media posts accurately either within the tools you’re using or via a manual process. From there, you can more easily narrow down and get a view of blog shares compared to other content types.

10. Backlinks
Finally, backlinks are here to round out the most critical of brand awareness KPIs. Not to be confused with broad referral traffic, backlinks help you understand how often visitors are arriving at your website through external links from other sites.
This type of referral is so valuable because it has the added benefit of boosting your domain authority and search engine rankings.
How to Track Backlinks
An SEO tool, like Moz or Semrush, is best used for measuring brand awareness from backlinks. However, if you do not have access to paid SEO solutions, referral data in Google Analytics can be parsed for this information.
7 of the Best Brand Awareness Campaign Examples
What about brand awareness in action? These examples offer a peek into some of the most successful and compelling campaigns of B2B and B2C brands.
1. The Ordinary
An industry disruptor, beauty brand The Ordinary has opted to shirk “traditional” brand campaigns with a more scientific, and human, approach. Through minimalist (yet witty) out-of-home ads, like the one pictured, and a similar approach across digital, efforts like its “Quality Equality” campaign keep artifice out of the equation and stand out in a space usually overwhelmed by aesthetic.
2. Alegeus
Using research findings as the centerpiece, Alegeus and PAN partnered to spread the word about the company’s Healthcare Consumerism Index. The campaign took an integrated, multi-channel approach to thought leadership and was able to successfully connect awareness to brand and demand, driving subscriptions and engagement via the Alegeus podcast and generating significant and impressions and click-throughs across email and social media.

3. Nike
It’s no secret that when it comes to slogans, Nike has pretty much cornered the market with one of the GOAT (greatest of all time) examples: Just Do It. But the brand’s ability to use its customers — and influencers — effectively by centering both paid and earned media around the people who buy the products, and their raw talent, is unmatched. The most recent example of this is the buzz generated when they had an ad in the can to air the moment women’s college basketball superstar Caitlin Clark became the NCAA’s all-time scoring leader. Chances are, you’re thinking of a different favorite Nike promotion or event now. That’s what grand brand building does, it creates memories.
4. Dropbox
Investment paid off tenfold when Dropbox launched its referral program, modeled partly off a previous PayPal campaign. How did the brand pull off 3,900% growth in 15 months, though? They did it by giving back to users and incentivizing deeper engagement. Coupled with a well-crafted product, this excellent approach to the customer journey has been invaluable for generating new users.
5. Artech 3D
How often can you say you reached 2 billion? That’s exactly what Artech 3D did when they took an unprecedented situation and turned it into something great. A global leader in the development and manufacturing of high-precision 3D scanners, Artech 3D proved the power of technology to do good things when they raised awareness of how their solutions were being used on the ground in Ukraine as part of war efforts, leading to actual legal impact and broader use of digital twin technology.
Related Read – Artech 3D: Demonstrating Brand Values and Increasing Brand Awareness with Meaningful Action
6. Slack
From 2015 to 2020 and beyond, Slack has been effortlessly positioning itself to professionals as a human brand that was built to make our work lives easier. Take the TV spot that capitalized on its undeniable usefulness amid forced change brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. By appealing to the human side of business, the team has built loyalty that will forever be tough to shake — and they take a fun tone, too.
7. PointClickCare
With the right partner, anything is possible. That’s why we’re so proud of all the work PointClickCare and Team PAN have been doing to advocate and raise awareness for long-term post-acute care (LTPAC). The rising demand within the industry creates resource constraints, which lit a fire within the experts at PointClickCare to expand their government advocacy work to build greater credibility for their brand among key stakeholders and those seeking LTPAC. The results are priceless, reaching millions of readers and generating interest in the company’s thought leadership.

Start Measuring Brand Awareness with Confidence
To sum up this brand awareness deep dive, it’s important to ground this concept in real, tangible insights. This will not only help you justify both your work and greater brand investment to leadership but will also allow you to make informed decisions on when to pivot messaging.
When it comes to KPIs and what tools you use, it’s likely you have everything you need to get started. While we do recommend investing in tools to support your efforts (and save you time), this is not a requirement. What is required is to decide the core metrics for your business and establish target benchmarks. From there, you’re better positioned to make magic happen.
Innovate your approach to brand awareness measurement today and prepare to build greater confidence in data-driven decision making.
Curious about how to weave “demand” into your “brand” work? Read further: 6 Key Elements of Brand-to-Demand Marketing for B2B Success