You know the importance of increasing brand awareness and recognition. But as you keep your head down, marketing your products and services, a question arises.

How do you know if your brand awareness efforts are working?

Here are a few metrics to keep an eye on, which will indicate whether or not your various campaigns are making a dent for your business.

Brand Awareness Results in More Traffic

Monitoring your site traffic with tools like Google Analytics gives you details about where people are coming from and how they behave once they get there. These measurements provide a peek into how well your marketing campaigns, ad buys, or other tactics are working to bring people to your domain.

Here are two particular measurements to keep an eye on.

Bounce Rate
You also want to look at how long people stay on the site and what they do after they arrive.
Bounce rates are one of the metrics used to show how long people stay on your site. The longer they hang out, it’s a sign to the search engines you’re providing something of value to the visitor.

Referral Traffic
It’s not uncommon to receive backlinks from sites. They’re a source of referral traffic, which can positively impact your site’s ranking if they’re quality links. When reputable sites begin linking to your content, it exposes it to diverse audiences and extends your reach.

Here are some common referral sources:

• – Social Media: This includes links and content shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
• – Advertisements: Display ads and sponsored content are among some of the paid tools used to generate awareness.
• – Email Marketing: Email can help spread the word and introduce new audiences to products and services.
• – Events & Media Coverage: Hosting digital or in-person events can potentially yield a ton of interest.

Site traffic helps you develop and tweak your strategy. It gives you a sense of what does–and doesn’t–work for your audience.

You’re Experiencing Social Media Growth

Look at how much your business’s social pages have grown over time. Are you noticing a steady increase in followers, views, and mentions? These are positive signs that you’re achieving the goal of increasing brand awareness.

But sadly, comments, shares, and likes don’t equal sales by themselves.

When combined with a solid digital strategy, social media is an invaluable tool to generate buzz. When customers have a positive experience with a company, they’ll likely share it, on average, with 11 people in their circle.

And how you interact with followers online is part of the equation.

Resolving customer service issues, giving out valuable information, and engaging consistently on social media is invaluable to getting those valuable sales and referrals.

Customers Come Back for More

Turning those one-time customers into repeat buyers is what all businesses hope to achieve. A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% uptick in profits.

When distributing content, you’ll want to track not only your sales but people’s actions as they interact with your brand. Compare it with your sales and marketing goals throughout the year.
The number of return customers indicates they are shifting from the “awareness stage” to becoming brand loyalists.

You’re Ranking for Search Terms

Branded terms are those associated directly with your company, products, or services. When people type in these terms, your site will appear at the top of the results.
What about competitive terms?

Product terms (e.g., financial POS software), local searches (e.g., Scottsdale Arizona wine bar), and transactional queries (e.g., LG Nexus 5X Smartphone) are considered more challenging to rank for.

It’s harder to get the top position for these highly competitive types of searches for many reasons. Some of the main hurdles to overcome relate to the size and authoritativeness of competing sites.

But you can always go after longer, less competitive terms. Going after these long-tail keywords helps you rank for them and target the user’s intent.

As your company inches closer to the number one spot, ranking for these terms indicates your brand has gained recognition and search engines see your site as authoritative.

Building Awareness in the Future

Now you have a few signals to look out for as you monitor the health of your brand. They’re going to play a crucial role in your company’s growth moving forward and climb the brand recognition ladder.