Brand and ad tracking. Manage your brand with data.

As consumers, we make many purchasing decisions every week. On some occasions, we may want to try unfamiliar brands that offer something interesting. However, in most cases, we tend to lean towards brands that we recognize, perhaps ones we’ve purchased from before or that inspire trust.

How do marketing teams ensure that their investments contribute to creating that recognition and the desired brand image? The brand and advertising tracking is the answer, and having one is easier than you think.

What is brand and advertising tracking?

Brand and advertising tracking, also known as brand tracking, brand tracking, or advertising tracking, is a market research study that measures the evolution of the most important brand and advertising metrics.

Brand and advertising tracking quantifies the evolution of different types of brand awareness, brand attributes, buying and consumption habits, as well as advertising recall. All this collected data is then related to the evolution of advertising investments and sales.

Brand and advertising tracking tells us whether our marketing activity is achieving its goals and quantifies the contribution of each campaign to optimize communication.

All this measurement is done for our brand and competing brands, so we can understand how our progress compares to the competition.

Unlike other brand studies, brand and advertising tracking collects continuous information, or at least with some frequency. In this way, the Brand Manager can compare the results of different waves and see if the expected progress has been made since the previous one.

Until a few years ago, brand and advertising tracking was a privilege of large brands that invested significant resources in advertising. Fortunately, the automation of research has made it possible for brand and advertising tracking to be accessible, and nowadays, any B2C brand that invests in advertising can have its own tracking.

Benefits of brand and advertising tracking

Brand and advertising tracking is an essential tool for any marketing team to:

• Demonstrate the impact of brand-building investment actions. Brand growth occurs in the long term and is more difficult to perceive unless you have a tool like brand and advertising tracking. Without this tool, the marketing director will find it much more difficult to allocate part of the budget to brand building versus short-term sales promotion actions. Investing an excessive percentage of the budget in promotional campaigns can harm the brand in the long term and threaten the brand’s viability.
• Optimize advertising investment. Brand and advertising tracking allows for the regulation of advertising investment over time. Based on tracking data, a marketing director can gradually increase or reserve budget for times when it is most needed.
• Improve campaigns. Thanks to advertising tracking, we can identify campaigns that need fine-tuning or simply discard them for the future.
• Monitor competition. Tracking identifies successful campaigns by competitors, allowing us to adjust our marketing plans to counter their effects.
• Discover opportunities. We can also find out if opportunities arise to improve our brand with specific target audiences or if reinforcing certain brand attributes could help us gain ground.
• Create better marketing plans. Brand and advertising tracking is essential for a proper evaluation of the previous plan’s success and, therefore, for the design of the new one.

Brand and advertising tracking questionnaire

To decide on the best questions for our brand and advertising tracking, we will need to identify what we want to know in order to make decisions. Each brand has its own strategy and objectives, so there is no one-size-fits-all questionnaire for all brand and advertising tracking studies. However, most brand and advertising tracking questionnaires include questions about:

• Brand awareness: we will need to assess the level of consumer awareness of the brand and competing brands, both spontaneously and prompted, as well as the correct attribution of the brand to its sector or category.
• Brand image: aspects related to the perception of the brand in the minds of consumers: what attributes it is associated with, the benefits it offers, its strengths, uniqueness in its market, etc.
• Buying and brand usage habits: these metrics focus on aspects directly related to the purchasing experience and brand usage.
• Satisfaction with the brand and preference.
• Brand loyalty and future purchase intent.
• Advertising recall. Which brand campaigns do they remember seeing and their level of understanding of the messages they conveyed.

Brand and advertising tracking. How to get started?

Creating your brand and advertising tracking is easy. At We are Testers, we can help you define a brand and advertising tracking fully tailored to your needs.

We have a team of professionals who can assist you in creating the questionnaire and getting started. You can also request reports with the obtained data or use our data visualization tool independently.

Consistency is very important in brand and advertising tracking, so once you have defined the initial wave, there is no need to revise the questionnaire in subsequent waves unless you want to make changes. Contact our experts for more details and start managing your brand with data!