Brand awareness is how many people know you exist and what for. Performance marketers tend to distrust it, usually because it is measured badly rather than because it does not matter.
What brand awareness actually buys you
Three things, all of which show up in numbers you already collect.
People who know you click your advert more often when it appears, which lowers what you pay. They convert better once they arrive, because the trust work happened earlier. And some of them search for you by name, which is the cheapest traffic any business gets.
Consequently awareness is not an alternative to performance work. It is an input that makes performance work cheaper.
Why brand awareness gets distrusted
Because the usual measures are impressions and reach, which count opportunities to see rather than anything that happened.
An impression is a slot on a page, not a memory. So a campaign reporting large reach and nothing else has told you what it bought rather than what it achieved, and a performance marketer is right to shrug at it.
The fix is not to abandon brand awareness. It is to measure it with something that moves for a reason.
Measuring brand awareness without guessing
Four measures are available to almost any business, and none needs a research budget.
- Branded search volume, visible in your own search reports.
- Direct traffic, meaning people typing your address in.
- Click through rate on adverts, which rises as recognition rises.
- How often new enquiries say they had heard of you already.
The last one costs nothing. Add a single question to your enquiry form asking where they heard about you, and read the answers monthly.
None of the four is precise, and together they are enough. Brand awareness moves slowly, so a rough measure read consistently over a year beats a precise one nobody keeps up.
Brand awareness and the branded search test
This is the closest thing to a real measure most businesses have.
Run the campaign, then look at whether searches for your name rose during and after it. That figure is hard to fake, it moves for real reasons, and it connects an awareness activity to a behaviour rather than to an impression.
Compare against the same period last year, since seasonality moves branded search too.
When it deserves budget
Three situations make brand awareness the right spend rather than a luxury.
When nobody searches for your category yet, because there is no demand to capture. When your cost per customer has been rising for a year, which usually means you have exhausted the easy demand. And when you sell something people choose slowly, where being known before the search matters more than being present during it.
Outside those, capturing existing demand first is almost always the better order. Spending on brand awareness while search enquiries are going unanswered is the most common way to make both look like failures.
Capturing that demand is the job performance work exists to do, and it pays soonest.
What brand awareness work looks like
Not necessarily an advertising campaign. Several of the most effective versions cost little.
Being genuinely useful in public. Turning up where your customers already are. Local sponsorship, trade events, a piece in a publication people read, work worth showing. Meanwhile the advertising version, on display, video or social, works too and needs the discipline described elsewhere in this cluster.
Consistency matters more than scale. The same message in the same voice, seen occasionally over a year, does more than a large burst everybody forgets by spring.
The trap of chasing cheap reach
Reach is the easiest thing to buy badly, since somebody will always sell you more impressions for less.
Cheap reach usually means poor placements, uninterested audiences and adverts nobody saw. So judge a brand awareness campaign on whether the four measures above moved, not on how many impressions it delivered. Impressions are the cost, not the result.
A smaller number of the right people beats a large number of anybody. That is true of brand awareness in the same way it is true of everything else, and it is easier to forget here because the reach numbers are so much bigger.
How long it takes
Longer than a performance campaign, and the effect decays if you stop entirely.
Expect months rather than weeks, and expect the benefit to appear in other channels rather than in the campaign that produced it. That displacement is exactly why awareness work gets cancelled: the credit lands somewhere else.
Agree the review period before starting, and make it long enough to be fair. Six months is a reasonable minimum for anything intended to change what people remember about you.
Holding both in the same plan
The practical answer for most businesses is a split rather than a choice.
Spend the majority on capturing demand that exists, since it pays soonest, and a defined minority on creating demand for later. Write the split down, review it annually, and resist moving the awareness budget every time a performance campaign has a poor month.
Brand awareness compounds slowly and disappears quickly, which is the opposite shape from everything else in a performance account.
Frequently asked questions
What does brand awareness actually buy?
Higher click rates on your adverts, better conversion once people arrive, and searches for your name, which is the cheapest traffic there is. It is an input that makes performance work cheaper rather than an alternative to it.
Why do performance marketers distrust it?
Because it is usually reported as impressions and reach, which count opportunities to see rather than anything that happened. An impression is a slot on a page, not a memory, so that report says what you bought, not what you achieved.
How can I measure it without research budget?
Branded search volume, direct traffic, click through rate on adverts, and asking new enquirers whether they had heard of you. The last one costs nothing: add a single question to your enquiry form.
What is the branded search test?
Run the campaign, then check whether searches for your name rose during and after it, compared against the same period last year. It is hard to fake and it links the activity to a behaviour rather than an impression.
When should I spend on awareness?
When nobody searches for your category yet, when your cost per customer has been rising for a year, or when people choose slowly and being known beforehand matters. Otherwise capture existing demand first.
Does awareness work have to be advertising?
No, and some of the cheapest versions are not. Being useful in public, local sponsorship, trade events, a piece in a publication people read, and work worth showing all build recognition without a media budget.
How long does it take to show?
Months rather than weeks, and the effect fades if you stop entirely. Expect the benefit to appear in other channels, which is exactly why this budget gets cancelled: the credit lands somewhere else.
How should I split my budget?
Most on capturing demand that already exists, since it pays soonest, and a defined minority on creating demand for later. Write the split down and resist moving it every time a performance campaign has a poor month.