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Post: How to Measure Brand Awareness in 2025 (AKA the Year of the Brand)

Ryan

Ryan

Hi, I'm Ryan. I publish here articles which help you to get information about Finance, Startup, Business, Marketing and Tech categories.

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Brand awareness is one of the “fuzziest” growth channels. And when things get fuzzy, you need concrete ways to prove your time and investment is paying off.

Below I’ve laid out 11 workflows you can follow to measure the success of your brand awareness—including some little-known Ahrefs use cases.

Brand awareness refers to a series of marketing tactics that help audiences recognize and recall a brand name, logo, or product.

It’s a “death-by-a-thousand-cuts”/ ”sales-by-a-thousand-sightings” approach to marketing: lots of tiny actions working together to create big benefits for your company.

If you’re thinking of advertising, eyeballs, and impressions, you’re in the right ballpark.

Big brands spend millions building awareness, because with recognition comes a certain level of legitimacy and trust—which can turn into sales further down the line.

a screenshot from LinkedIn of a post by Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo. It says that building a brand is largely just about advertising budget. The biggest brands spend billions on advertising (e.g. Starbucks)
Tim Soulo on LinkedIn

There’s no right way to manufacture awareness. Brands use different formats, channels, and varying levels of creativity to capture audience attention.

Examples of different types of brand awareness include:

B2B companies spent 28.9% of their marketing budgets on brand awareness in 2024, according to Gartner—investing more than at any other stage of the customer journey.

A screenshot from Gartner CMO Spend Survey showing that 28.6% of spend goes towards driving brand awareness—the highest of all journey stages.

Companies can burn through cash on awareness campaigns, hoping people will recognize and love their brand. But generating a buzz with no sales is a situation no marketer wants to find themselves in.

“The key to building a successful brand with ads is that those ads need to actually convert people into buyers—otherwise you’ll waste a ton of money and could bankrupt your company if everyone knows your brand but doesn’t buy it.” 

Tim Soulo

That’s why it’s crucial to measure the impact of your brand awareness strategy as you build it.

The events of the last year mean it’s harder than ever to build brand awareness, what with AI eating into top-of-the-funnel traffic, near-constant search reshuffling, declining social reach (hello, TikTok ban), and a flood of low-quality AI content eroding consumer trust.

But I also, counterintuitively, think it’s the best time to build and measure your brand.

The more brand awareness, trust, and loyalty you build now, the less troubled you’ll be by these challenges in future. That’s because the benefits of brand awareness compound. Building awareness will bring you more:

  • AI traffic. AI is an entirely new channel, giving you first mover advantage. The more your brand name crops up in topically relevant conversations online, the more likely it is to be mentioned and cited by LLMs and AI.
  • Organic traffic. According to Mark Williams-Cook, Google assigns sites a “site quality” score, based on brand metrics. To understand your website’s quality, it analyzes your branded keywords, brand mentions that attract clicks (e.g. brand rich anchor text), and site clicks. Proactively building your brand awareness will inflate these metrics, boosting your site quality score and search ranking. And any ranking improvements will reinforce your brand visibility, creating a feedback loop of compounding awareness.
  • Brand protection. Brand awareness means less dependence on any one channel, and diversified traffic from multiple sources and channels.
  • Brand loyalty. Once your audience is aware of your brand, you can nurture that interest throughout the customer journey, turning it into positive brand sentiment and loyalty.
  • Customers. Despite being tricky to attribute, when awareness booms, sales and conversions are often pulled along in the slipstream.

Brand awareness is the fuzziest form of marketing, built on emotional resonance rather than measurable metrics. Outcomes like brand recall, recognition, perception, affinity, and sentiment are notoriously tricky to quantify because they rely on subjective, emotional responses.

What’s more, some of your brand awareness counts as earned media—like PR, word of mouth, user-generated content, and social media. This awareness is beyond your direct control, and since you didn’t create the content, you lack full performance data, making it even tougher to evaluate.

For example, you won’t know the exact traffic or impressions a New York Times article mentioning your brand has generated without access to their analytics.

Similarly, your brand will inevitably generate awareness you can’t track—and may never even know about—through offline channels or dark social.

And another thing!

A meme of a stick figure pointing and eating with the text "And another thing"

Me at 9.09am writing this blog while eating my toast.

Brand awareness sits right at the start of the customer journey, so following the breadcrumbs through to conversion is not easy and, at times, impossible.

But don’t let all that put you off. Measuring brand awareness can still be done, and when done right, it’s hugely valuable, helping you to:

  • Justify investment: Pinning down the brand awareness metrics you can measure will help you prove growth. With that evidence, you can secure investment, attract partnerships, and get sign-off on those harder-to-measure creative projects.
  • One-up your competition: Measuring brand awareness through methods like share of voice analysis can help you work out your market positioning, set realistic goals, and repurpose strategies that have worked for your competitors. Even if your competition has more awareness, if they’re not measuring and proactively building on it, you can close that gap.
  • Figure out what works: Reviewing your brand awareness strategy shows you which tactics lead to the biggest surge in interest. Once you know what works, you can repeat successful campaigns, justify resource allocation, and more accurately tie output to ROI.

So, it’s hard to justify spend on brand because it’s so… fluffy. But you can remove a lot of that fluffiness by measuring awareness in smart ways, and paying attention to what works.

Here’s how to do that.

Let’s dive into 11 different methods and metrics you can use to figure out how well your brand awareness strategy is working.

There are so many moving parts when it comes to increasing brand awareness. Different ads, creative formats, channels, messages.

You really need a top-level view of performance to know if it’s all working.

Share of Voice (SoV) is that in a nutshell—a top-down metric that helps you quantify your brand awareness in the context of your market and competitors.

The formula to calculate share of voice is:

| SoV = Your brand visibility / Total market visibility * 100

Social share of voice shows you the percentage of the market you’ve cornered on social media, measured by your share of brand mentions vs. total brand mentions in the remaining market.

The formula to calculate social share of voice is:

| Social SoV = Your brand mentions / Total brand mentions in your market * 100
A visual representation of the social media platform, Brandwatch, showing a market analysis, including a share of voice chart

Brandwatch Consumer Research helps you measure your social share of voice

Search SoV calculates how much organic traffic you own as a proportion of the total market.

The formula is:

| Search SoV = Your organic traffic / Total organic traffic in your market * 100

Ahrefs Rank Tracker will show you your brand’s search share of voice for up to 10K keywords.

Just list out your branded or campaign-specific keywords, and see whether your brand awareness is falling, growing, or going steady.

A screenshot of a share of voice chart in Ahrefs rank tracker, with arrows pointing out share of voice and share of traffic value data

You can also benchmark your brand awareness against competitors in Rank Tracker, if you’ve specified them in your project setup.

To see that data, head to the “Competitors > Overview 2.0” tab on the left for Share of Voice and Share of Traffic Value timelines.

A gif of Ahrefs' Competitors Overview pointing out share of voice and share of traffic value trend charts

In this example, we’ve seen a 6.2% increase in our search share of voice over the last six months, bringing us up to an overall share of 23.1% for the keywords we care about.

These are the kinds of metrics to look back on when you’re proactively building your awareness.

Rank Tracker is great if you want to see your SoV trending over time, but for a snapshot view, head to Keywords Explorer.

Same as Rank Tracker, this report lets you track 10K keywords, so you can benchmark your brand’s top-level search presence against your closest competitors.

Here’s an easy workflow you can follow:

  1. Head to the Organic Keywords report and select the 10,000 highest ranking keywords for your domain
  2. Hit “Copy”
  3. Head to Keywords Explorer and paste them in the searchbar
  4. Pull up the “Traffic share by domain” report
  5. See how you much share you own for your top keywords, vs. the rest of the market
A gif walkthrough showing readers how to find their top 10k keywords in Ahrefs' Organic Keywords report, and then run a traffic share by domain report on them

Metrics to measure

Each month, report on key metrics such as Share of Voice uplift, traffic and position improvements, and traffic share percentage. 

Advertising is a huge part of increasing brand awareness. You need to watch how your ads are performing before, during, and after each marketing campaign—and keep tracking at scale—to see if your brand awareness efforts are actually paying off.

Most ad platforms have built-in ad managers (e.g. Google Ads Manager, Google Display Network, Facebook Ads Manager) which show you key brand awareness metrics like impressions, traffic, clicks, or CTR.

We run our own ads on Quora, for example, and have access to all of those figures.

A screenshot of Ahrefs' Quora Ads, showing data on ad campaigns, including impressions, clicks, and CTR

Here are a couple more ways you can measure the success of your ads using Ahrefs.

Measure the success of PPC brand awareness campaigns

Head to Site Explorer and enter your domain¹, then find the Paid Pages report². Other reports in Ahrefs let you dive into the minutiae of your search ads, but this is one of the best places to study overarching ad awareness.

A 4-step tutorial of how to find and assess paid traffic in Ahrefs.

Once you’re there, make a note of your Total Traffic³ at the top of the keyword table, and then study your paid traffic growth over time⁴—especially in relation to ad cost. When your paid traffic exceeds paid traffic cost, it’s a good sign that your brand awareness ads are doing the trick!

In this report, you can also filter by keywords in URLs, titles, and descriptions to better report on the campaign-specific brand awareness.

A screenshot pointing out where to add keyword filters for ad titles, display URLs, and descriptions, in the Paid Pages report

Metrics to measure

Report monthly on metrics such as total paid traffic and campaign-specific paid traffic. 

Track total uplift in PPC traffic

For a birdseye view over your brand ads, pull up the Overview report in Site Explorer. It’s great for checking your:

  1. Total ad traffic vs. organic traffic
  2. Gross ad traffic growth and decline
  3. Location based and regional awareness
A gif walkthrough pointing out where to find paid traffic vs organic traffic numbers, and paid traffic by location

Metrics to measure

Each month, record metrics such as paid traffic as a percentage of organic traffic, paid traffic growth/decline, and location-based paid traffic growth/decline.

If you want to know whether people care about your brand, watch your traffic during a campaign.

It’s not a perfect science, but it can help you quantify intangible goals like brand recall and recognition.

When people recognize your brand, they’re more likely to visit your site. If they visit it directly, that’s further proof that they know you exist.

In other words, if you run an ad and your direct traffic goes up, there’s a good chance it’s working.

You can monitor total and direct traffic without fuss in Google Analytics 4, via the report:

Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition: Session default channel group report
A 3-step walkthrough of how to find the traffic acquisition report in GA4

And now you can view your web traffic in Ahrefs, via our Web Analytics tool in the Dashboard¹ part of the platform. When you get there, just head to Projects² to see your total web traffic³.

A 3-step tutorial of how to measure your traffic in Ahrefs Web Analytics tool

Then, to see your direct traffic, add a “Channel” filter for “Direct”.

A screenshot of Ahref's Web Analytics tools showing how to add a channel filter for Direct traffic

When you set the date range to align with your campaign, you can see whether your promotion is having any impact.

You can also segment your total and direct traffic by campaign URLs or UTMs.

A screenshot of Ahrefs Web Analytics tool highlighting page and UTM parameter filters

Metrics to measure

Report regularly on your total, direct, and campaign-specific traffic—including growth in each area. 

People may like your brand and visit your site, but you know your awareness is really growing when they care enough to talk about it.

This will look like a steady stream of backlinks and referral traffic to your site from publications, blogs, review sites, forums, and social media.

But not all links are created equal. When you report on earned awareness, you need to focus on the growth of quality referrals—not just the sum total.

Here are some things to consider when you’re working out what constitutes a “good” link:

Quality link traits Ask yourself… How to validate
Relevant Is this link relevant to my brand? • Check anchor text
• Visit site
Authoritative Is this site considered an authority? • Check the site’s DR
• Check the page’s UR
Visible Will people actually see my brand from this referral? • Referring page organic traffic
• Referral traffic back to your site
• Mentions of your brand name in/surrounding anchor text
Equitable Will it pass on link equity? • Dofollow vs. nofollow links

And you’ll also want to think about what “good” looks like to your brand.

For instance, some companies may see a link from a national publication as being the zenith of awareness—regardless of whether it drives referral traffic.

Here are some practical ways you can use Ahrefs to measure growth in your backlinks and referrals.

Track how many high-quality backlinks you pick up

Once you decide what quality referrals look like, you can configure a “Best links” filter to speed up your monthly SEO reporting.

This filter allows you to set specific criteria for your links.

For example, you might choose to only see “dofollow” links in an attempt to pick up more link equity, or “in content” backlinks, to sidestep spurious links in footers or comment sections.

A screenshot of Ahrefs' Best Links filter

Here’s how to measure your best brand backlinks:

  1. Head to the Overview report in Site Explorer
  2. Drop in your sites’ domain OR a campaign link—depending on what you’re measuring
  3. Click on the “Backlink profile” tab
  4. Set the filter to “Best links only”
A 4-step walkthrough screenshot of how to measure brand awareness through backlinks in Ahrefs

This configuration will give you a macro-level view of your highest-quality links. Then you can record link numbers each month…

A screenshot of backlinks and referring domains in Ahrefs Site Overview report

…and roughly correlate spikes in backlink acquisition with the dates of your brand campaigns.

Metrics to measure

Each month, note down your total backlinks and referring domains, plus any growth. 

Measure how much your brand name gets mentioned in anchor text

If someone links to you, but doesn’t mention your brand, is that even brand awareness?

To really understand the strength of your brand presence, tracking your brand name in link anchor text is a must.

Head to Ahrefs’ Anchors report, set an “Anchor with surrounding text” filter for your brand name (and any common misspellings).

This will show you every occasion where a site has either hyperlinked your brand name, or mentioned your brand name in the content immediately surrounding a link to your site.

This is important to quantify because the more your brand name gets repeated, the more likely your audience will be to recall it.

A screenshot of Ahrefs' anchors report, with an "Anchor with surrounding text" filter for branded keywords

Remember, you can limit your analysis to “Best links”, as above, so you’re focusing on the mentions that really count.

Tracking how your brand anchors grow over time will give you a better idea of how your brand awareness is growing.

You may also want to work out your brand anchors as a percentage of your total anchors, and track how that changes.

For instance, right now at Ahrefs we have 22,072 “brand name” anchors, and 96,640 anchors overall, meaning that 23% of our links are driving overt brand awareness.

We can check back on this figure every month, and even segment the analysis to focus on the uptake of specific brand campaigns, like the Ahrefs Podcast.

Metrics to measure

Report monthly on your total brand anchors, new brand anchors, and brand anchors as a percent of the total.

Measure brand awareness in terms of referral traffic

If you want to see which one of your brand awareness tactics have pushed users through the marketing funnel, then it’s a good idea to report on referral traffic—this will show you the number of users that actually made it back to your site.

You can track this in GA4, via the report I mentioned earlier on:

Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition: Session default channel group report.
A 3-step tutorial of how to find referral traffic in GA4

Or you can dig into your traffic in Ahrefs Web Analytics.

Just add a “Channel” filter for referral traffic.

A screenshot of Ahrefs Web Analytics highlighting how to add a channel filter for referral traffic

Metrics to measure

Each month, record your total referral traffic, campaign-specific referral traffic, plus any growth.

Whether you’re paying a princely sum for a 30 second election ad like Calm

…or doing a lo-fi brand spoof like smartphone manufacturer Nothing

A side by side screenshot of Jaguar's logo rebrand on X, compared with smartphone manufacturer's brand spoof of Jaguar's logo on X

…the very least you can hope for is a spike in social media engagement following a brand awareness campaign.

Here are some metrics to look at when you’re assessing your brand awareness on social.

Social media mentions and sentiment growth

You can use social listening tools to scour for earned mentions of your brand, and set up queries for your:

  • Campaigns
  • Products/services
  • People
  • Any other brand associations

Once you’ve tapped into brand-relevant conversations, make note of your total reach, and measure how much awareness your brand has sparked in the market.

A screenshot of Brandwatch social media management tool, highlighting the reach metric

Brandwatch’s social media management tool, highlighting the total reach of social content

For years, social tools have been able to analyze the language of your brand mentions, and decree whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral in sentiment. I imagine this kind of analysis is only going to get better with advancements in AI and LLMs.

If you want to quantify the qualitative (read: “fluffier”) parts of your brand, then sentiment scores are another great metric to include in your reporting.

Sproutsocial dashboard showing sentiment scores and trends

Sentiment scores in SproutSocial



Lora Helmin

Lora Helmin

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