Brand tracking and brand health: measuring what lives in memory, and linking it to sales

Brand building works through memory, slowly, and shows up in sales late. If the only numbers on the dashboard are this month's sales and clicks, brand effects are invisible until they are lost. Brand measurement fills the gap. The brand equity and how brands grow pieces explain what a brand is and how it grows; this piece is about measuring it.

• The decision it informs whether the brand is getting stronger among the people who buy the category, whether a campaign moved memory, and whether the long-term investment is paying.
• Tracking studies ask category buyers the same questions at intervals. Jenni Romaniuk's Better Brand Health builds tracking on category entry points, mental availability and mental advantage¹.
• Brand lift compares survey answers of people who saw a campaign with a control group who did not⁷.
• Share of search a brand's share of category searches, which Les Binet showed can lead market share^4, 5.
• Linking to sales brand measures earn their place when they are read alongside sales, the mix model and experiments^10, 11.

Brand measures answer three questions that sales cannot answer in time. Is the brand gaining or losing ground in memory, compared with competitors? Did this campaign leave a trace in the minds of the people who saw it? Is the long-term investment working, before the sales effect is large enough to see? The figure below shows why: brand effects compound slowly while activation effects spike and fade.

A marketing team that cannot show the slow line loses budget to the fast one. Brand measurement is how the slow line becomes visible, and the brand-activation split calculator is where the budget consequence is worked out.

Traditional trackers ask about awareness, image statements and intention. Romaniuk argues for a framework that fixes many of their problems by starting from category entry points (CEPs), the situations and needs that bring a category to mind¹. See category entry points and mental availability in the glossary.

• Mental market share is the brand's share of the links between brands and the category's entry points, relative to competitors².
• Mental penetration is the share of category buyers with at least one CEP link to the brand, and network size is the average number of links among those people³.

These measures behave like market share: comparable across brands, and read against competitors rather than in isolation. Add a few classic measures for continuity, a check on distinctive brand assets, and behaviour (who bought and when), and the tracker tells you both where the brand stands in memory and whether that memory is converting.

Three design rules make the difference. Sample category buyers, not your customer list: growth comes largely from people who do not buy you yet, as the how brands grow piece explains. Keep the questionnaire stable: every change breaks the trend line. Report uncertainty: a two-point movement in a small monthly sample is often noise, so roll periods together or set a threshold before calling a change.

A tracker need not be expensive. A smaller business can run a few waves a year on an online panel, keep the list of entry points to the handful that matter most, and lean on share of search between waves (see the founder or small business hub). What it cannot skip is the comparison with competitors and the stable questionnaire: without them the numbers have nothing to be read against.

Brand lift is an experiment applied to memory. In Google's version, a sample group that saw the ads and a control group that was eligible but was not shown them answer short surveys, and the difference in recall, consideration and awareness is the lift; in Display & Video 360 the surveys run for 28 days or until enough responses are collected⁷. Google describes delivering a one-question survey to both groups about a day after they saw, or did not see, the ad⁸. Behind such designs are methods like ghost ads, which the American Marketing Association noted several platforms offer⁹. Brand lift is useful for creative and media choices within a campaign. It is not brand health: it measures a short-term change on one platform, and ad recall is not the same as a link to a buying situation. See brand lift and, for test design, incrementality and experiments.

Share of search is the cheap, fast complement. Binet defines it as a brand's organic searches divided by all searches for brands in the category, and points out that the data from Google Trends are free, go back to 2004 and can be weekly^4, 5. See share of search.

The link has to be built, not assumed. Three ways work.

Share of search against market share. Presenting his analysis at the IPA's EffWorks Global in 2020, Binet showed share of search leading market share in automotive, energy and mobile handsets: by about six months for handsets, zero to three months for energy brands and nine to twelve months for car makers⁴. He was clear that it is not a perfect predictor, because conversion also depends on other factors, price above all^4, 5. He also found that share of voice has two effects on share of search: a large short-term effect that fades quickly and a longer-term effect that decays slowly⁶. That gives a planner a testable chain from spend to interest to share; the ESOV calculator sets the ambition for the first link.

Brand measures in the mix model. A mix model that includes a tracker measure or share of search as an intermediate outcome can show how much of a channel's effect runs through the brand rather than straight to sales. The IPA's view is that marketers who build a learning culture integrate econometrics, experiments and attribution¹¹; brand measures are what lets that integration see the long term. See marketing mix modelling.

One review. The IPA's Making Effectiveness Work argues that no single method is a silver bullet¹⁰. In the triangulation used across this track, the mix model sets budgets, experiments establish cause, attribution optimises within channels, and the brand tracker and share of search are the leading indicators. Put them on one page, with the sales line, for the same meeting.

Illustrative, with no real data. A regional coffee chain wants to grow in a city where a larger rival dominates. Qualitative work gives it a list of entry points: a quick coffee on the way to work, somewhere to meet a client, a treat on a Friday afternoon, a place to work for an hour. Its tracker samples coffee buyers in the city each month and reports mental penetration and mental market share against the rival. The first campaign produces a strong brand lift in ad recall, but the tracker shows no change in links to any entry point. The team rewrites the creative to show the brand in two chosen situations, keeps its colour and cup design constant as distinctive assets, and watches share of search monthly. Two quarters later the tracker shows its links to "somewhere to meet a client" rising, and share of search moving with them; the next mix model includes both as brand measures.

1. Tracking customers only The people you need to win are not on your list.
2. Reading awareness as health Being known is not the same as coming to mind in a buying situation.
3. Changing the questionnaire every year The trend line is the asset; protect it.
4. Treating brand lift as brand building A rise in ad recall is a start, not proof of growth.
5. Calling noise a change Small monthly samples move by chance; agree thresholds in advance.
6. Keeping brand and sales in separate meetings The link is only made if they are read together.

On Monday:

1. Write the decisions brand measures must inform this year, for the brand manager and the CMO.
2. Check your tracker's sample: category buyers, including rivals' customers?
3. List the category's entry points from research, and add CEP-based measures (mental penetration, mental market share) to the next wave.
4. Start a monthly share of search for your brand and the main rivals, beside market share.
5. For the next big campaign, plan a brand lift study and write in advance what result would change the creative.
6. Ask for brand measures to be included in the next mix model.
7. Put tracker, share of search, sales and the mix model on one page in the measurement framework, reviewed quarterly; see the brand awareness hub for related tools.

• On Better Brand Health: Research World¹, Romaniuk in interview² and a 2025 conference session³.
• Les Binet on share of search: WARC⁴, the IPA⁵ and Campaign⁶.
• Google on brand lift^7, 8; the AMA on ghost ad methods⁹.
• The IPA's Making Effectiveness Work¹⁰ and its econometrics resources¹¹.
• On IMC Report: measuring effectiveness, brand equity, how brands grow, and the glossary entries for share of voice and brand equity.