Brand health metrics: the four layers to track and how to build the scorecard

Brand health metrics are the handful of numbers that show how well people know your brand, how they feel about it, and how likely they are to choose it. A working set has four layers: awareness (do they know you), consideration (would they pick you from a list), loyalty (do they stay and recommend), and demand (do they look for you by name). Track one or two measures from each layer on a fixed schedule and you have a brand scorecard that moves before revenue does.

Why brand health needs its own scorecard

Sales tell you what happened last quarter. Campaign reports tell you what a campaign did. Neither shows whether the brand itself is getting stronger, which is the thing that lowers the cost of every future sale. Brand health metrics fill that gap. They answer a plain question: if a buyer in our market needs what we sell, how often is our name in their head, and what do they think of it?

The four layers and the measure for each

Layer	Question it answers	Main measures	Where the data comes from
Awareness	Do people in our market know us?	Unaided awareness, aided awareness	A short survey of your target market
Consideration	Would they put us on the shortlist?	Consideration rate, preference against named rivals	The same survey
Loyalty	Do customers stay and speak well of us?	Net Promoter Score, repeat purchase rate, churn	Customer survey, sales records
Demand	Do people go looking for us by name?	Branded search volume, direct visits, share of search	Search Console, analytics, Google Trends

Awareness: unaided and aided

Unaided awareness asks, without prompting, "Which brands come to mind when you think of project management software?" and counts how many people name you. Aided awareness shows a list and asks which names the person recognises. The gap between the two tells you something useful. High aided and low unaided means people have seen you and not remembered you, so the work is distinctiveness and repetition. Low on both means the work is reach.

Survey the same type of respondent, using the same wording, at the same time each quarter. A change in wording changes the result, so write the question once and keep it.

Consideration and preference

Ask the people who know you whether they would consider buying from you, and ask them to pick between you and two or three named rivals. Consideration shows whether awareness is turning into willingness. Preference shows how you stand when the choice is direct. If awareness is healthy and consideration is low, the issue sits in what people believe about you: price, quality, fit or trust. That is a message and product problem, not a media problem.

Loyalty: Net Promoter Score and the plain measures beside it

Net Promoter Score comes from one question, how likely you are to recommend the business to a friend or colleague, answered on a scale of 0 to 10. Respondents scoring 9 or 10 are promoters, 7 or 8 are passives and 0 to 6 are detractors. The score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Fred Reichheld introduced it in a Harvard Business Review article in 2003.

Use it with the facts customers cannot give an opinion about: repeat purchase rate, renewal rate and churn. A strong score with weak renewals means customers like you and still leave, so ask them why with an open question.

Demand: how often people look for you by name

This layer is the easiest to measure and the one most teams skip. Pull three figures each month.

• Branded searches. In Search Console, filter the Performance report for queries that contain your brand name. The report is described in Google's Search Console help. Rising branded impressions mean more people are looking for you.
• Direct visits. Visitors who type your address or open a bookmark, as shown in your analytics.
• Share of search. Your branded search interest as a percentage of the combined interest in you and your named rivals. Google Trends lets you compare brand names side by side, and the percentage you calculate from that comparison is a cheap, repeatable stand-in for market share of attention.

Sentiment and reputation

Add one measure of what people say about you in public: the average and recent trend of your reviews on the sites your buyers use, and a quarterly read of a sample of mentions marked positive, neutral or negative. Count the same sources each time. Our guide to improving a Google rating covers the review side of this in detail.

Building the scorecard

1. Choose one measure per layer, four in total, to begin with.
2. Write the exact definition of each, including the source and the date range.
3. Record a baseline now. A baseline taken this month makes next quarter's change mean something.
4. Set a review date every quarter for surveys and every month for search and sales data.
5. Put the scorecard beside your revenue numbers in the same meeting, so brand work has the same standing as campaigns.

If you are also tracking the performance of content, the companion guides to content performance metrics and SEO KPIs cover the numbers that sit one level below the brand scorecard.

Questions about measuring brand health

How often should I measure brand health?

Surveying once a quarter is the usual rhythm, with search and sales measures read every month. More frequent surveys mostly add noise.

How big should a brand survey be?

Large enough to split by the groups you care about, such as customers and non-customers. Agree the sample size with your research supplier before you start and keep it fixed so the results compare.

Can a small business track brand health?

Yes. A five question survey to your customer list, a monthly branded search count and your review trend make a complete scorecard at almost no cost.

What is the difference between brand health and brand equity?

Brand health is the current state shown by the metrics above. Brand equity is the commercial value of that strength, shown for example in the price premium customers accept or the lower cost of winning a new customer.

Which single metric matters most?

Unaided awareness among the people who buy in your category, because every other number depends on being thought of first.

A fifth reading for brand health: what an assistant says about your name

Buyers now put the question "which companies do this?" to an assistant before they put it to a friend, and the reply either includes your brand or leaves it out. That makes the share of answers that name you, and the accuracy of the description given, a brand health measure in its own right: it is unaided awareness as a machine reports it. You can run a first read today by asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity ten category questions and counting how often your name appears. AI Knows Us (aiknowsus.com) records that count across five assistants, with the sources behind each answer, so it can sit on the scorecard next to branded search.