How to Evaluate Brand Tracking Companies and Approaches

The best way to evaluate brand tracking companies is to match their approach, expertise and pricing to the decisions your organisation needs the tracker to support. That means understanding what a good tracker measures, how it should be designed, the types of tracking study available, and the trade-offs between software platforms and full-service agencies. This guide covers each in turn, so you can commission with confidence. Brandspeak designs and runs brand tracking programmes of exactly this kind, and this guide is written to be useful whoever you end up appointing.

Brand tracking is a way to invest in your brand

Your brand is one of your biggest assets. The most effective brands, the ones we all love the most, deliver real benefits for organisations such as customer loyalty and business growth. So, it makes sense to invest in your brand, and because we can’t manage what we can’t measure, one of the key investments must be in brand tracking. And because the value of a tracker compounds over years, choosing the right brand tracking company or approach at the outset is one of the most consequential research decisions you will make.

If you are new to the subject, start with our full introduction to what brand tracking is and how to use it. This guide assumes you know the basics and focuses on evaluation and commissioning.

What should a brand tracking company measure? The elements of brand equity

Any provider you evaluate should be able to explain how they will measure brand equity. Brand equity is a composite measure of the value of your brand and an indicator of its likely performance. It is the sum of the following elements:

Brand awareness and mental availability: Awareness refers to the extent to which consumers are familiar with and recognise a brand. Mental availability refers to the extent to which it readily comes to mind at the time of need or at purchase. You want both to be high so that when the consumer is (for example) looking at a supermarket shelf full of competing yoghurt, cereal or hair dye brands, your yoghurt, cereal or hair dye is the one that they recognise and pick up.

Brand loyalty: The extent to which consumers consistently choose your brand over others. This matters for the cost of acquiring and retaining customers, and it matters just as much for the ongoing relationship: loyal customers are more likely to forgive the occasional customer service failure, for example. They are also more likely to spread positive word of mouth about your brand.

Brand image: How do consumers perceive your brand and its associated attributes, such as quality, reliability and uniqueness? What comes to mind when they think of your brand and does that image reflect the one that your organisation has worked hard to create?

Brand associations: This refers to the emotional or psychological associations that consumers have with your brand, such as (hopefully) feelings of trust, reliability or nostalgia. Trust is really important: research shows that 75% of people with high brand trust say they will buy the brand’s product even if it isn’t the cheapest, it is the only brand of the product they’ll buy, and they will immediately check out a new product from that brand.

Brand value: This is the sum of perceived benefits and corresponding value that consumers attribute to your brand, based on the extent to which they feel it meets or even exceeds their needs and expectations. Perceived brand value can have a significant influence on purchasing decisions.

Brand experience: How do consumers interact with your brand? How often do they use it, when and where? Which are the key touchpoints and how positive is the nature of the brand experience that is delivered?

Need states: This refers to the suitability of your brand in relation to the consumers’ main need states: the individual, physical and emotional needs your product or service must be capable of meeting. Going back to yoghurt, for example, some consumers may need a low fat healthy probiotic yoghurt to fulfil their need for physical fitness and wellbeing, whereas others may need a tasty treat with chocolate pieces to fulfil their need for indulgence that is still perceived as healthy.

Your brand tracking study may report on some, or all, of these measures individually, as well as providing an overall brand equity score. It’s important to track these measures over time, as well as tracking sales, so you can see which initiatives have been effective and how to improve your marketing.

How these measures combine into an overall view of brand health tracking is covered in our guide to understanding brand health, and the wider question of how to measure brand performance beyond the tracker is covered separately.

What is the difference between brand tracking and a brand tracker?

Brand tracking is the process and a brand tracker is the vehicle, most often a quantitative online market research survey, that is used to conduct the brand tracking process. Typically, market research agencies that specialise in brand tracking will offer brand trackers as products. In many cases, these will be standardised ‘black box’ approaches. At Brandspeak, though, we believe in a more flexible approach to brand tracking.

What is the difference between brand tracking and a brand audit?

A brand audit is a one-off, in-depth review of a brand’s current position: its identity, perceptions, competitive standing and consistency across touchpoints. Brand tracking is the continuous measurement that follows, showing how that position changes over time. The two are complementary rather than alternatives: an audit establishes the baseline and diagnoses the starting position, while tracking tells you whether the actions you take are working. If a provider offers only audits, you get a snapshot. If they offer only tracking with no diagnostic depth, you may measure movement without understanding it. The strongest programmes combine both.

What should a good brand tracking programme deliver?

Brand tracking should be seen as an investment which enables you to improve your product or service to better reflect your target audience’s needs, expectations and behaviours. When evaluating brand tracking companies, ask how their programme will help you do each of the following:

• Measure performance: you need to understand what is happening with your brand in the market and over time; things change and tracking can help you get ahead of the curve.

• Prioritise customer segments: brand tracking can be used to understand the preferences and behaviours of different customer segments. If you have an existing segmentation, you can apply this to your brand tracker to identify segments that show strong affinity, loyalty or growth potential.

• Evaluate marketing: you can test hypotheses and validate assumptions about your marketing strategies by monitoring brand metrics before and after implementing a specific strategy, and seeing if the impact aligns with your expectations.

• Generate ideas: brand tracking enables you to keep an eye on how the market is shifting, including consumer preferences, emerging trends and competitor moves.

• Compare with competitors: by tracking key metrics for your brand as well as competitors’ brands, you can identify areas where you outperform or lag behind the competition.

• Evaluate the impact of marketing communications: brand trackers can help evaluate comms by measuring brand metrics before and after campaigns and by measuring message resonance, recall and relevance.

What consistent tracking reveals that periodic research cannot

The unique insight generated by ongoing brand measurement is the trend. Not the data point, but the direction, the rate of change and the pattern over time.

Trends matter for several reasons. First, they separate signal from noise. Consumer perceptions naturally fluctuate, and a single reading of, say, brand consideration may reflect a seasonal effect, a news cycle or a fieldwork anomaly as much as it reflects genuine underlying sentiment. Consistent measurement allows you to distinguish between temporary movement and structural change, which is an important distinction when deciding whether to act and how urgently.

Second, trends help reveal cause and effect. When you can see that brand awareness rose by, for example, six percentage points in the quarter following a significant media investment, and held at that elevated level across subsequent waves, you have evidence of marketing effectiveness that a one-off post-campaign survey cannot provide. The context supplied by consistent tracking turns individual findings into learning, and learning into better decisions.

Third, trends surface competitive positioning shifts before they show up in revenue. Consideration metrics in particular tend to be leading indicators of purchase behaviour. A sustained decline in brand consideration among a defined audience segment is a signal worth acting on several months before it appears in sales data. Without an ongoing programme, you would not see that signal at all.

Which brand tracking methods should companies offer?

These days, the majority of brand tracking is conducted via online survey, which is the fastest and most cost-effective way of gathering data. However, surveys aren’t the only way to gain insight about your brand. There is scope to enhance your survey with data from additional sources such as social media, online search data, share of voice and share of spend data, internal sales data and CRM analysis and qualitative research. When you bring together these disparate data sets, it helps you get a more holistic picture of what is happening with your brand. A provider that can only run the survey, with no capability to integrate other data sources or add qualitative depth, will limit what your tracker can tell you as your needs grow.

Are brand monitoring tools the same as brand tracking?

No. Brand monitoring and social listening tools are often listed alongside brand tracking tools, but they do a different job. They count and classify what is said about a brand online, such as mentions, sentiment and share of voice, and some now also report how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers. That is useful, but it reflects the people who choose to post, not a representative sample of the market. A brand tracker asks a defined audience the same questions at every wave, so it can measure awareness, consideration and preference among people who never comment online. The two work best together, with listening data feeding the tracker rather than replacing it. We look at how trackers are taking in newer data sources in is brand tracking dead?

Which metrics should your brand tracker include?

A brand tracking survey should contain the following key metrics:

• Spontaneous brand awareness

• Prompted brand awareness

• Brand imagery associations

• Brand personality associations

• Product/service quality ratings

• Brand preference

• Brand purchase including frequency

• Future purchase intent

• Brand usage occasions

• Brand need states fit

• Brand closeness: emotional connection

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

In addition to the above, a tracker can also be used to evaluate the impact of a recent marketing campaign. For example, brand awareness, associations and purchase intent scores can be compared before and after the campaign has run, to determine uplift in those areas. We’ve written in more depth about brand tracking metrics here.

How should a brand tracking company design your tracker?

A capable provider should walk you through seven design steps, and how they handle each is a good test of their quality:

1. Include the right target audiences: your tracker should include not only your current customers, but your competitors’ customers too. If appropriate, you should also aim to include a demographic spread that will enable you to identify any age-based differences in relation to your brand.

2. Ensure you have a sample size large enough for statistically sound analysis. There is always a tension between cost and sample size, but choosing too small a sample is a false economy.

3. Determine tracking frequency: agree on the correct frequency of tracking relative to your brand and sector dynamics. The right answer is the one that works for you and considers the size and stability of your brand and your strategic objectives.

4. Include a ‘flexi-section’ so that you can respond to special circumstances without disrupting the core questioning. Core questioning should remain stable, wave on wave, so you can compare and see trends over time.

5. Implement ongoing and recurring reporting that enables you to visualise trends. Brand managers often use an interactive, ‘always-on’ dashboard that shows key metrics at a glance, whilst enabling them to carry out their own data analysis and quickly export the results for internal sharing.

6. Calculate an overall aggregate brand health score drawn from all the key brand health metrics. This sounds simple but in reality can be a complex exercise that needs careful consideration. This will be the key measure you use to track performance, so it’s important to get it right.

7. Carry out annual strategic deep dives using the full year’s data set. Regardless of how often you conduct your brand tracker, an annual review makes sense as part of your wider marketing strategic review.

What are the five types of brand tracking studies?

Part of evaluating an approach is knowing which type of study you actually need. There are five main types of brand tracking studies to consider:

1. Consumer brand tracking

For brands that sell to consumer audiences. This form of tracking is suitable for any brand involved in the provision of goods or services to the consumer. For example, broadband suppliers, food, clothing retailers, car manufacturers, package holiday providers and retail banks.

2. B2B brand tracking

For brands that supply other brands, rather than consumers. Brand health matters for all brands, meaning that it is just as important that it is measured by organisations that specialise in supplying products and services to other businesses. For example, car leasing companies, facilities management companies and organisations that provide insurance for businesses. B2B brand tracking differs from consumer tracking in practice: audiences are smaller and harder to reach, decision-making units involve multiple stakeholders, and metrics such as trust, credibility and consideration among named competitors carry more weight than mass awareness. Evaluate whether a provider has genuine B2B research experience, not just a consumer tracker with the labels changed.

3. Pure brand tracking

In contrast with brand and comms tracking, pure brand tracking focuses on brand metrics only and doesn’t use the survey as a vehicle to explore other areas of insight. A pure brand tracker will therefore focus on core brand metrics only, like brand awareness, brand associations, brand preference and purchase intent.

4. Brand and comms tracking

Unlike pure brand tracking, brand and comms tracking includes elements of the brand that relate to marketing communications, such as ad recall or recognition.

5. Always-on brand tracking

As the name suggests, this refers to the ongoing sampling and completion of your brand tracking survey, with the data cut in waves to provide agile and responsive insight when needed.

How should challenger brands approach brand tracking?

Challenger brands need tracking as much as market leaders, but the design priorities differ. For a challenger, the key questions are whether awareness is building among the target audience, whether the brand is entering consideration sets alongside the incumbents and whether its intended points of difference are actually landing. A lean, focused tracker measuring the brand against two or three named incumbents, run at a frequency the budget can sustain, will serve a challenger far better than a scaled-down copy of a market leader’s programme. When evaluating providers, ask specifically how they would design for a challenger position rather than adapting a template.

Software platform or agency: how do you choose?

Brand tracking software platforms offer dashboards and standardised questionnaires at lower entry prices, and suit organisations with in-house research expertise and straightforward measurement needs. A full-service agency tracker costs more because it provides more: a bespoke questionnaire designed around your decisions, recruitment matched to your specific audience, senior analytical expertise and commercially grounded recommendations. The question is not which is better in the abstract, but which is right for the decisions you need to make. Our breakdown of brand tracking costs in the UK compares the two models in detail, and GrowthTrack, Brandspeak’s advanced tracking programme, is designed to sit between the two poles: agency rigour with a structured, commercially focused approach.

What questions should you ask a brand tracking company?

Beyond the design steps above, a structured conversation with each shortlisted provider will quickly separate the strong from the merely polished. Five questions do most of the work.

Where does your sample come from? Ask how the provider guarantees the same sample source and quality wave on wave. Consistency matters more in tracking than in any other form of research, because a change of panel can move the data more than the market does.

Who designs the questionnaire, and who analyses the results? You are buying senior expertise, so establish how much of it you will actually receive, and who will present the findings at each wave.

How do you handle a break in the trend? Questionnaire changes, panel switches and methodology updates are sometimes unavoidable. A good provider will explain how they bridge old and new data rather than pretending the issue never arises.

Can we access the raw data? Providers confident in their work will say yes. Reluctance is a warning sign, particularly where a ‘black box’ equity score cannot be interrogated.

What happens if we want to leave? Clarify data ownership and exit terms before you commission. A provider that makes leaving difficult is telling you something about how the relationship will run.

Ten brand tracking companies worth considering

Evaluation criteria are only useful once there is something to apply them to. The companies below cover three broad groups: large research groups with global panels, independent brand tracking agencies that design each tracker around the client, and software platforms selling a standard dashboard at a lower price. Each is suited to a different kind of buyer, and none of them is the right answer for everyone.

1. Brandspeak (London, working across more than 30 tracking markets)

Best for: Organisations that want a tracker built around their own funnel, and reporting that says what to do rather than what happened.

Brandspeak runs brand trackers across consumer and business markets, with every programme led by a director rather than handed to a junior delivery team. Trackers are built around the client’s own purchase funnel rather than a standard template, and GrowthTrack links brand measures to acquisition, retention and switching through buyer-dynamics segmentation and a What-If Simulator. It also takes over trackers from other agencies, mapping the existing questionnaire so that trend data survives the move.

2. Kantar (London, global)

Best for: Large consumer brands that need brand and media measurement run continuously at scale.

Kantar is among the largest names in brand equity research and brand tracking, and since selling its media measurement business in 2025 it has concentrated on brand building and marketing effectiveness. Its brand tracking and guidance systems combine survey data with search, social and sales data, and suit brands managing continuous measurement across many markets rather than a single programme in one.

3. Ipsos UK (London, operating in around 90 markets)

Best for: Multinational and public sector organisations needing tracking run consistently across many markets.

One of the world’s largest research groups, Ipsos pairs global infrastructure with deep experience in polling, public opinion and advanced analytics. Its scale gives access to datasets and methodological resources smaller agencies cannot match, which is why it remains a default choice for government bodies and large multinationals tracking across borders.

4. YouGov (London, international)

Best for: Organisations that want always-on measurement and the ability to look backwards as well as forwards.

Built on a panel of more than 30 million registered members worldwide, YouGov’s tracking products deliver continuous brand measurement with historical benchmarking attached. The ability to see how a measure has moved over several years, without having commissioned the research at the time, is its clearest point of difference.

5. Savanta (London, UK-wide)

Best for: Teams that need frequent, comparable data quickly, including B2B and public sector audiences.

Savanta runs audience panels covering consumers, B2B audiences and MPs, and its BrandVue platform measures brands daily on an always-on basis. Its tracking products suit organisations that need regular, comparable readings rather than a single deep study, and it covers business and public sector audiences as well as consumer.

6. Vision One (London, Liverpool and Leeds)

Best for: Mid-sized brands wanting a full tracking programme with transparent pricing and a dashboard included.

Vision One runs brand tracking continuously or in monthly, quarterly or annual waves, benchmarking between six and 20 brands, and reports through its BrandVision dashboard, with a senior researcher walking the client through each wave. It also tracks its own Brand Momentum measure of whether the market sees a brand as rising, flat or fading. It is unusually open about the commercial detail, publishing a starting price for a first UK tracker on its own site, which makes it straightforward to compare against.

7. Basis (London and the US)

Best for: Brands that want tracking tied to commercial outcomes, with strategic guidance at each wave.

Basis is an independent, senior-led insight agency working across UK, US and global markets, with brand tracking at the heart of its work. Its 4-S data model combines survey, social, search and storefront data to connect brand perceptions with commercial performance, and its trackers are modular, so they can be adapted to the category. Results are reported through interactive dashboards and visuals produced by its in-house design studio.

8. DJS Research (UK-wide)

Best for: Organisations wanting a straightforward tracking programme with a regular reporting rhythm.

DJS Research runs brand tracking with metrics tailored by sector, and reporting that ranges from live dashboards and monthly insight briefings to quarterly deep-dive reports. The reporting cadence is the notable feature: a regular rhythm of contact rather than a single debrief each wave.

9. Latana (International brand tracking platform)

Best for: Brands wanting large samples at low cost, and comfortable with a standard model.

Latana is a tracking platform that recruits through advertising placements rather than conventional research panels, and applies machine learning to data quality. It states samples of up to 100,000 interviews per brand, per year, in each country. The trade-off is a standardised model rather than one built around a specific brand.

10. Attest (London)

Best for: In-house teams wanting to run their own tracking without commissioning an agency.

Attest is a self-serve research platform giving in-house teams direct access to consumer panels across dozens of countries, with results starting to arrive within days. It suits frequent, lighter-touch measurement where the team already knows what it wants to ask, rather than programmes needing design and interpretation.

Applied to the questions set out above, the list sorts itself fairly quickly. If the answer to "who interprets this each wave?" is nobody internally, the platforms come off the list. If the answer to "how many markets?" is more than a dozen, the smaller agencies do. What remains is usually a shortlist of three, which is the right number to brief.

If brand awareness is the main question, our guide to the top brand awareness agencies in the UK compares ten suppliers on that measure.

Can you switch brand tracking providers without losing your trend data?

Yes, with care, and the possibility is worth establishing before you commission rather than when you want to move. The trend data should belong to you, and an experienced agency can take on an existing tracker by replicating the core questionnaire and sample specification and running a parallel or bridging wave, so that old and new data can be read together. Some movement at the point of transition is normal. It should be labelled honestly in reporting rather than smoothed away. If a provider cannot describe how they would manage a transition in either direction, treat that as part of your evaluation.

How should your study be reported?

A brand tracker is only useful if it is actionable. The first step to using your tracker to drive change is to ensure that you have easy-to-understand and accessible reporting. There are several ways you can do this:

• A brand health scorecard that reports on overall brand health metrics and the brand equity score. This is the equivalent of an executive summary when only the headlines are needed.

• An online reporting platform for always-on brand trackers. This enables you to monitor brand health in near real time, including the provision of easy-to-use data interrogation so that you can ask and answer ad-hoc questions quickly and easily.

• A post-wave analysis and presentation that includes a detailed data analysis of the results and answers both core objectives and wave-specific brand questions.

• A strategic, annual deep dive: an opportunity to look back at the data set over a full year and carry out a much more detailed analysis, usually to answer bigger, more strategic questions and objectives.

How frequently should you carry out brand tracking studies?

For smaller, established brands operating in less volatile sectors, where less frequent marketing activity is conducted, an annual or twice-yearly brand tracking exercise is likely to be sufficient. But for larger organisations and those operating in fast-moving sectors where there is significant competitor activity or price fluctuation, ongoing brand health monitoring becomes necessary so that brand issues can be rapidly identified and acted upon.

Whatever the interval, it should be frequent enough to detect meaningful change while there is still time to act on it, and it should be regular. Waves fielded only when budgets allow, or when someone remembers to commission them, produce data that cannot be trended reliably, which defeats the purpose of tracking.

Regularity matters less, though, than consistency of design. The same questions, asked of the same audiences using the same method at every wave, are what make a trend comparison valid. The temptation to add questions or adjust the audience definition is understandable, particularly when priorities shift or new stakeholders become involved, but every change introduces a break in the data series. A tracker that changes its core questions between waves is not a tracker at all; it is a series of disconnected snapshots with a shared name.

How do you measure the ROI of brand building?

Measuring the ROI of brand building can be challenging because brand-building initiatives often have long-term effects that are difficult to attribute solely to specific marketing activities; you could argue that all of your marketing investment is a form of brand building. However, a well-thought-out measure of brand equity represents the intangible value of your brand, including customer perceptions, loyalty and brand associations. Measuring changes in brand equity over time can indicate the effectiveness of brand-building efforts. We have written a dedicated guide to brand tracking ROI and connecting brand health to revenue, which sets out the evidence base and how to build the business case.

Get expert help with your brand tracking

Brandspeak is a market research and brand tracking agency that runs B2C and B2B brand tracking programmes. For more information about our services, or to talk through how to evaluate your options, please contact Jeremy Braune, Managing Director, at jeremy@brandspeak.co.uk, or reach us via our contact page.

Frequently asked questions about choosing a brand tracking company

What do brand tracking companies actually do?

Brand tracking companies design, field and analyse ongoing research programmes that measure a brand’s awareness, perceptions, loyalty and purchase intent over time. Full-service agencies also interpret the results, connect them to commercial outcomes and make recommendations, while software platforms primarily provide the survey infrastructure and dashboards for clients to interpret themselves.

What is the difference between brand tracking and a brand audit?

A brand audit is a one-off diagnostic review of a brand’s current position, while brand tracking is the continuous measurement of how that position changes over time. An audit establishes the baseline. Tracking shows whether your actions are moving the brand in the right direction. Most organisations benefit from an audit first, followed by an ongoing tracker.

Should you choose brand tracking software or an agency?

Choose software if you have in-house research expertise, straightforward measurement needs and a limited budget. Choose an agency if you need a bespoke design, hard-to-reach audiences, senior analysis or recommendations you can act on. Many organisations start on a platform and move to an agency programme as the decisions riding on the data become larger.

How is B2B brand tracking different from consumer tracking?

B2B brand tracking works with smaller, harder-to-reach audiences, longer buying cycles and multi-stakeholder decision-making units. It places more weight on trust, credibility and consideration among a named competitor set than on mass awareness. A provider should be able to show genuine B2B fieldwork capability, not a consumer tracker with relabelled questions.

Do challenger brands need a different tracking approach?

Yes. Challenger brands should track whether awareness is building in their target audience, whether they are entering consideration sets alongside incumbents and whether their points of difference are landing. A lean tracker measured against two or three named incumbents, at a sustainable frequency, is more useful to a challenger than a scaled-down copy of a market leader’s programme.

How much do brand tracking companies charge?

Costs depend mainly on sample size, how niche the audience is, survey length and the level of reporting. Software platforms sell subscriptions at lower entry prices, while full-service agency trackers cost more because they include questionnaire design, analysis and recommendations. Brandspeak's brand tracking prices typically start from £10,000, depending on those same factors.

How often should a brand tracker run?

It depends on the size and stability of the brand and the pace of the category. Smaller, established brands in stable sectors may need only an annual or twice-yearly wave, while larger brands in fast-moving or highly competitive categories usually need more frequent or continuous measurement. Whatever the interval, the waves should be regular and the core questions should stay the same, so that the trend can be read reliably.

How long does it take to set up a brand tracker?

At Brandspeak, tracker set-up typically takes four to six weeks, with first results around eight weeks from commission. Brandspeak also takes over trackers from other agencies, mapping the existing questionnaire so that trend data survives the move.

About the author

Jeremy Braune is Managing Director and Head of Research at Brandspeak, a global market research and brand strategy agency. A brand strategist with over 30 years’ experience, Jeremy leads brand tracking, brand development and positioning programmes for consumer and B2B organisations across sectors including financial services, FMCG, technology and professional services.