April 28, 2025 • 10 min read

How to Measure Brand Performance

There are dozens of KPIs you can track to understand how well your marketing is performing. From conversion rate and open rate to monthly site visitors and social engagement, every KPI gives you a window into your overall business health. But there’s another performance metric you should be keeping your eye on if you want to outshine the competition: brand performance.

Brand performance marketing can mean a lot of things — how memorable it is, what people think of it, and whether audiences associate your brand with the right attributes — but it’s all valuable data that can drive better business decisions. Today, our business strategy agency breaks down why brand performance marketing metrics are so important and how you can measure them with the right tools and techniques. Let’s get started.

How does brand relate to performance?

Brand and business performance are tightly linked throughout every conversion funnel. But brand is especially important for the awareness stage; by working “upstream” in the funnel, it can influence how people perceive your company long before they decide to buy. For example:

Brand drives awareness and recognition. If people don’t know you exist, they can’t consider your business as a solution.
Brand communicates value. A well-defined brand makes it clear why you stand out from competitors.
Brand builds trust and recall. People prefer to buy from brands they recognize and trust, especially in crowded markets.
Brand builds equity. High brand equity raises the perceived value of the goods and services a business provides.

Put all this together, and the strength of your brand often becomes a very accurate projection of your future business performance.

Why brand marketing matters to performance

Let’s zoom in on the awareness stage of the funnel. Winning on brand here — at the beginning of most buyer journeys — is key to fueling success throughout the rest of the funnel. At our performance marketing agency, we consistently see effective brand awareness tactics accomplish several major things.

Larger prospect pool = more leads

Because brand influences audience awareness, it also directly helps you build a larger prospect pool. The more prospects your brand has, the greater the number of potential leads you can attract to your brand. Of course, your brand awareness efforts should prioritize your target customers, not the general public — not all leads are equally valuable to your business.

Still, when combined with magnetic brand energy and the right strategies, broad brand awareness can do wonders for attracting the ideal audience to your business and driving better all-around business performance.

Stronger connection to existing audience

Brand awareness doesn’t just help you attract new audience members. It also helps you keep them by retargeting existing or previous customers, improving customer retention, and maximizing customer lifetime value. These goals are essential for all brands, but especially for businesses that have seasonal or otherwise non-continuous offerings.

Imagine that you run a B2B business, and most of your clients only need to make a purchase from you once every few years. Mastering customer retention, therefore, is vital in your B2B marketing strategy; it helps ensure you can count on revenue in the long term, not just right now, and cranks up lifetime value for better bottom-line performance.

More broadly, not every prospect is always in “buy mode.” But with strong brand performance, your business will remain top-of-mind when those audience members are ready to approach you for a partnership or purchase. It puts you ahead of competitors before the race has even begun.

Reduced cost per lead or CAC

Higher brand awareness often leads to a reduced cost per lead (CPL) or customer acquisition cost (CAC). When audience members already know about your brand, they could:

Require less convincing or fewer marketing materials to convert them into customers
Contact you organically (i.e., without having an ad served directly to them)

In either case, brand performance leads to easier lead captures (and more lead captures) in a variety of industries. The less time you spend marketing to prospects, the more time you can spend on delivering exceptional experiences and forging long-lasting relationships.

Potentially faster sales cycle

In certain industries, like many B2B sectors, buyers have higher considerations that brands need to meet before they’re ready to make a purchase. Boost your audience’s awareness of your brand, and you could see faster sales cycles — in effect, branding can accelerate decision-making.

Say you run a B2B software company, and a prospect is looking for a new partner. If your brand awareness is high, and the prospect is already aware of your company, they might be partially onboard signing a deal with you before ever reaching out, leaving your team to seal the deal in half the time it normally takes.

Of course, this isn’t a universal advantage since not every industry has a slower-than-average sales cycle. Still, in fields where trust and familiarity factor heavily into which company gets a contract, brand awareness can be the deciding factor and lead to superior performance.

How to measure brand performance and awareness

Measuring something as broad as “how well your brand is doing” can be tricky, even if you’re looking for specific signs of success. However, we’ve seen success through applying a handful of tools and analytics tactics.

Measuring brand awareness

Track branded search volume

Keyword tools like SEMrush, which we use for our own research at Infinity, are invaluable for seeing both what people are searching for and how often they’re searching for it.

By monitoring how often people search for your brand online, you can get a decent sense of how generally aware your audience is of your company. Similarly, social media mentions and engagement metrics are solid proxies for the mindshare your brand has in its potential customer base.

Watch your website’s activity

Don’t forget to watch your website’s home metrics, too. Organic search visits and clicks from your digital marketing materials — like paid search ads — are helpful measures of brand awareness, particularly when you combine these data points with other key performance indicators.

Trace your average CAC

Since CAC is directly affected by brand performance, the former serves as a good way to measure the latter.

A lower CAC could indicate several encouraging things:

Your brand is getting more referrals
Your brand awareness is rising, so customers are encountering your brand organically more often
Your customers are more loyal than ever

Ultimately, a lower customer acquisition cost signifies stronger brand recognition and higher brand performance. Compare your CACs over time — a steady downward trend is good news for your brand.

Measuring brand perception

Monitor Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a great tool for grasping how customers perceive your brand. In short, NPS is a measurement of customers’ collective willingness to recommend your brand to others.

Think of NPS as the closest you can get to a “word-of-mouth rating.” The higher your score is out of 10, the stronger your customers’ brand loyalty and advocacy are.

You earn a higher NPS through brand awareness, which fuels referrals, and through excellent service, which inspires people to share their positive experiences. With high enough brand performance, your NPS should grow into an organic and impactful boon to your brand. You’ll have higher brand equity to “spend” when you’re a highly regarded brand.

Watch for lead quantity AND quality

The number of leads your brand acquires matters, certainly — but the practical value of those leads matters even more. To really measure brand perception, you need to assess lead quality alongside quantity. Remember, your brand should be like a magnet, attracting the ideal customers and gently repelling non-ideal audiences.

If you’re receiving a lot of new leads but only a few convert into customers, it may indicate your brand messaging needs some refinement. On the flip side, lots of new, high-quality leads are surefire signs of an excellent brand identity and potent messaging.

Perform sentiment analyses

Modern social platforms often offer tools for sentiment analysis: the science of discerning the emotional tone people use when talking about your brand on social media. The power of natural language processing (NLP) models allows you to get a reasonably accurate summary of the “mood” of your social audience — and that’s a very useful means for determining whether people are more or less pleased with your brand’s current direction.

More measuring tips

Use KPI dashboards and trackers

So far, we’ve explored some less obvious ways to measure brand performance, awareness, and perception. But the classic tools — like good ol’ fashioned KPI dashboards — still have a place in your kit.

Plenty of KPIs are solid metrics to monitor your brand’s performance, like:

Referral traffic
Conversions
Total visits
Website activity/clicks

However, these KPIs are little more than numbers on a screen without context. That’s why they’re best used in conjunction with the other methods we’ve explored above.

Send out customer surveys

Customer surveys can play a key role in your quest to measure brand performance, too. Send these out via email (with a deal-sweetener attached, like a small coupon or promotional prize, to make sure they’re filled out) to gather regular feedback and keep the pulse of your audience.

Keep an eye on “qualitative” data

Not all data can be distilled into a raw number. That doesn’t mean non-numeric data isn’t valuable. In fact, it’s a good idea to track more subjective, qualitative data to better grasp how audiences view your brand (and to better forecast how your brand will perform in the near future).

This qualitative data can be almost any customer action or comment, but our favorites to track include:

The types of words people use on social
The language that people use in customer testimonials/surveys (and comparing it with the words people use elsewhere)
Whether customers use “branding words”

In a certain sense, if customers “echo” or “mirror” your brand’s voice or values back at you, it’s a great sign that your brand identity resonates with them deeply, and that your value is clear.

Partner with an integrated marketing agency to measure your brand performance and growth

Brand performance isn’t just about sales or conversions. It’s about the long-term strength of your company’s reputation, brand awareness, and customer loyalty.

At Infinity, our marketing analytics team understands that relationship better than anyone and can tailor our business data visualization services to your needs. By tracking metrics like branded search volume, lead generation, NPS, and CAC, your business can measure brand awareness and perception to get a better sense of performance and then refine your strategies as needed.

Ask us about tracking these metrics and actively monitoring your brand performance. Learn how the data you gather unlocks new opportunities to realize your business’s biggest goals.