Brand Measurement Metrics and Techniques

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's the Metrix Brothers, Growth and CAC.

And I'm Growth, better known as Ray Reich, founder and CEO of Benchmarket.

And I'm CAC, better known as Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital, independent consultant, and the author of Kelblog.

And together we are the Metrics Brothers.

And we go together like brands and trust.

Brands and trust, hey? As in a brand is supposed to make a promise I can trust?

That's, that's exactly right, Ray. We're going to make a marketer of you yet.

Well, not so sure of that, but one thing I trust about brand spend is that it's very hard to measure its return.

Ah, there we go. There we go. You're back to your normal self. Grasshopper snatched the metrics from my hand. There is a way to measure brands and branding.

And I'm guessing that's the topic of today's episode.

Yes, it is. But before we dive in, let's hear a word from our sponsor.

The Metrics Brothers is proudly sponsored by Benchmarkit, the B2B AI and software industry's largest, broadest, and most contextualized benchmarking index. Dave Kellogg and Ray Groth Wright have put the Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus for the remainder of 2026. All episodes we have ever recorded are still available on your favorite podcasting app. You can reach Dave at Kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn at Ray Reich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers podcast.

So today we're going to talk about branding, specifically brand measurement metrics and techniques. Let's start at the top. Branding comes from the Norse word brandr, meaning to burn. For example, burning a symbol into something to say it's yours. We used to do it to cows, like you'd put the Lazy S Ranch brand on to say it's your cow or the Bar T Ranch. Potters would use maker's mark, the source of another brand, right? That's now a brand of whiskey. But a maker's mark on a pot was simply a mark that the maker put on it to identify it as made by them. Uh, and then we'd put it on goods. For example, some of the older brands are older and more noted. King Arthur Flour dates back to 1790. Jim Beam, 1795. Colgate, 1806, Brooks Brothers, 1818, Levi Strauss, 1853, which when their products, when jeans first came out, they were called waist overalls, just kind of like cordless phone or horseless carriage, right? The original pair of jeans was a low pair of overalls. And that was from Levi's in 1850.

You know, Dave, I did not know back when I grew up on a farm in Ohio that I was actually learning about marketing when I helped my next-door neighbor brand cows wearing my overalls. So, I guess I've been doing marketing for a long time.

Your first marketing lessons came at a young age, right? So, literally branding was a form of identification. And it became a mode of differentiation that these are just any pair of waist overalls. They're Levi Strauss waist overalls. This is not any bottle of bourbon. This is Jim Beam bourbon. So, it became a mechanism of identification, became really a promise about quality. This isn't just any Schmumble. It is our Schmumble. And when you buy our jeans, our flour, our toothpaste, it comes with our promise. And the dream for every company except legal— this is a rat hole that we can dive into if you want to— was that for your brand to define the category. This is called genericization. And it would be things like, give me a Kleenex. Do you have a Band-Aid? Write it on a Post-it. Can you just Google that? Right? Those are 4 instances of using a brand name. And of those, I think Band-Aid is the one that people may not even recognize anymore as a brand name. Like Post-it, I think they know, right? But those are using brand names as generic. And marketers dream for that. Legal counsels, that's their worst nightmare.

Hey Dave, can you Slack me a Zoom link? Oh no, I mean a Teams link.

Okay. Thank God you didn't say Xerox. Ray had that in the original script. I was like, Ray, you're gonna be like my father who called aluminum foil tin foil. 'Cause apparently back in the refrigerator and icebox, 'cause this is not branding, but that's just what the categories had different names 'cause they were different things. But yeah, I can Slack you a Zoom link.

Hey, hey Dave, can you gimme some Reynolds Wrap? I'm sorry, I won't go there.

Oh wow. Oh, Ray, you're back. Well, we can do the split branding, which I like too, which is you're on the East Coast. What mayonnaise do you use?

Hellmann's.

Right, and you know in California it's got a different name. You've lived out here.

No, what is it?

Best Foods. Same jar, same brand. I could show it to you. They're identical, but we call it Best Foods and you call it Hellmann's. What's the other one? There's a fast food chain. Is it Wendy's and Carl's Jr.? It's Carl's Jr. and— oh, it's Carl's Jr. on the West Coast and something else on the East Coast. I can't remember the name anymore. But we still have this in the US where the brands can remain regionalized as opposed to national. But in any case, some of the generic— Ray, you were in sales. Why don't you start by telling us When you sold branded products, what were some of the advantages you got that when the product you were selling had a strong brand?

Well, I mean, I go back to the old days when I picked up the phone and told people I was from GE. I didn't have to spend 2 minutes telling them who GE was. I went right into how our product could help their business. So that's the best example. And, you know, think about 10, 15 years ago when someone from Salesforce called up to sell Salesforce automation. They didn't have to tell people who Salesforce was, but that poor sales guy from Pivotalonics had to tell them who they were before they could talk about their product.

Got it. So, awareness, it comes with a strong brand. People know who you are. There's a famous ad for advertising, which is a picture of an old bald man in a chair going, I don't know who you are. I have never heard of your company. I don't know what your company stands for. Now, what was it you wanted to sell me again? And that is the ultimate ad for advertising. It's a classic. You should go look it up. So you get awareness, you get pricing power, right? Hey, ours is better. So you can charge a premium for the brand name one. You get customer loyalty, repeat purchases. You become the default choice. I do the shopping in our house, Ray, and I almost always write brand names. I, you know, I don't write adhesive bandages. I write Band-Aid, right? Or I write Heinz for ketchup, or, you know, like you become the choice, right? Like literally to the point where when the customer literally writes the shopping list, they're writing brands down. not categories. It reduces marketing costs. So, the need for discounts and trade promotions, right? Buy one, get one free, get a 20% discount, on sale this week. All those are marketing costs in consumer packaged goods. And when you have a strong brand, you don't need to do those because people are going to buy you anyway. You certainly don't need to do them as much. And then finally, you get defensive benefits. Like, you basically have a moat, like, which should scare off new entrants. Like, do you want to go fight with Heinz and ketchup Do you want to fight, you know, with Kraft macaroni and cheese, which by the way, they've been actually attacked fairly vociferously by Amy's and others. But you do get a moat. And probably my favorite quote on branding, Ray, to finish off the intro is just that, well, 2 quotes actually. One, brands exist in the mind of the customer from Reason Trout, which means if we're going to measure them, we're going to have to try and get in there. We have to get into the mind of the customer. And that means market research. And secondly, my favorite quote, brands convert preference into profit. But they do so indirectly, which means they, in my opinion, they are indeed hard to measure.

Thoughts? You know, just a couple of quotes. One, your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in a room. Jeff Bezos from Amazon said that. Then Seth Godin, who I really followed as a marketing storyteller, he says, the best brands don't sell products, they tell stories. And Dave, I actually went to ChatGPT to see if I could find more. And I found a very interesting quote. Brand is the sum total of how someone perceives a particular organization or company accredited to Dave Kellogg.

Hey, there we go. My AEO strategy is working, right? So interesting. Okay, cool. Now, let's talk about the first thing on branding. I remember I read a book a long, long time ago called Managing Brand Equity by a UC Berkeley guy named David Aaker. And I think it was this book that introduced me to the notion of kind of measuring brand indirectly. And I think this is a technique, indirect measurement, that is good to remember whenever you're talking about measuring brand. I'll talk about the number one use of this indirect technique today is there's a company called Interbrand, which is a branding consultancy that does an annual brand valuation study, and they publish the top 50 most valuable brands. Like, for example, In 2025, they said Apple was the world's most valuable brand worth $471 billion. Microsoft was second worth $389 billion and Amazon worth $320 billion. And the question is, where do those monies come from? Because that's not their market cap. That this is what Interbrand is asserting is their brand value, i.e., the value of their brand. And the way they do this is what I would just call indirect measurement. They start with how much the company is worth. Then they try to measure how much influence the brand has on customer choice. In some categories, it matters a lot more than others. So they try to factor that. And they basically subtract away the tangible from the total to kind of arrive at the intangible. Not unlike how goodwill works in an M&A transaction, right? That's exactly what goodwill is in M&A. You buy a company, we go look at the book value, Here's what the chairs are worth. Here's what the furniture is worth, right? Here's what the computers are worth. Let's subtract that from what you paid. And that must be goodwill that you paid for, the relationships with customers, the trust in your brand, et cetera. So, the first thing here is to talk about indirect measurement, right?

I like that. And I don't know why, but it brings me to a famous quote from John Wanamaker that half the advertising spend is wasted. I wish I knew which half. And to me, this shows maybe how brand investments can add to your total value.

Yeah, that's certainly a famous quote in marketing. And yeah, it's a funny quote as well. I want to come back practically to how you can use indirect brand management in the day-to-day life of the software company. Because I'm not going to try and establish the brand value of your company's brand. But how about I told you we had 2 Trade shows we were thinking of going. And at one of them, we thought we'd get 100 leads. And at one of them, we thought we'd get 200 leads based on prior history and execution. And then we had the 2 different costs, but one of them seems to have more brand. The salespeople are like, man, it's better for our brand to be at show A than show B. How would you try and determine how much you were spending to get that brand value from show 1 versus show 2? And the answer is, let's use this indirect technique. Hey, we're going to spend $100,000 on a trade show. I'm going to get $50,000 worth of leads. Let's just say leads cost me $100 each. I'm going to get 500 of them. So, I'm going to get $50,000 worth of leads from that show. But I'm paying $100,000. Therefore, I guess whether I know it or not, I'm paying $50K for brand exposure. Right? So, to me, it's the exact same idea if I'm comparing 2 trade shows. All right. Say one of them is going to generate a ton of leads. It's going to generate $90,000 worth of leads. I'm like, well, I'm only having to spend $10K for the brand exposure on that one. So, which one do I want? It depends on how many leads I need. But the easiest way to take a marketing program is to say, I can calculate the demand gen value because I know what a lead costs. So, let's subtract the demand gen value from the total cost. And that is how much I'm paying for brand. And then we can compare those leftovers. And go, wow, one of them, it costs $50,000 to get the brand exposure. This other one costs $10,000. And when I asked the sales force, they seem pretty much the same. I'm gonna go to the one that where the brand exposure costs me less. So, that's the first indirect applied technique you can use in software.

Makes a lot of sense. And your CFO is going to be very happy when you tell them you got $90,000 of leads versus $50,000.

Correct. But at least, I mean, to me, you have a framework for comparing the other events. So just put it differently. If you want to say no to one, just say it only generates $20,000 in lead gen and it's a $100,000 investment. You're going to look at the VP of sales and say, is the brand exposure worth $80K? Because I can get $20K of leads through a whole bunch of different mechanisms for $20K. I don't need to go to this show to get $20K worth of leads. You're asking me to spend $80,000 more. For all this soft value, is it really worth it to you to go do that? So, I like this technique. It's exactly how they measure the aggregate brand value in a corporation, right? Same basic idea. Take the market cap, subtract away all the other stuff, and what's left is brand. Here, it's take the cost of the program, subtract away its tangible value, right? How much it would cost to get those leads through other channels. And then what you've got left is the brand cost of that event. Now, let's talk now more about how we measure brand value. Let's talk about metrics. There's a number of things I use to try and measure brand. And I think we all know, Ray, that a big part of my philosophy of marketing metrics is this triangulation problem. We're lost in the forest. We don't know where we are. We've got a map and a compass. So we're taking shots. We're taking bearings to different landmarks to try and triangulate where we are. So, here are some of the metrics I would use to triangulate on brand value. One, web traffic, both direct traffic, meaning typed directly, typeyourcompany.com. Bookmarks are direct traffic. So, I revisit a bookmark I've previously done. Dark funnel links. So, links where somebody shows up but I can't tell where it came from. Maybe it was an internal Slack message. Maybe it was an internally forwarded email. Maybe it was an internal document. But somehow, somebody pressed on a link that took them to my site. And because I can't see it, we'll call it dark funnel. Those things all count as direct traffic. Also, I'd say branded organic traffic. How many people typed my brand name and then rather than just pressing on, well, basically they pressed on the first organic result, right? Rather, if I had bought the ad, which a lot of people unfortunately have to do these days, that would be different, right? That would actually be paid media, paid branded traffic. This would be organic branded traffic. So, another way to measure it. Next, share of voice. And I'm going to abstract share of voice a little bit to say there's 2 different types of it. There's kind of share— share of voice means kind of how loud you were in the market. How much were you talking? Literally share of voice. Traditionally, it's a PR metric. At least when I grew up with it, it was a measure of PR. We would count articles. So, if there was 100 articles written about our space and we were in 30 of them, we would say that we had a 30% share of voice. Now, increasingly with kind of media changing and PR changing, That's going to include podcast references in discussions, transcripts, articles in publications, blog posts, right? You're going to create some set of properties that you monitor and you do the same thing. You count how many articles or how many— I'll call them articles— were written about our space and how many were we mentioned in. If you're sophisticated, you're also going to measure how visibly you were mentioned. Was it positive or negative in conjunction with what issues, etc., etc.? But the basic measurement is how much were we in the media? Tools like Cision or Muck Rack help you do that. You can do the same thing on social media. Again, this is kind of a blurry line between PR/earned media and social media. But the tools tended to grow up on one side or the other, although now today most people have both. But like Sprout Social is an example of a tool that grew up tracking social media. So, we have share of voice in either kind of traditional earned media Or social media. So that's our second class. We have web traffic, we have share of voice, we have share of spend, which is just how much are we spending versus the other guys on Google. I should mention all these metrics to me are comparative. Too many marketers just like to compare to themselves. Well, our traffic, our traffic is up relative to us, or our traffic is down relative to us. I like to know that for sure, because for traffic, we can actually know what the answer is.

Yeah.

But for, so for competition, we need to use tools like SimilarWeb, right? To see what their traffic is. 'Cause we don't know for sure. So somebody else has to triangulate them and us to try and figure that out. But to me, it's a competitive world. All these metrics are effectively share metrics. Like how well are we doing relative to the other people in getting talked about, in presenting ourselves as advertisements, And in what people search for, both in the sense of SEO search and AEO search, kind of what's our share of search when people are looking, how much they're looking for us. SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and SimilarWeb do SEO. And then newer tools like Profound, Goody, and Oddly.ai do AEO. So I think I have one more category here, Ray. Well, the next category after that is market research, but we'll come back to that in a minute. Because it deserves its own conversation. Thoughts on these kinds of traditional metrics for measuring branding?

Well, I think you did a very nice job on the marketing side. As a former head of sales, one of the things that I like to always look at, and I thought it was a proxy for brand investment. An example, we did a big trade show at National Retail Federation. In the next 6 months, our inbound leads went up by 25%. Compared to the 3 months before then. And when I look at inbound leads versus outbound generated leads, I found that win rates were higher. The average contract value was larger and the sales cycle time was lower. So, I always kind of looked at those types of brand investments through a sales funnel performance lens.

Got it. And 2 things on that one. One, it's not really measuring brands, kind of measuring the impact of brand, right? Like when we have good brand, Or when somebody comes to us in a way that's more related to branding than stalking, for example, SDR outbound, they tend to close at a higher rate and faster. And it makes sense, right? Like, they were already out shopping and they'd already heard of us and they were kind of partially baked as a sales cycle. Whereas often an SDR takes somebody who's not even in the market and say, hey, have you ever thought about buying one of these? And so, they're kind of starting from the zero-yard line rather than starting from the 20. So, that all makes sense. I think the other thing about what you said that's important to me is if I'm a CMO, I want to have what just happened between Ray and I happen at your e-staff meeting. I.e., I don't want the marketing person saying, let me tell you that leads that I get off inbound convert better than the other ones. Just doesn't sell well. It sounds competitive. I want the sales rep making that argument. There's certain arguments you make yourself as the marketer. Like you could just do, I always say you're the anchor person, deliver the news, be matter of fact. And if there's an opinion piece like what Ray just did, let sales do that. Because otherwise it sounds like you're taking credit. And what you want is a live testimonial in front of the board where the VP of sales is saying, I love the fact we invest in brand for these reasons. There's no better testimonial. For either the CEO or the board than the VP of sales saying it. And you can bring some numbers to say, in fact, Ray is right. It's supported by the data. Inbound leads convert at this percent versus outbound at that percent. Of course, very quickly concede, at least outbound, we can better control where we aim them. So, we know why we do it because we've got a set of strategic accounts we want to penetrate. It's not about one being better than the other. But yeah, when Brandon helps Ray, he just told you, don't listen to me. It helps Ray sell the stuff. So those are some of the metrics. And I think you should track all those metrics. Every CMO should track every metric we talked about, direct traffic, branded organic traffic. They should do Cision-like studies to do share of voice. They should do social media tracking. They should track their paid spend and they should be tracking SEO and AEO, typically like, you know, keywords and results pages. Are we in the top page of results on these 20 keywords? You summarize that to some number. And this is all kind of tracking branded-oriented marketing. It's not going to tell you how much a dollar brand spend results in a lead, right? It's just not as direct as, say, advertising spend, where I can tell you that exactly, but it's important. The other thing you should do, in my opinion, and I feel strongly about this one, is market research, where you can either, usually in this day and age, do custom research to get a bunch of people in your space, do this once or twice a year, And just test the FUDL, which is awareness, opinion, consideration, trial, purchase. Have you ever heard of this company? That's called aided awareness because I named the company. You can also just say, can you name 5 companies in this space? That's unaided awareness. Do you have a positive opinion of said company? Yes or no? Have you ever considered buying their products? Have you ever tried? Have you ever run a trial of their products? Have you ever purchased their products? Have you ever repurchased their products? And getting this from the outside is super important because it's going to help you triangulate against what you're seeing in your CRM. Bear in mind, people who've never heard of you never get into your CRM. People who've heard of you and have a negative opinion of you may never get into your CRM, right? People who've heard of you and have an okay opinion of you but would never put you on a shortlist never get into your CRM. Potentially, they may have responded to a marketing program, but they certainly don't get into your opportunity management system, right? So this allows you to see kind of up and beyond the traditional funnel, very important way of measuring branding. And as mentioned, you can do this either with custom research, right? Kind of either today on-demand tools like Winter Test or traditional studies through research firms like Topline Research or Velocity Partners, both of whom I've used. And the most important thing about all this is just remember the 90/10 rule that you should be willing to spend up to 10% of your budget.

Yeah.

to measure the other 90 because this stuff all costs money. But, but you need to have the data. Otherwise, you're spending money without any idea of where it's going.

Hey, Dave, as we're coming to the end of today's session, unfortunately, but I know we talked about 3 other brand management techniques as we were preparing for this episode that I think is really important to talk about.

Yeah. So, look, in addition to the stuff we just talked about, I think everybody should do self-reporting, meaning when somebody fills in a contact form, I know you're using UTM parameters and other ways to track where they came from. Ask them too. And I don't even care if they're different because sometimes where they think they came from is not where you think they came from, right? They think they came from a friend who told them about you, so they typed your name in Google and clicked on an organic result. You think they're coming through SEO, right? But when you ask them, well, what got me to type your name into the brand box— into the search box? was in fact word of mouth, right? So, ask them and try and triangulate the difference. What's, you know, when in doubt, just ask. Number 2, run lift experiments. Basically, where you do this, basically, this is just a controlled experiment where we take 2 similar cities, you know, Denver and Minneapolis, Tampa and Orlando. And I run billboards or bus ads or taxi ads in one but not the other. And then, I try and measure, did anything change? Did I get more sales? Did I get more web traffic? Did I get more people attending webinars? What changed in my demand funnel?

Yeah.

As a result of doing this experiment, I think is very important. And then finally, Gong analysis. And this is really just trying to capture and measure anecdotal references. So, if I do a Super Bowl ad and Udi Lederer talks about this in his book, Courageous Marketing, they'd run a Super Bowl ad that they use Gong, their own tool, to look how often the ad got mentioned in subsequent sales conversations.

Right.

Creative way to measure, hey, people are talking about, people are calling us or talking about the ads we ran on buses in New York, but we didn't run any buses in San Francisco, any bus ads, so we're not hearing about it there. So, those are the 3 techniques, right? 1, self-report. 2, do experiments to measure lift or incrementality. And 3, try to measure anecdotal references.

Yeah, I still remember putting ads in the Boston Logan Airport and we didn't do it in any other city. And the percentage of deals that closed in the next 6 months went up about 50% in Boston compared to other cities. So to me, that was a great Lyft experiment.

And I'm sure the Boston reps are happy. And your job as CMO is to make sure the VP of sales tells everyone that. If you tell them that, it has nowhere near the same impact as the VP of sales saying, well, the guys in Boston were super excited because we ran these ads and everyone's talking about us, yada yada.

But I will tell you, we also did a billboard on 101 in Northern California And boy, was the CMO excited when he heard a couple of our newest customers said, I heard about you from the billboard on the 101.

Well, I put a billboard on my investors' commute. That's a story for another day. But our investors said we didn't have good enough awareness. So, I literally figured out where they live, where they work, and I bought billboards on their commute so they could see us as they drove into work. So, in any case, brand is important. Brand is hard to measure in my opinion. It doesn't mean it's not measurable. You need to invest if you want to measure it. You need to triangulate if you want to measure it. And you need to do experiments if you want to measure it. Brand doesn't just show up at top of funnel. I think we often talk too much just about awareness and opinion and consideration. It often shows up at the bottom of funnel, which you should track through your win-loss analysis and asking people why they pick you and giving them the chance to say things that actually ultimately relate to your brand. Like, I think you were the safe choice, or I heard good things about you from my friends. Those are all brand-oriented things. So win-loss also plays a role here as well. That's all I had for today, Ray. Any final thoughts?

I'll just go back to an episode we did about 3 weeks ago, Brand versus Demand. And to those CMOs who wanted to increase their brand spend by 15% compared to what they're doing today, but they had trouble measuring it, by listening to this episode, they'll have some great ideas.

Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. The Metrics Brothers AI, SaaS, and More is a production of the Metrics Brothers Growth and CAC and a member of the Bench Market Podcast Network. By accessing this podcast, you acknowledge that the Metrics Brothers make no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided or the humor content of the jokes told. Ray, information, opinions, and recommendations presented are, according to our spouses, probably wrong and provided for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered professional or for that matter, unprofessional advice. We disclaim any and all liability for any direct, indirect, indirect, misdirect, incidental, special, ordinary, consequential, inconsequential, or other damages arising out of any use of, or God help you, reliance upon the information presented here. Ray Grothreich is based in New York City and available on X @RayReich. Dave Kellogg is based in Silicon Valley and available on X @DaveKellogg. Kellogg. Schedectady, which is French for unspellable, is not our actual production location. Thanks for listening.

Thanks, Dave.