The push for marketing and PR teams to be more analytical and measure everything is not a trend anymore. It's a strong movement that is only on the rise.
Every dollar spent on marketing and public relations needs to have a clear return on investment. While this is nothing new for the world of marketing, public relations is still fairly new to measuring the impact of work done on the bottom line.
So, how do you measure brand performance, including brand loyalty and brand sentiment? And what should you be tracking in the first place?
What is brand performance?
Brand performance measures a brand's strength and success over time by measuring how well it achieves its business goals in areas like awareness, customer perception, loyalty, and financial returns.
When measuring brand performance, it's important to understand the difference between short-term results and long-term brand equity.
Short-term results focus on immediate gains like sales spikes or ad conversions, while long-term brand equity is about building lasting value through gaining trust, recognition, and customer loyalty.
Short-term wins deliver quick impacts but may fade fast, whereas brand equity grows slowly and supports sustained business success.
The best brands balance both to drive growth now without sacrificing future strength.
Challenges in measuring brand performance
Measuring brand performance metrics can be complex for a variety of reasons.
👉 For agencies, it can be difficult to measure brand performance for multiple clients spread across different platforms and audiences.
Factor in that every client has different expectations and budgets, and it can become a challenge to measure key performance indicators for each brand consistently.
👉 For in-house teams, the biggest challenge can be to align PR efforts and brand metrics with marketing KPIs.
When you measure brand performance over time, it may be difficult to prove the long-term value and show return on investment to win a greater budget for your team.
What to track for brand performance (that actually gives results)
Depending on who you work for and your end goals, the way you measure brand performance can be wildly different. Some clients may want to track brand recognition, others may focus on brand loyalty, and many will only care about purchase intent and its effect on their bottom line.
Here are some great starting points when it comes to tracking brand performance.
#1 Brand awareness
When you measure brand awareness, you measure how well customers recognize your brand.
You can track brand awareness of your brand through a variety of different methods:
- Through surveys: what your customers (and potential customers) know about you and how they perceive you
- Media mentions: how many times your brand name pops up on social media channels
- Online search volume of your terms: how many customers look you up online
- Number of people who have been exposed to your brand: total reach through advertising, media coverage and other channels
Brand awareness is the basis of PR efforts, helping you determine the impact of your campaigns and how well people recognize you.
💡 How to do this with Prowly?
Use our media monitoring tool to find out how many times people mention you and in what context. It helps you find out who talks about you, on which platform and, thanks to brand sentiment analysis, you can see the emotion and intent behind each mention too.
#2 Media coverage
Media coverage is the amount and quality of exposure your brand or campaign receives in the media.
It includes several elements that help evaluate the success of your PR efforts. It includes things such as the number of mentions, type of coverage, outlet quality and more. The overall purpose of this metric is to gauge how often you're covered and by whom.
Track it through:
- The number of articles: how many unique mentions there are of your brand across platforms
- The quality of media outlets: the overall quality of the outlets that mention you, graded by the traffic of their website, their (inter)national coverage, and the type of their audience
- Top-tier publications: whether you are mentioned by the likes of New York Times, Forbes, Washington Post or others
💡 How to do this in Prowly?
With our PR reporting platform, you can track individual mentions or sum them up in a report to see an overall view of your brand health. At a glance, you can see the type of outlets that mention you, their audience, website metrics, traffic and overall quality, to determine if the coverage is a valuable outcome of your brand marketing efforts.
#3 Presence score
Presence score is a proprietary PR metric used to show your brand's visibility across a variety of platforms, like traditional media, social media, and digital platforms.
You can track it by collecting data from multiple sources: media mentions, press coverage, social media reach, combined with other visibility metrics contributing to a consistent brand identity.
It's a lot to do manually. So it's best to choose a PR tool that that tracks and provides all (or most) of this data, like Prowly.
Presence score is an excellent benchmark of how visible your brand is and how frequently it appears in the right places.
#4 Brand reputation
Brand reputation is how the public perceives a brand based on overall sentiment and trust. The higher the brand reputation, the more trustworthy you are and the easier it becomes to persuade leads to become customers.
To track your brand reputation, use a mix of the following:
- Media coverage: how many people mention you, when and in what context
- Social media posts: what platforms people use when mentioning you
- Online reviews: where people review you and what kind of ratings they give you
- Customer feedback: survey results, feedback form submissions, ratings through different channels
Brand reputation is crucial for PR efforts as it has an immediate impact on how much customers trust you, how loyal they are to your brand, and how much money they're going to spend with you. By ensuring positive media coverage and handling potential crises, you can get a grip on your brand reputation.
#5 Brand equity
Brand equity is the value you add to a product or service thanks to your brand name, customer loyalty and perceived quality.
In other words, everything besides your product that contributes to your overall sales and customer lifetime value.
There are a few ways to measure this:
- Customer surveys: ask customers how they feel about your brand shown in metrics like the Net Promoter Score
- Market research: poll your (potential) customers how they feel about the value your brand adds to your offer
- Customer loyalty metrics: Net Promoter Score, repeat purchases, lifetime value
- Overall sales performance: total sales, monthly or annual recurring revenue, customer churn, etc.
Brand equity is crucial for PR because it's often a sign of high customer loyalty and the success of your brand as a whole. Great PR and marketing strategies help keep brand equity strong over time.
#6 Share of Voice (SOV)
Share of Voice is the percentage of all the media mentions that your brand gets in comparison to your competitors. For example, you're in the mobile phone space and you want to measure how many mentions you get in comparison to Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, or other manufacturers.
Track it by:
- Using media monitoring tools: add the brand names of your brand and that of all your competitors to get a clear overview of the conversation and benchmarks for comparison
- Tracking mentions in media outlets, blogs, social media and press releases: all the channels where you and your competitors are present
💡 How to do this in Prowly?
You don't have to calculate anything because Prowly does all of the hard work for you.
Prowly can:
- Track online mentions of your brand and competitors
- Use custom filters like media type, sentiment, backlinks, and languages
- Track mentions in blogs, forums, print, and broadcast media
- Provide various reporting graphs to visualize change over time
#7 Sentiment analysis
For excellent brand engagement, people should not only mention your brand's product a lot. They should also speak well of you, which can be really hard to track with a large volume of mentions.
In other words, if 1,000 people mention you in a month, manually determining how many of those mentions are positive and how many are negative is a chore. This is where media monitoring tools like Prowly come in.
When you monitor sentiment analysis, you can get mentions of your brand categorized as:
- Positive
- Negative
- Neutral
💡 How to do this in Prowly?
Simply log into your dashboard to get an overview of your total mentions. You'll see an AI-based breakdown of your overall sentiment, including individual mentions for detailed overview and adjustment.
#8 Engagement
A great brand strategy means coverage from journalists and the attention of potential and loyal customers. For brand teams, the way people engage with a company speaks volumes about the total brand value and performance.
You can track brand engagement through:
- Social media likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Engagement levels
- Website traffic driven by PR efforts
#9 Brand visibility
Brand visibility is just that: how visible your brand is across different channels.
Strong brand performance doesn't mean being on all the social media platforms or traditional media channels. Instead, it means being present where your customers are.
Track it through:
- Brand mentions: across different platforms, breaking down your mentions per platform
- Frequency of visibility: how often your brand pops up on your most relevant channels
💡 How to do this in Prowly?
Simply add your brand name to our media monitoring tool and you'll get access to a dashboard to view where you where mentioned, when and in what context.
#10 Return on investment (ROI)
Perhaps the most important brand performance metric of all, ROI shows you just that, the amount of money the business has gained by investing in PR efforts.
ROI as a brand performance metric is important for proving the value of PR to clients, managers and stakeholders. It helps agencies and PR and marketing teams win a seat at the table and secure budget for future campaigns.
While notoriously difficult to track, it's not impossible.
💡 You can most easily track it by comparing the cost of PR campaigns (such as media outreach, press release distribution, event planning and management) with business outcomes tracked over time (increases in sales or leads, raises in brand equity).
SEO metrics
Customers with a strong brand preference will flock to your website.
If your marketing and brand campaigns are working, you'll see an increase in website traffic, especially referral traffic as a result of your PR efforts. For example, if you get mentioned in the press, on other blogs, on news websites and other sources.
You can track it through:
- Referral traffic: visits to your websites that come from other platforms
- Bounce rate: interested readers tend to "bounce" less and stick around on your website
- Time spent on site: the more engaged your readers are, the more time they will spend on the website
- Incoming backlinks: how many people link to you as a source, tracking traffic to your website, especially referral traffic driven by PR efforts (e.g., mentions in press, blogs, news sites).
💡 How do to this in Prowly?
1️⃣ Head over to Prowly's Media Monitoring tool and easily track the quantity and quality of articles that contain relevant backlinks to your site.
2️⃣ Start off by creating a dashboard filled with articles that include backlinks and sort them by domain authority (backed with data from Semrush).
Improving brand performance over time
To improve brand performance in the future, the best thing you can do is constantly measure and improve. By setting brand performance benchmarks for your business, you can find out which campaigns are working and what needs to be rethought.
Here are some best practices for adjusting your PR campaigns based on data:
- Analyze media coverage to see which outlets and messages are generating the most visibility and positive brand perception.
- Monitor engagement metrics (clicks, shares, comments) to understand what content your audience is responding to.
- Track audience sentiment using surveys, social listening, or feedback tools to gauge public perception.
- Use data to refine messaging, making sure it aligns with what your audience values and cares about.
- Adjust targeting by focusing on the most responsive demographics, channels, or regions that impact your brand health.
- Optimize timing based on when your content is most likely to gain traction.
- Be prepared to pivot quickly if results show your current strategy isn’t working.
In the end, tracking brand performance and improving it helps paint a clear picture of the value of PR efforts to your client or manager.
Over to you
You can't improve what you don't measure.
To effectively measure brand performance, define your key metrics and use the right marketing, PR, and analytics tools to aggregate that data and analyze it in real time. Knowing where you stand is half of the battle.
With Prowly, you can easily measure your branding efforts across different platforms and channels.
With features such as media monitoring, social media listening, a media database, and many others, you'll always have a clear understanding of your brand performance over time and as it unfolds.
