Measuring Brand Awareness: Methods, Examples & Templates

How well known is my brand? A brand awareness survey gives companies the answer. Measuring brand awareness is an essential step in marketing: it shows how familiar consumers are with your brand. Based on the results, you can plan targeted measures to raise awareness among your target group. Below, we give an overview of the types of brand awareness, explain how to run a brand awareness survey and share tips for your online questionnaire.

What is brand awareness and how can you measure it?

Brand awareness describes how well known a brand is among consumers and is a key marketing KPI. It is expressed as a percentage: the share of respondents who remember a brand and can assign it to a product category. It has a strong influence on purchase decisions, especially when people shop online. One emotion often plays a major role here: trust. Consumers trust brands they know. This is most visible with brand names that have become generic terms, such as “Kleenex” for tissues, “Post-it” for sticky notes or “Tupperware” for plastic food containers. These brands are so well known that people use their names instead of the actual product name. An established brand in the target market is more likely to be bought than a little-known one. Companies should therefore keep an eye on their brand awareness, measure it regularly as part of brand tracking and especially after advertising campaigns, and raise it with suitable measures to drive commercial success.

So how can you measure brand awareness? There are several methods, which can be used individually or in combination:

• Online survey: measure brand awareness with an online questionnaire
• Website traffic analysis with Google Analytics, Matomo or similar: draw conclusions about brand awareness from the traffic to your own website
• Search ranking analysis: assess brand awareness through SEO data, such as the number of searches for brand-related products
• Social listening: analyse what people say about your brand on social networks

Unaided versus aided brand awareness

It is not only the level of awareness that matters, but also how it comes about. Brand research distinguishes between unaided and aided brand awareness. With unaided awareness, respondents name a brand without any prompt (= brand recall). Unaided awareness is considered a very good indicator of brand strength. If respondents only remember a product or brand when it is shown to them, for example by its name or logo, this is aided brand awareness (= brand recognition). One example of the latter is a 2022 Statista study on the best-known social networks in Germany: respondents were “aided” by being shown both the logo and the written brand name alongside the question “Do you know this brand, even if only by name?”

Study on Statista

Well-known social media platforms, especially those relevant to your brand’s target group, are not only a good place to measure brand awareness through social listening. They are also ideal for raising it. Read more on our page Increase brand awareness.

Create a brand awareness survey

Measuring brand awareness: questionnaire template

The online survey is a common way to measure brand awareness. Compared with a face-to-face survey, it saves money and above all time, especially when it comes to distribution. You can simply embed the survey link on relevant websites or email it to a random sample of people, for example in a panel.

An online brand awareness questionnaire can easily combine both concepts, unaided and aided awareness. Unaided questions such as “Which brands come to mind when you think of [product category]?” work well at the start of the survey. Respondents answer in open text fields, listing the brands they spontaneously associate with the category, the ones that come to mind first (top-of-mind awareness). Is your brand among them? Then it has high unaided awareness and is one of the best-known brands in its category. You can then add a multiple-choice question with a list of brand names, including yours, to find out whether participants recognise your brand as an alternative to competing brands (= aided brand awareness).

Feel free to use our brand awareness questionnaire template as a starting point. Click “Use template” to copy it to your LamaPoll account free of charge and adapt it to your needs.

Brand awareness questionnaire: tips and tricks

A brand awareness questionnaire lets you find out with little effort whether consumers know your brand and how familiar they are with it. Here are a few tips on content and timing: In terms of timing, an online survey is particularly worthwhile after an advertising campaign, to find out whether your brand has stuck in people’s minds and is recognised. It is also advisable to measure brand awareness at regular intervals, for example monthly or quarterly, so you can see and analyse changes over time. For the content, it makes sense to start with unaided awareness questions and follow them with aided ones. Last but not least, a brand awareness questionnaire can be rounded off nicely with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question: respondents who know your brand and have already bought from you then also tell you whether they would recommend it to friends and family.

Tips for your brand awareness survey:

• Combine unaided and aided brand awareness questions in your questionnaire.
• Add a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question to find out how likely people are to recommend your brand.
• Run the survey regularly so you can compare how awareness develops over time.
• Run a brand awareness study especially after an advertising campaign.

Why is measuring brand awareness important?

Brand awareness directly influences consumers’ purchase intent and therefore their buying decisions. Well-known brands are bought more often than little-known or unknown ones. If companies want to increase purchase intent for a product, they should raise their brand awareness. But first they need to know how well known the product already is on the market. That is why measuring brand awareness matters. This applies all the more to products and brands bought in low-involvement situations, where consumers choose a product with little engagement and little interest in researching every available brand. Everyday products such as groceries are a typical example, as they are often bought on impulse. For low-involvement products (also called low-interest products), measuring brand awareness is therefore particularly important, for example to decide how advertising campaigns can be optimised.

Conclusion: There are many ways to measure brand awareness, and an online survey is one of them. With LamaPoll, you can easily create your own brand awareness survey or use our questionnaire template to find out from consumers how well known your brand is. Based on the data, you can then take measures to raise brand awareness further and positively influence purchase intent among your target group.