How do you measure brand marketing?
Apr 27, 2025
Why brand matters
So-called "data driven" companies are finally catching up to the idea that building a sustainable Brand is the best path to building a sustainable business. The challenge, however, has always been connecting Brand Metrics with lower funnel business metrics, but just because it's not measured doesn't mean it's not there.
Below, we're going to simplify some concepts and unpack how to get started on measuring your brand.
While the doubt around whether building a brand moat is worth the investment continuously comes up, there is no doubt about the inverse: how the destruction of brand creates negative ROI.
Consider these examples that demonstrate the importance of focusing on Brand:
Nike: Lost $167M in Market Cap over 3 years with a series of major strategic marketing changes
X (Twitter): $5.9bn in lost ad revenue due to content moderation changes
Uber: 400,000 riders deleted their accounts and switched to Lyft because of a single Tweet
While none of these happened in vacuums the primary cause of all three cases trace back to brand devaluation through a change in how people perceived the company and its value props.
Understanding brand terminology
One challenge when discussing Brand Marketing is defining terms. Even among well-known researchers, definitions overlap and sometimes conflict. It's important to remember that it's more about the general idea than the EXACT definition.
Brand: The customer's perception of the totality of your efforts. It covers everything from the product to pricing (the obvious ones) to the people you employ and how you treat them (not so obvious). In a world where information is readily available, there are no limits to the definition of Brand.
Branding: A component of Brand and the general design aesthetics associated with a Brand. Think font, colors, logos, etc. Consistent and unique branding leads to a better perception of Brand.
Brand Marketing: Typically refers to campaigns geared towards increasing brand awareness and strengthening a business' reputation rather than increasing sales. We find this definition fuzzy since all campaigns should drive sales, whether directly or indirectly. But for clarity, we'll refer to top-of-funnel, awareness-oriented campaigns as brand marketing.
Mental Availability & Brand Awareness: The textbook definition of Brand Awareness from 1987 (Rossiter and Percy) is defined as the buyer's ability to identify the brand in sufficient detail to make a purchase. Byron Sharp defines Mental Availability as "the probability of the brand to be noticed, recognized and/or recalled in buying situations." In both cases, the importance is ensuring your brand is top of mind when it matters most: purchase.
It’s important to note that awareness or mental availability falls in the bucket of necessary but not sufficient metrics when evaluating the downstream impact on sales. Said another way, a lift in awareness is necessary but may not be enough to cause a lift in sales.
Measuring your brand
Ever feel lost when you try to measure the impact of brand marketing? If so, you're not alone.
People think these campaigns are daunting to measure because they often work over long periods. How can you connect that TV ad from six months back to today's product purchase? Brand marketing also typically runs on channels that don't generate clicks or touches, like TV or billboard ads, so real-time tracking seems challenging.
Here's the truth: all marketing should be held accountable to the sales it drives. Said another way, if your "brand marketing" doesn't drive sales on some time horizon, you probably should stop running it. Yes, some types of marketing are more straightforward to evaluate because they lead directly to short-term sales. But the idea that "brand marketing" doesn't fall in this bucket is just false. Teams can track long-term marketing with leading metrics and brand health tracking.
The framework
The framework to understand the ROI of Brand Marketing has two levels: The campaign level and the holistic level. This is a great time to reemphasize that brand is the cumulative impact of your efforts so measuring just an individual campaign will often not be enough.
Level | Goal | Tool |
Campaign Level | Prove impact on top-of-funnel metrics | Brand Lift Study |
Campaign Level | Prove impact on business metrics | Conversion Lift Studies + Geo Studies |
Holistic Level | Measure cumulative improvement in top-of-funnel metrics | Brand Tracker |
Holistic Level | Measure cumulative improvement in business metrics | MMM + Geo Studies |
We distinguish these two levels because without optimizing the impact at the campaign level, you will find it harder to move the needle at the holistic level.
1. Prove the impact on top of funnel metrics of your campaign
Before you can connect whether your brand marketing is moving the needle on sales metrics, you must first understand whether your brand marketing is moving top of funnel metrics. To do this, we recommend using tools like Brand Lift Studies and other survey-based methodologies with the goal of attributing the lift in these key metrics to the campaign itself.
Take a B2B software example with the six- to twelve-month sales cycle. The company could set up a six-month experiment to compare sales in an area with the software billboard to one that doesn't have it. But with a time frame that long, who's to say that the billboard is responsible for the difference in sales? There are likely other responsible factors, like the brand's sales demo or pricing. Also, there’s the risk that the billboard itself is not effective.
Say they ask buyers, "Have you heard of [insert brand name] before today?" The business would set up an experiment where they run the same marketing and ask buyers the survey questions in two regions. The only difference is one region will have the billboard ad. At the end of the test, the company would measure the difference in "yes" responses between the two areas to see if the billboard increased familiarity.
What's most important here is choosing the right campaign metric. Are you trying to move awareness, consideration, or some other metric? Oftentimes, campaigns have a lack of clarity here and that leads to ineffective campaigns, so the campaign brief is crucial. There are many frameworks for creative writing but one that often comes up is known as Get, To, Buy:
Get [an audience] who experience a problem
To [do something]
By telling them the proposition
2. Prove the impact on business metrics of your campaign
You can confirm how your campaigns cause your target metric to change with incrementality testing. This experimentation involves showing your brand marketing to one group of consumers but not showing it to another group with all other conditions being the same.
From there, your team would measure the difference in your target metric between the two groups to determine the impact of your brand marketing. Some marketers question whether you can set up incrementality tests for brand campaigns that impact sales long-term. The truth is you can but it requires more patience and a larger appetite for not changing things if you do.
Choose brand campaign target metric(s) based on your sales cycle:
Imagine a D2C company with a short customer journey that releases subway ads to build brand awareness. It's easy for consumers to buy the product after seeing the subway promotions, so the brand uses sales as its target metric.
On the other hand, consider a B2B software company that releases a billboard ad to boost awareness about their platform. The product is expensive, and its sales cycle typically takes 6 to 12 months, so the marketing team doesn't expect the ad to drive sales directly. Instead, they'll measure leading sales indicators that occur more quickly—such as traffic or inbound demo requests—as the campaign's target metric.
In both examples though, you are aiming to measure tangible business outcome.
Discover how Maya Spivak, a prominent Brand Marketing Leader with experience across Wealthfront, Segment, Mux, and Gretel, immerses herself in the realm of billboards, dissecting the three essential variables pivotal for brand construction: Commitment, Coverage, and Stamina.
Finally, it's important to experiment with your experiments. Not all campaigns need to prove direct ROI metric. For example, you can run an incrementality test proving an increase in share of search. While the searches may not result in immediate conversions, depending on your customer journey, more searches is never a bad thing. You can also go one step deeper and prove the impact on efficiency metrics such as CAC. For example, you might see that with more brand campaigns you're able to convert the same number of users but at a lower CAC. This is a great example where it's important to connect the brand campaign to a hypothesis of how it will impact the business metrics.
Geo tests can be particularly effective for measuring brand impact. Companies like Wayfair use geo experiments to measure incrementality of their marketing efforts.
3. Measure the cumulative improvement in top of funnel metrics
According to marketing researcher Jenni Romaniuk, the goal of brand health tracking isn't measuring a business' health. It's gauging how consumers feel and think about a brand. Once you've used health tracking over some time to determine your buyers' baseline impression of your business, you can understand the impact of your brand marketing campaigns.
Say more buyers in your category report they remember your business when you're running a brand campaign compared to when you aren't. Assuming all other conditions are the same, this difference suggests your brand marketing is increasing your target audience's familiarity with your company.
To track your brand health, Romaniuk recommends asking customers about your brand through online surveys and focus groups. For example, you might ask, "Are you familiar with [insert brand name]?" or "What is your opinion of [insert brand name]?" Romaniuk offers a free questionnaire template, and she recently wrote a book "Better Brand Health" to guide marketers through the process.
For small brands who don't have the time or money needed to conduct customer surveys, Romaniuk suggests the workaround of using an omnibus survey—hiring a research agency to interview consumers in your target group about your brand. The Harris Poll and Tracksuit are two excellent vendors for conducting brand surveys.
Companies can also use online information as a proxy for brand health tracking, collecting metrics such as:
Share of traffic: The percentage of traffic your company's website receives compared to the traffic of all the competitors in your category.
Share of search: The percentage of searches for your brand name compared to searches for all competitors. This metric is only helpful if your company has a distinct name.
Social media mentions: Discussions about your brand on social media platforms in posts, comments, stories, hashtags, and captions.
Keep in mind that strong online metrics don't necessarily indicate positive brand awareness. A product recall, for example, will likely boost your share of search and social media mentions, but not for the right reasons.
4. Measure the cumulative improvement in business metrics
Experiments are invaluable in showing the causal relationships between brand marketing activities and business outcomes. However, incrementality tests require actual brand marketing spend, and ensuring accurate experiment results across marketing channels takes a lot of work.
We recommend combining MMM and incrementality testing to understand your brand marketing's performance fully. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) uses statistical analysis to find the correlation between marketing channel activity and the target metric. For example, an MMM could show whether sales increase as the volume of video ad impressions increases. MMM then computes the costs and diminishing returns of that video ad campaign.
It’s important to note that if your brand is getting stronger, you should expect your baseline sales to grow just as well as your incremental sales over time. The split between baseline and incremental sales is a key output from a Marketing Mix Model.
Follow the data to improve your brand marketing
Measuring brand marketing can seem intimidating, but it's nothing to be scared of. With the approach we've described—health tracking, MMM, and experimentation—you can discern how your brand campaigns impact your business, whether you have a long or short sales cycle.
This brand marketing reporting is critical for maintaining relevance. We recommend every company, especially those in mature categories, invest in brand marketing and assess their campaigns to understand their customers' perspective and differentiate from competitors.
Need help measuring your brand marketing? Our solution Paramark uses both MMM and incrementality testing to evaluate campaigns for businesses. Schedule a demo to learn more today.
