Key Data Points and Insights To Track For An Effective Brand Performance Check

Measuring brand performance isn’t just about tracking likes or follower growth anymore. It’s about understanding the bigger picture—how your brand is perceived, how it stacks up against competitors, and whether your marketing efforts are actually driving results.

With so many platforms, campaigns, and metrics to juggle, getting a clear view of your brand’s performance can feel overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.

In this article, we’ll unpack what brand performance really means, why it matters more than ever, and how you can start measuring it in a way that actually moves the needle.

What are brand performance indicators?

Brand performance indicators (BPIs) are metrics used to measure how a brand is performing across various channels, like its website, social media platforms, sales channels, and more.

From brand awareness, brand recollection, brand loyalty to more revenue-related business goals, measuring brand performance implies a lot of data points, each prioritized by what abusiness focuse on a particular moment. 

Here’s how Chelsea Frank, Social & Digital Marketing Managers at Mettlestate explained them:

Brand performance indicators are your brand’s pulse check. They measure how your brand is doing, both in the market and in the minds of your audience. That includes everything from awareness, reach, and engagement to sentiment, trust, and customer loyalty.

And Jessica Mann, brand growth strategist adds:

Brand performance indicators show how effectively a brand is growing both emotionally and commercially. I want to see how the brand is being perceived to our intended audience, if it’s being remembered, and if there there was enough motivation to take action.

So, what should you be focusing on? Let’s dive in!

What does brand performance measurement imply?

​​Shortly put, according to Renée Shaw:

Brand performance implies a deeper understanding than just conversion / clicks. It speaks to cultural fit, resonance, reputation. Things that are more human and nuanced.

Brands that are measuring their overall performance are taking a strategic approach to their branding strategy that can help set them up for success in the future. 

When interviewing her, Chelsea told me that:

Measuring performance indicates that you are willing to change, evolve, and remain accountable to the story your brand is telling, as well as consciously creating something that is not only visible but also valuable.

Measuring your brand performance gives you insight into data like:

• How your audience perceives your brand
• Your brand's overall reputation
• Where you stand within your market
• Your brand’s health and equity
• How are your marketing efforts doing

And Jessica adds:

With info like that, you can look into if the messaging is actually landing and identify any spikes in purchase intent. At the core though, brand performance is going to dive into key checkpoints for brand health from a long game perspective.

Does brand performance differ from content performance?

Short answer: Yes. Brand performance is a much higher-level analysis than content performance. With content performance measurement, you’re looking at each individual piece of content on its own, analyzing how your audience received it and if it hit the goals you were hoping to achieve.

Brand performance measurement looks at the overall health and state of your brand as a whole. Instead of analyzing a blog article, landing page, or social media post, or even all of your content together, it looks at the state of your brand.

Here’s how Chelsea explained it: 

Content performance looks at how individual pieces of content are doing. Are people clicking, watching, sharing, or converting? It’s very tactical and tied to specific outputs.

Brand performance zooms out. It’s about the overall perception and impact of your brand over time. Brand performance reflects how well your audience recognises your brand and trusts it. It’s less about one post and more about the emotional thread that connects every touchpoint.

That said, they’re connected. Strong content contributes to strong brand performance, but content is the vehicle, and brand is the journey. One helps build the other, but they’re not the same thing.

What does this mean?

It’s important to monitor how your audience perceives your brand, or how they feel about it. Does your brand name come with good connotations? (Ideally, that’s the goal.) Are people having conversations about your brand? Are most conversations promoting your brand or talking about customer service issues they’ve had?

Below are some insights that Jessica offered about some do’s and dont’s when measuring both that I think will be useful.

Focusing on their needs and interests will help you build trust through honest communication, which, in turn, will encourage more meaningful engagement and long-term growth for your community.

Content performance is tactical while brand performance is strategic. If you want to learn how a specific asset is doing, content performance is going to tell you by looking at engagement rates, watch times, saves, audience retention, etc. It gives a very dialled in view point that can help you optimize your content.

On the other side, brand performance looks more broader at how all of the content, campaigns, experiences, and partnerships are shaping the overall perception and equity of your brand over time. Okay sure, you went viral but what use is a video that can go viral if it does nothing for your brand’s perception or attracts the wrong audience. 

Must-track brand performance KPIs

As you set out to track your brand performance, there are several KPIs you need to keep an eye on. Let’s walk through each category of brand performance metrics that you’ll want to add to your monthly or quarterly reporting.

Brand awareness metrics

Brand awareness refers to how well your target audience knows of or can recall your brand. The more people are aware of your brand, the bigger pool of potential customers you have, meaning the better your brand is performing.

To measure your brand awareness, you need to look at individual KPIs like:

• Share of voice
• Brand mention volume
• Reach

Share of voice (SoV) measures how much of the market is dominated by conversations around your brand versus your competitors. 

As an example, imagine that within the coffee shop industry, Starbucks and Dunkin’ likely have the largest share of voice, respectively. Keep in mind that this is also likely largely geographical, and areas in Canada may see Tim Hortons with a larger share of voice.

To measure SoV, use the following formula:

Your Brand Mentions / Total Number of Brand Mentions (Yours + Your Competitors') x 100

You’ll end up with a percentage that tells you how much of the industry is talking about your brand. 25-30% is considered a strong share of voice, but this range can wildly depend on things like your industry, the competitive landscape, and other factors.

Next, you want to look at brand mention volume. This is similar to measuring your share of voice, except you’re just looking at the total number of mentions your brand gets across all channels—social media, websites, publications, videos, and more.

You can use social listening tools or a tool as simple as Google Alerts to make sure you don’t miss any online mentions of your brand.

Make sure that your brand mention volume is consistently growing month over month, as that will be a clear indicator of a good brand performance.

Finally, you also want to examine your reach. Reach refers to the total number of people who have seen your content or your promotions within a given period of time. You can use website and social media analytics tools like Socialinsider to help you pinpoint how many people you’ve reached with your brand.

But with brand awareness, you want to look further than just the number of people you’ve reached. It’s important to look at the trends as well, to see if your efforts are consistently bringing more value over time.

Using Socialinsider’s reach analysis, you’re able to look at your total social media reach, plus how it fluctuates over time, so that you can make sure you’re consistently reaching more and more people within your target market.

Tracking your brand awareness metrics ensures you get an idea of how well known your brand is within your industry. This lets you know whether you need to be ramping up your promotional strategy to reach more people in your target market or if you’re on a solid growth trajectory.

As a takeaway on this, here’s Jessica’s insight:

The numbers matter, but so does the story behind them. It’s one thing to track clicks and mentions, but the real question is: Are we building something memorable? Something meaningful? That’s what strong brand indicators can reveal when you’re paying attention to both the data and the story it tells.

Brand engagement metrics:

Next, you need to look at performance metrics surrounding your brand engagement, or how many people are interacting with your brand online.

These KPIs include:

• Engagement rate
• Comments
• Shares
• Saves

Your engagement rate measures how many people are interacting with your content. The formula for this metric is:

Number of Engagements / Number of People Reached x 100

Essentially, you’re calculating the percentage of people who interacted with your content after seeing it. You can also use the following formula:

Number of Engagements / Number of Followers x 100

Using that formula would let you know how many people are interacting with your content out of the total number of people who already follow your brand. 

This metric tells you how interesting your content is to your target audience. The higher your engagement rate, the better. However, each platform has its own benchmarks you at least want to aim for.

Keep these engagement rate by followers benchmarks in mind as you calculate your own results:

• TikTok: 2.50%
• Instagram: 0.50%
• Facebook: 0.15%
• X/Twitter: 0.15%

You can use a tool like Socialinsider to look at your engagement metrics and get an overview of your social media performance. Take a look at this example dashboard below to get an idea of the insights you can get access to:

This might seem like a lot of data to track, and yes, it’s still early on, but here’s why all this data is important, according to Chelsea:

When it comes to tracking brand performance, you want to focus on indicators that reveal both the breadth and depth of your brand’s influence.

Key metrics include how widely your brand is recognised (brand awareness), how positively it’s perceived (brand sentiment), and how much space it occupies in conversations compared to competitors (share of voice). Engagement levels tell you how invested your audience is in your message, while loyalty and retention metrics show whether you’re building lasting relationships.

Your comments, shares, and saves are three different types of engagements that your audience can take with your brand. Likes are also a form of engagement, but that’s an extremely simple one that doesn’t really tell you much. Many users like posts mindlessly as they scroll through their feeds.

However, if your post resonated enough with a follower that they left a comment, shared it with their network, or saved it to go back to later, that tells you a lot more about the type(s) of content your audience wants to see from you.

You can also see this data within your Socialinsider dashboard by scrolling down in the Engagement tab:

Finally, Jessica adds:

We have to be able to go beyond likes and followers when measuring brand performance. I want to see how the brand is being perceived to our intended audience, is it being remembered, and of course was there enough motivation to take action. I believe this is one of the best ways to really see a brand’s relevance and reputation. 

Brand perception metrics

The next category of brand performance metrics is all about brand perception. This relates back to how the general public views your brand. How they feel about your company and its products or services.

The main KPIs you want to track here include:

• Sentiment analysis
• Brand association strength
• Customer advocacy signals

Sentiment analysis looks at the overall sentiment surrounding your brand online and tells you whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral overall. Sentiment analysis tools look at the tone and context of online posts about your brand and put together an analysis based on their findings.

This is an important metric to track as it tells you whether your brand is being received positively within the market or if you need to make a major pivot because your target audience isn’t very receptive to your brand.

Brand association strength refers to the feelings or ideas that consumers associate with any given brand—and how strong those associations are. For example, Geico has created a strong brand association with its gecko. People who think of the word “gecko” might also think of Geico alongside it due to this strong association.

Brand associations can be anything from feelings to celebrities, founders, slogans, characters, or any other type of idea or activity that reminds consumers of a specific brand. Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan is another example of a strong brand association.

You can use brand tracking tools to find brand associations as well as focus groups and other market research tactics that let you communicate directly with consumers to get their overall thoughts about your brand.

Customer advocacy signals tell you how willing your audience is to advocate for or promote your brand. This type of advocacy could come via:

• Online reviews
• Word-of-mouth referrals
• User-generated content
• Social media mentions

Customer advocacy is a powerful form of marketing and a sure sign that you have a positive brand perception amongst your audience. To track customer advocacy signals, look at how many reviews your brand is getting online and the number of UGC posts your customers are creating.

One final insight that Jessie gave me and I consider very important to keep in mind when analyzing your brand’s performance is this:

Qualitative metrics are trickier, but arguably more revealing because they’re rooted in perception and help decode how your audience feels. I like to look through the lens of audience sentiment, save to share ratios, brand associations and community depth.

When I see things like “I feel like this was made for me” or “this finally makes sense” or “this made me think of X” we know we’re onto something. In short, quantitative data validates the impact but qualitative data explains the emotional drivers behind it. You need both to understand how your brand is performing and why it even matters.

Brand loyalty indicators

Next, you want to look at brand loyalty indicators. These tell you how likely your customers are to keep coming back, remaining loyal to your business and not heading off towards your competitors.

These indicators include:

• Community growth
• Repeat engagement patterns
• User-generated content volume

With community growth, you’re looking at the size of your social media community (i.e., engaged followers, group members) and how it has fluctuated over time. You want to see consistent growth, showing that you’re adding more engaged customers to your audience.

Repeated engagement patterns refer to people who consistently engage with your content and your business on social media. You want to see these repeat engagement patterns as it shows you that your brand and your online presence is resonating with your target audience, and that they’re regularly wanting to see and interact with your content.

When looking for repeat engagement patterns, you also want to analyze the different types of content that tend to see the most engagement. This can help you optimize your content with the top-performing formats or topics.

You can access this within your Socialinsider dashboard by scrolling through the Engagement tab until you find the graph showcasing post types sorted by engagement, like in the example below. 

You can also check out your content pillars—the topics you post most about—to see which of those outperform the rest. This can help inform your content calendar going forward, so you can continue to increase repeat engagement.

And finally, you can also look at user-generated content volume. User-generated content is content that your audience has created, but that you can cross-post and use as your own marketing content. It helps your strategy feel more authentic and showcases that you have a wide range of happy customers.

The more UGC you see your customers post, the more likely it is that you’re generating loyal and happy customers that will continue to buy from your business.

Brand authority metrics

Your brand authority refers to the level of trust and credibility you’ve built within your industry. Do your customers trust you? But more than that, are you considered a leader amongst your industry?

To gauge your overall brand authority, you want to monitor KPIs like:

• Industry mention share
• Expert citations

Industry mention share is similar to share of voice (SoV), but is a bit more specific. Instead of looking at your overall visibility within your industry, it hones in on just your online mentions. This tells you how authoritative your brand’s voice has become across your industry.

To calculate this, use the following formula:

Your Brand Mentions / Total Mentions in Your Industry x 100

This lets you see how much of the industry conversation your brand is dominating. A high authority brand will obviously be talked about a lot. And a high authority brand is a key indicator of a successful brand performance.

Expert citations are online posts where experts mention your brand, either in a blog article or a social media post. The more expert citations your brand gets, the higher its authority, as well.

Here’s an example of what this can look like. The below LinkedIn post is from an industry expert citing Socialinsider’s founder Adina Jipa as the two of them talked through analytics and data. Getting mentions and opportunities like this is a clear sign of brand authority.

Competitive brand metrics

Finally, we need to look at competitive insights, or KPIs that showcase how your brand stands up against its competitors, to round out your brand performance analysis. 

The main metrics you’ll look at here are:

• Engagement rate comparisons
• Audience overlap analysis

Engagement rate comparisons measure your own engagement rate up to your competitors’ engagement to see how you line up. You can easily access this information inside your Socialinsider dashboard by adding all of your major competitors to your account.

Take a look at the overall profile summary below—you get to see comparisons for follower count, overall engagement, number of posts published, and overall reach. Use these numbers to calculate engagement rate for both your brand and your competitors to see where you stand.

Audience overlap analysis shows you how much of your audience lines up with your competitors’ audiences and how much of your respective targeting overlaps. You can use audience overlap tools to measure this metric and discover your closest competitors.

Once you’ve found those competitors, you can more easily conduct competitive benchmarketing analysis, looking to see how you and your performance compare to your closest competitors.

Brand performance measurement techniques

Aside from tracking the aforementioned metrics and KPIs, there are a few additional techniques you can employ to measure your overall brand performance.

• Emotion analysis and brand feeling measurement: Use social listening and sentiment analysis software to analyze the overall emotion surrounding your industry, and more specifically, your brand. Understanding your target audience’s emotions behind their motivations to buy can help you create better messaging and improve your performance.

• Competitive content gap identification and exploitation: Pay attention to the types of content your competitors are using to ensure you aren’t missing any key promotional ideas. By using Socialinsider’s content pillars feature, you can see the most engaging content pillars for your competitors, and the results generated, offering insights for new content strategies approaches.

• Cross-platform brand journey mapping and optimization: Analyze how your audience is interacting with your brand across different channels by mapping out all of the touchpoints. Are there places where your audience members are falling off and not making it all the way to becoming customers? Optimize those touchpoints to improve overall performance and conversions.

Brand performance optimization strategies

You can only go so far by measuring your brand performance. Especially if your findings aren’t what you’d hoped. Once you’ve put parameters in place to start tracking performance metrics, your next step is to optimize that performance so your results will continue to improve.

These tactics can help you to optimize your brand performance so you can boost overall sentiment, perception, awareness, and more for your company.

Content strategy for brand performance

Content can play a huge role in boosting your brand performance. The right content can increase engagement, make more people aware of your brand, improve overall perception, and place your brand as an authority figure in your industry.

You just need the right tools to help you pinpoint that content.

With Socialinsider, you can quickly identify not only your own most engaging posts, but those from your competitors as well.

You can also discover content pillars that can point you to the most engaging topics for your target audience. Pay attention to content types that tend to drive engagement versus those meant to generate conversions.

Other key tips for generating a content strategy meant to boost your brand performance include:

• Finding your brand voice, documenting it, and ensuring it remains consistent across all channels.
• Digging into your storytelling skills and spinning a tale of your brand, rather than focusing exclusively on promotion.
• Creating user-generated content campaigns that showcase happy customers and improves your overall brand authenticity.

Community building and brand advocacy

Building a community around your brand can improve your performance by ensuring you have a network of brand advocates and ambassadors who consistently promote your brand and its products or services among their network.

Again, brand advocates are customers of yours that are so loyal, they start mentioning your brand to others. Leverage those advocates and build relationships with them to further boost performance.

Some tactics for doing so include:

• Identifying and nurturing brand advocates so you have a direct relationship with customers who are that excited about your brand
• Carefully analyzing feedback that shows you what resonates with your audiences across all of your channels
• Building a brand ambassador program that makes it easy for people who love your brand to get rewarded for promoting it
• Encouraging your customers to become brand evangelists on social media

Here’s an example of what that could look like. At Socialinsider, we rewarded some of our most loyal followers on social media with not only a free month of our product, but also Canva and Audible. This is a great way to keep people who already love your brand even more excited about it.

Leading indicators of brand performance changes

As you measure your brand performance, you want to be on the pulse of any changes—whether positive or negative. 

You can find indicators of potential changes by:

• Keeping an eye on trend predictions in your industry and maintaining relevance by incorporating those trends into your overall strategy
• Anticipating competitive threats and preparing a list of proactive responses should any negative mentions arise
• Identifying new market opportunities by analyzing your brand performance data

Tools and technologies for brand performance measurement

Lastly, to ensure you’re properly monitoring, measuring, and optimizing your brand performance, you need the right toolset. These four tools can be a huge help.

Social media monitoring and listening tools - Mention.com

Social media monitoring and listening tools can help you track metrics like:

• Brand mentions
• Share of voice
• Sentiment analysis
• Brand association

Mention.com is a great tool to check out for online monitoring and analysis.

You can get access to features like real-time monitoring of online data across the last two years, sentiment analysis, share of voice, competitive intelligence, and more.

Social media analytics tools - Socialinsider

Social media analytics tools are key for tracking data like:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Competitor performance
• Social media insights

With Socialinsider, you can get access to key competitive analysis features that let you in on how your social media marketing performance lines up with that of each of your main competitors.

You can also get access to data that helps you form an informed paid campaign budget by looking at the overall organic value of your results:

To access this on your own, we recommend configuring the values based on the benchmarks of your industry.

Start by clicking on Settings from your home dashboard, then click on Organic Value Configuration.

From there, choose the channels you want this metric calculated on. Next, you can assign different values based on what engagement, awareness, and other metrics are worth to your business.

Socialinsider can also help you track the overall performance of each of your social media channels, monitoring growth over time and ensuring your social media strategy is improving your brand performance.

SEO tools - Ahrefs

SEO tools play a major role in your content strategy. They can help you find the right keywords and topics to create content around, while also helping you analyze your audience overlap and content gaps.

Ahrefs is a go-to SEO tool for brands looking to use their content strategy as part of their brand performance optimization.

Get access to features that help you explore competitor websites, find gaps in your content topics, track content performance, and more.

CRM - HubSpot

A CRM is essential for tracking data about your customers. You can use your CRM to monitor metrics like:

• Sales
• Repeat purchases
• Customer interactions

HubSpot has a free CRM that houses all of your customer data in one easy-to-access place. You can use the CRM to gather customer information like contact info to then market directly to them via email and text.

You can also get access to features that let you track your customer relationships, sales, and other activities.

Final thoughts

Measuring your brand performance helps you gain an understanding of where you stand within your industry and how your target audience feels about your brand. Boosting your brand performance requires keeping a close eye on key brand performance metrics.

Take advantage of tools like Socialinsider that can help you track your performance, discover what your competitors are doing, and work to boost your market share.