Brand Tracking Best Practices: From Data Collection to Actionable Insights

In this blog, we focus on best practices for brand tracking, from setting up an effective tracking study, to collecting the right data and extracting meaningful insights that drive strategic decision-making.

Brand tracking is your secret weapon to staying up to date on where you should invest your valuable time and resources so you can get the most out of your insights and make better business decisions.

Best practices for effective brand tracking

Brand tracking is the ongoing measurement of key brand metrics (e.g. brand awareness, brand consideration, brand usage), captured over time in intervals (e.g. monthly, quarterly, bi-annually). However, creating a brand tracker isn't as simply as just continuously collecting data; it's about turning that data into real business decisions that generate long-term value.

Below are some best practices to keep in mind so you get the most out of your brand tracker:

1. Set clear objectives that align with brand strategy

Before you even think about drafting a survey or visualizing how your report will look, you need to start with clear objectives that will support the foundation of your tracker. After all, a brand tracker is only valuable if it answers key questions that drive the business forward.

Start by thinking about what you want to achieve with your brand tracking efforts. Are you hoping to discover new and unexpected insights about your target audience? Or maybe you're looking to understand how your latest marketing campaigns are influencing brand perception?

Below are some further examples of business objectives that might drive the creation of your brand tracker:

Track brand awareness: Think top-of-mind awareness, brand recall, and share of voice. Track key metrics like aided and unaided awareness to see how well your target audience remembers your brand over time.
Boost customer loyalty: Focus on metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer lifetime value, and repeat purchase rate. Understanding what drives customer loyalty can help build a strong brand.
Measure campaign effectiveness: Track ad recall, changes in brand perception, and website traffic. Analyze how your marketing efforts are impacting key brand metrics like brand consideration and usage, and identify actionable areas for improvement.
Understanding brand positioning: Track metrics that reveal how your brand is perceived, relative to competitors. This includes brand associations, brand preferences, and perceived values.
Gather customer feedback: Use brand tracking surveys to collect customer feedback on new products, proposed pricing, and overall customer experiences throughout the customer journey.

Let’s continue with a more in-depth example of setting up a tracker to focus on business objectives. Say you're launching a new line of organic snacks. Your objective is to position your brand of snacks as the "go-to" healthy snack for millennials - a key demographic already buying your snacks for their kids. Expanding into this group of consumers will help make your brand a household snack, rather than just a snack for kids. With this objective in mind, your brand tracking research should focus on measuring awareness, perceptions of brand health and quality, and brand purchase intent, specifically among millennials.

Why setting objectives matter:

Focus: Clear objectives keep your brand tracking laser-focused and prevent you from getting lost in a mass of irrelevant data.
Measurement: Well-defined objectives make it easy to measure the success of your brand tracking initiatives on overall brand strategy.
Actionable insights: When your objectives align with your overall brand strategy, the insights you gain will directly inform/impact your decision-making.

2. Choose the right metrics

Once you know your objectives, it's time to pick the right metrics to track. This is where having a clear objective helps you stay focused and ask relevant questions of your target audience to ensure your research will provide the answers you are looking for.

Common brand tracking metrics include:

Brand awareness metrics: These key metrics help you understand how well your target audience knows your brand. As mentioned in the section above for the objective of increasing awareness, these are metrics like brand recall, brand recognition, and share of voice.
Brand perception metrics: Uncover how your target audience perceives your brand and its messaging by asking questions around brand associations, brand personality, and brand sentiment.
Brand performance metrics: These KPIs provide insights into how your brand is performing in the market - such as market share, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty metrics.
Brand behavior metrics: Understand how consumers interact with your brand and make purchase decisions by asking about purchase intent, brand usage, and customer journey touch points.

As an example, if you're a car brand that’s trying to build up your brand in the luxury vehicle space, tracking car metrics like "perceived affordability" might not be as relevant as tracking "perceived exclusivity" or "high status."

Why choosing the right metrics matters:

Relevance: Tracking the right metrics ensures you're collecting data that actually matters to your brand, feeds into its objectives, and contributes toward brand strategy decisions.

Efficiency: Focusing on the right key metrics helps you avoid data overload and keeps your brand tracking lean and efficient (which is good news for your research team - and for your survey respondents).

3. Set benchmarks to track progress

Benchmarks are your reference tool for success. They help you measure tracking progress over time to see if your brand is moving in the right direction based on an initial (aka, benchmarked) metric.

To benchmark your data, you’ll most likely need:

Historical data: This helps compare your current performance to past performance in order to understand trends and progress. If it’s your first time ever running a tracking study, this will be your benchmark wave.
Competitor analysis: Competitive data informs you of how you’re stacking up against other key players in your category to identify areas for improvement.
Industry averages: Similar to the above, industry averages help conceptualize your relative position in the market and identify key opportunities that competitors haven’t yet tapped into.

As an example of setting benchmarks, let's say your goal is to increase your Net Promoter Score (NPS). You might set a goal based on your current/benchmarked NPS score (e.g., improve by 5 points in the next year). Alternatively, you might base your goal around the average NPS for your industry - to match or beat it.

Why benchmarking your data matters:

Progress measurement: Benchmarks allow you to easily track your progress towards your brand goals/objectives.
Accountability: Benchmarks hold your brand accountable for its performance, and gives you something to strive toward with your tracking efforts.
Motivation: Similar to the above, seeing positive progress toward benchmarks can be a powerful motivator for your team.

4. Leverage multiple data sources for diverse insights

It’s an old saying but a good one - don't put all your eggs in one basket. When running a tracking study, use a variety of data sources to get a well-rounded view of your brand.

Below are just a few ways to capture data for tracking studies - many of which can be used supplementally.

Quantitative surveys: Gather quantitative data on brand awareness, brand attitudes, and brand behaviors. Use a variety of survey question formats (e.g. rating scales, multiple choice, etc.) to capture different aspects of brand perception and brand usage.
Qualitative surveys: Qualitative data is a great supplement to support existing quantitative findings or to guide the creation of a new tracking survey. Investigate consumer behavior toward your brand through in-depth one-on-one interviews, focus groups, video calls, ethnographic observations, and so on. Qualitative findings provide rich insights into consumer motivations, perceptions, and experiences - often adding the ‘why’ or ‘how’ to the ‘what’ of quantitive findings.
Social media listening: Leverage social media as a means of understanding brand sentiment and customer conversations - as they’re happening. Social media listening provides valuable insights into how your brand is perceived in the real world, and can greatly support your brand tracking survey insights.
Website analytics: Don’t neglect your website traffic data, user experience feedback, and other online conversion data. This type of data is invaluable in understanding how consumers actually interact with your brand online. It can provide helpful context into why consumers report feeling a certain way toward your brand in your brand tracking survey.
Sales data: Like website analytics, sales data is a straightforward way of understanding your brand’s purchase patterns and top-performing products. Your consumers might report a high brand consideration, but only the sales data can determine if they follow through with a purchase. If there’s a disconnect between your survey metrics and sales data, it could warrant investigation into potential barriers - like product availability, price limitations, and so on.
Customer reviews: Lastly, look at customer reviews on your website or third-party review sites. See if these reviews align with the customer feedback gathered in your brand tracking survey as a sense-check. If your survey data feedback is overall positive, but you’re seeing a lot of negative reviews online, you might want to add in more specific brand tracking questions to narrow in on what’s driving that negative sentiment.

Let's now pretend that you’re a market researcher for a big fashion retailer. Your stakeholder is interested in learning more about your target audience, so you launch an online brand tracking survey to capture quantitative metrics. In your stakeholder report, you build on your findings by combining your quant data with quotes from social media listening, point-of-sale data, and website traffic metrics to provide a comprehensive view of your brand's performance.

Why it matters to leverage multiple data sources:

Contextualization: Multiple data sources provide a more complete and accurate picture of your brand, lessening the chances that key stakeholders are left with unanswered questions.
Validation: Different sources often validate each other, increasing stakeholder confidence and buy-in to your findings.
Exploration of insights: Combining data sources can reveal hidden patterns and connections you might miss with just a single data source.

5. Automate your brand tracking process

The key to a strong and future-proof tracker is a brand tracking software or platform that will save time & money, reduce manual errors, and streamline your tracking process from start to finish. With an automated tracking platform, you can free up the tedious time spent on tracking setup and analysis, to focus more of your time on turning insights into strategic action.

To put this into a realistic scenario, think about two researchers: one who is using a traditional research agency (let’s call them Researcher A) and the other who is leveraging a modernized, automated platform (we’ll call them Researcher B). Researcher A is a seasoned researcher and comfortable with the traditional agency approach. Each time they run a new wave of their tracker, they have to manually type in edits to a document and track their changes through strike-outs and messy color-coded highlighting. They send these edits over to a programming team, wait for them to implement those changes, check that the changes have been correctly implemented, contact their panel team, test the survey links, and finally, launch their study. Only once the fielding process is complete, they’ll start their quality assurance checks and manually clean out respondents that don’t provide authentic or legitimate responses. If that sounds time-consuming and error-prone...you’re right.

Now compare that process to Researcher B, who in recent years has made the switch over from a traditional agency research provider to an automated research platform like quantilope. They can forget version control issues - being able to edit their survey directly in a platform that’s accessible to all their team members at once. They can connect to any panel of their choice with just a few platform settings and monitor their data in real-time as respondents complete the survey. To clean their data, all they have to do is toggle on their chosen data cleaning filters - which they can do at any point during fieldwork. To build a report, they simply drag-and-drop charts into their live dashboard and leverage an AI co-pilot to help with chart headlines and key takeaways. These charts even automatically update as new data is available - both while in field and with any new wave data in the future.

Why automating your brand tracker matters:

Efficiency: Automation frees up your time for more strategic tasks, like making actionable business recommendations from consumer insights.
Scalability: It’s inevitable that your brand tracking needs will change over time. Automation makes it easier to scale your brand tracking efforts as your business grows. Rather than having to manually edit your survey and risk version control issues across teams, you can add in new questions or hide outdated ones with just the click of a few buttons.
Advanced analytics: Automated platforms typically offer access to powerful tools like advanced methodologies and AI co-pilots to get more done, faster.
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Five brand tracking mistakes you should avoid

While above we highlighted five best practices to keep in mind, we’d be remiss not to also mention five mistakes to avoid. After all, even the best researchers aren’t fully immune to brand tracking mistakes.

Below are some reminders to help you avoid common tracking when running a brand tracking study:

1. Inconsistencies in tracking

Using different methods or survey questions from one tracking wave to the next can make it impossible to compare results accurately and identify true trends. Maintain consistency in your approach to ensure reliable data and meaningful comparisons over time. While it’s ok to add in new questions over time, always make sure to notate any new additions within your reporting to ensure no one reading the report makes inaccurate comparisons.

2. Ignoring qualitative data

As highlighted in the best practices above, focusing only on quantitative data without qualitative context is a common mistake in brand tracking. While separate qualitative studies can be valuable, an even simpler approach is to incorporate open-ended questions into your existing quantitative surveys. This adds depth and meaning to your findings, providing richer insights into consumer perceptions and motivations.

3. Over-relying on funnel metrics

Traditional brand trackers are often centered around the core ‘funnel metrics’ - brand awareness, brand consideration, and brand usage. These metrics are informative, but don’t always tell a brand the ‘so what’, leaving them with insights but no action. To focus on metrics that reflect brand health and business opportunities, consider Better Brand Health Tracking - an approach that leverages Category Entry Points (to uncover the reasons consumers shop in a category), Mental Availability Metrics (to let you know which brands come to mind in specific buying scenarios), and Mental Advantage analysis (which tells you which brands in your category perform better or worse than expected).

4. Using the wrong tracking frequency

Brand tracking is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. However, you have to find the right tracking cadence that makes sense for your industry. Fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) can be tracked much more frequently than, say, mattresses or cars. That’s because FMCG trends change quickly and often - warranting quarterly or even monthly tracking frequencies. Meanwhile, the mattress and car industries are less volatile/’trendy’. These categories can probably be tracked once or twice a year.

5. Failing to act on insights

If you're investing time and money in brand tracking but not using the findings to improve your brand, you're essentially wasting those resources. To maximize the value of brand tracking, you need to close the loop between insights and action. This means effectively communicating your findings to key stakeholders and collaborating to turn those insights into tangible improvements across your business. Ensure your findings are communicated clearly and in an engaging manner, highlighting relevancies for different teams across the business - from marketing to new product development. This collaborative approach ensures that your valuable consumer insights drive real change and contribute to your brand's success.
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quantilope's approach to brand tracking

quantilope's Consumer Intelligence Platform empowers brands to conduct agile and robust brand tracking studies - whether you’re looking to run a traditional brand tracking study with standard usage and attitude questions, or you're interested in leveraging quantilope’s Better Brand Health Tracking approach. Whichever route you choose, build your tracker in a fraction of the time you might be used to with agency partners. Simply drag and drop survey questions and methods into your questionnaire, collaborate with other team members in real-time without worrying about version control issues, connect to any panel of your choice directly in the platform, monitor results as soon as respondents complete your survey, and build an interactive dashboard with live significance testing that automatically updates with any new data as it’s available - both during fieldwork for a current wave, and as new waves are available in the future.

Beyond the platform’s automated tracking features, leverage quantilope’s AI co-pilot, quinn, to help with the analysis of your tracking insights. Simply ask quinn to generate tracking chart headlines or summarize key takeaways from your dashboard data. With quantilope, you no longer have to worry about manually tracking survey changes, tedious data processing checks, or the rigidness of traditional agency trackers. Make whatever changes you need to your tracker, at any time, so you can always stay up to date on current consumer trends and behaviors.

To learn more about quantilope’s brand tracking capabilities, get in touch below!