Brand Metrics for Ecommerce Companies

Brand metrics describe how shoppers feel about a business and its products.

Brand metrics are often predictive, indicating how likely shoppers will purchase, and prescriptive, defining the features to emphasize and promote.

What marketers learn from brand metrics could impact content marketing, search engine optimization, advertising, and even personalization on a store’s website or in email and text messages.

What Are Brand Metrics?

Brand metrics are measurements — quantitative and qualitative assessments allowing marketers to track and analyze a brand’s performance, strength, and perception over time.

These metrics offer insights into brand awareness, loyalty, and overall brand health relative to the company’s target audience and the broader market.

For the most part, brand metrics are subjective indicators of potential performance based on what shoppers say they believe or what they say they will do.

The metrics often include:

• Brand awareness. Measures the percentage of a target market that is familiar with a brand. A relatively high level of brand awareness can be a competitive advantage and is frequently the first step in the buyer’s journey. Brand recall, recognition, and share of voice are related metrics.

• Brand equity. The value that a brand adds to a product. It is why some folks pay more for an iPhone. Brand equity is often gauged in terms of buyer perceptions and associations.

• Brand loyalty. Assesses the likelihood that customers will repeatedly purchase a brand’s products regardless of whether it is a retailer or direct-to-consumer business. Loyalty indicates a stable customer base and can forecast sales. High brand loyalty often reduces marketing costs.

• Brand consistency. Measures how uniformly a brand presents itself across channels and touchpoints. Marketers can use this measurement to ensure shoppers receive a consistent brand experience, which, in turn, can reinforce brand identity and trust.

• Shopper satisfaction. Evaluates how happy customers are with a brand’s products or services. Often, this metric is associated with a Net Promoter Score.

• Purchase intent. Gauges the likelihood that a shopper will buy a brand’s product. This metric helps forecast sales.

Brand metrics often derive from surveys and conjoint analysis, where respondents consider multiple features jointly.

How to Use Brand Metrics

In general, brand-related measures provide three types of insights:

• Familiarity,
• Perception,
• Investment.

Consumers familiar with a store or product are relatively easier to convert into customers. Thus boosting brand awareness can lead to lower customer acquisition costs.

Moreover, shoppers familiar with a product or brand often have favorite features. Thus, familiarity with a product or brand can lead to relatively more personalized messaging.

Perception metrics tell marketers if their brand adds value to the selling proposition. Shoppers might pay more for a product from a store they trust. This is common with Amazon. Shoppers would rather purchase a product from Amazon because they believe the company will deliver quickly, manage returns well, and ultimately stand with the shopper if there is a problem.

Measures of investment indicate the likelihood of a purchase. Shoppers likely to buy could respond to unique, specialized marketing campaigns versus those with low intent.

Integrating these insights into marketing decisions ensures a more targeted approach.

Imagine, for example, a DTC business specializing in bar and cocktail products. If it has high brand loyalty — meaning its customers love the brand — the company could run a refer-a-friend campaign. But a similar campaign for a lesser-known brand would not likely work since shoppers would presumably not recommend an unfamiliar product.

A company with loads of brand loyalty could try a refer-a-friend campaign.

Measurement Frameworks

Brand measures, while indicative, complement a broader marketing framework.

For example, the Data & Marketing Association in the U.K. released a comprehensive marketing measurement framework that encourages using brand metrics with other performance indicators.

Such frameworks are not a rote way to measure every promotion but rather a method for developing campaign measurements wherein brand metrics play a role.